- Hey, in this video, I'm going to answer a bunch
of advanced SEO questions. And this is an actual consulting gig that I did with a client. And I actually don't take on
consulting clients anymore. And I'll explain why at
the end of the video, but this is a Q and A type of video. So the client is asking me
questions and I'm answering those advanced SEO questions for him. So if you have a lot of
advanced SEO questions, if you just have a lot of
SEO questions in general, this video is going to be really, really helpful because we
really dive deep into some advanced topics. So if you're excited about
this video and you want more videos like this, where I
answer, advanced SEO questions, then drop a comment below saying more and make sure you like this video. So with that said, let's jump right in. - And so, first of all, one of the techniques that
you talk a lot about and that we start to implement a lot is the, the skyscraper and the question, So Neil Patel has a thing that
he recently published like three, four days ago. And that's essentially about
automated and I don't know how much he goes into, I
don't know if you read it, but it's essentially, hey, there's a process of
research going into his tool to research it, then rewrite it, or like expand on it and completely redo it. And then obviously, so he kind of uses two or three
different tools for it and he doesn't go into details
about how to rewrite it, but our thoughts were, and I don't know what you
would think about it is to what about AI to rewrite an article
initially and then post it. So it starts to kind of get
traction a little bit and start working with outreach while
our writers get to it. Because it takes our writers
a long time to develop these pieces 7,000, 40,000 words articles. And sometimes it takes
weeks or a couple months to get to an article. What do you think about
that kind of strategy? - Yeah, I mean, those are kind of, you can approach it two different ways. The way that I obviously like
to approach saying is try to put the best piece of
content out initially, but there is a different
school of thought where you're doing more of like a minimum
viable piece of content and I've done both approaches
and they both work equally as well. But although developing the
content may take longer, If the content is good out of the gate, it will decrease the amount of time you'll need to get links. So it ends up kind of evening itself out almost to a certain extent. Of course, it's given
that the content is built to acquire links. It is something that is
actually link worthy, which I of course don't know
what the topics are, but yeah, I mean, you can use both
approaches, I've used both, but my personal preference
is just to try to go all in on the content. It doesn't feel when
nothing's being published. Cause you're just working on
like one really big asset. But in the long run, I've seen a better, a better result from doing
that as opposed to just like putting a bunch of stuff out
and iterating on that content to try to improve it over time, it works. But to me it's almost like
logistically more challenging to do it that way. Cause then it's like now you're
managing all these different assets trying to improve those. And then when do you know that
it's actually at a level that it deserves to be? So it's kind of like, it's
weird in that respect and when you do the other way,
where it's just all in focus on developing the best asset possible, at least, you know, you've
done the best you can. And then in like three
to six months from now, you can see that
performance be like, okay, this one didn't do very well, so maybe we need to switch things up. So yeah, just my personal
approach of course. - Yeah, no, it makes sense. But I guess our challenges, when you talk about the
worthiness is we're in more or less initial content. And what we've found was
when we reach out to these different refers so to say, whoever linked to our competitors,
they all asked for money, they all seemed to be shady or
they all seem to be like both links one way or the other. So it seems like nobody's linked into a section niche content. And this is where we found
challenges to actually develop raw organic, natural
backlinks with real traffic, real people visiting and it was always, like in some of the
posts they were saying, we had to pay plenty to get, a site linked to us with
real traffic and all of the outreach attempts so far, I mean, we're going to try more
reverse guest posting, but so far just a regular with templates, 404 and everything it ended
up to be, hey, okay, sure. First give me 50 bucks, 100 bucks. - Yeah, And I wish I could tell you it's going to be a different story. But that is the way it works. At least when it comes to outreach. - Right, but that is a normal thing that we we're experiencing. So I don't have a problem paying for it, relatively cheap still, but you know, in a really legit article
with tons of traffic, it can cost a thousand bucks, I mean 500 is easily expected
but it's for 50 bucks. And then it has some real traffic, some real users just like,
should people be like, yeah sure, I'll post it for free that
I've never seen in my life. - It doesn't happen
often only very rarely. I've seen in a few industries
where it's not like, so just attacked heavily
with SEOs where it does work, but you should just assume
that if you're doing outreach, you're going to have to pay. That's just like, you
should just assume that. The thing is I like to combine
outreach because first of all that's active link building, right? So you're like actually going
out there and trying to get those links because you
need that traction to get results in other ways. But then at the same time, I'm always thinking about how
to create linkable assets. And so those are assets that
will attract links naturally. If the right people see them and the right websites see them. So pretty much anything that's data-driven especially unique data is like my go to when it comes to linkable assets. So if you can develop
some sort of unique data, unique case study that people
would want to reference to that's really works well, so, but yeah, I mean it's when it comes
to active link building, you're just gonna, you
unfortunately will have to pay the price a lot of the time. - That's all right, yeah. As long as it's a normal thing
and it's not like I'm just running into an industry
where everybody is just, just buying stuff and then it's nothing, nothing is natural and - The way I kind of have thought about it, just to kind of change
my perspective is like, this is a collaboration, that's
the way I think about it. Like, okay, basically a link
is promoting your brand. Therefore it's a collaboration. Therefore they should
get paid to show the link because it's their
website, they built it up. So it's only fair ultimately. So that's kind of how
I've rationalized it. But at the same time, like
from Google's perspective, it's technically against their guidelines. So, but you know, you
gotta do what you gotta do to get SEO results. - Google's perspective
the only thing you can do is just talk about it yap, yap and then optimize your website to be fast. But yeah, we don't like
anything for you to do. They're not your friends. - No, of course not. And how would they know anyway, there's no way that they know
that money has exchanged hands unless they're scraping our
Gmails, which is possible. But so that's a different email. - On your email? - Yeah. - I'm talking to them now. I don't know if I should try it, but it's supposedly nice, so yeah. All right, let's go
into the next question. So obviously I've heard you,
you've heard about it then. I heard it's black hat, but I'm not sure. Buying domain drops,
what are your thoughts? Is there a legit way to
utilize good domain drops. - So expired domains or just any, any domain that's dropped essentially? Yes. There are good ways to do it. I will say that right now, the safest thing to do is try
to acquire a live website. So if you can find a
website in your industry, that's like just a ghost town,
they haven't posted forever, but they have a good link profile. That's a golden opportunity
to acquire that site and then redirect it to your site. And of course, how you
go about redirecting, that's kind of a different discussion because you pretty much, when
you do a redirect like that, you only want to redirect
pages that actually have links. And then all the other pages
from that previous site should just 404, does that make sense? - Yeah, we've ran into some, a piece of article and we've
tested it and I can tell you a little bit about it and
let me know your thoughts. So essentially this gentleman
did this following practice. He would acquire drops, expired domains preferably
recently expired very recently. And then he would take
that domain and do a 301 on one of the pages, says more or less not the corner piece, okay. And see how it performs,
and if it performs well, then he would start
rebuilding the website from, archive work or whatever
that thing is called. And then start rebuilding and
then can even post content and so forth, all that kind of stuff. So we've tried that we've
had very good success, obviously on the very bottom page. So to say not, not very important, but it was evident and clear it worked. And then the question is okay, should we, it is a little bit
security in the sense of, hey we don't want Google
to really think, hey, we're catching you, you're doing
some blackhead right there. If that's what they
think, is that what it is. And so it is working, the question is now, should we start plugging
in more main pages? Should we start restoring
content on those websites? - Yeah. And it's not an
easy answer unfortunately, because it is going to be case dependent, but you do need to be
careful with redirects. Like you don't want to go too overboard. I've seen some sites where they have like, just way overboard, they
have like 30 different sites, like redirecting to their
site,that's a huge footprint. But redirects are a normal
part of the internet, so to have to have them, isn't going to raise a bunch of red
flags and so I've done it, in with local businesses. I've done it with national
businesses, it works and, it makes sense, but a
couple of key points, relevance is key, has to be relevant. That's so, so important. And then also, like I said, between getting expired
domains and acquiring existing websites that are still alive, I would pick a live website any
day of the week just because basically you're just acquiring
it and you're immediately getting that redirect and it
didn't drop, it didn't expire. So to me that looks a
lot more trustworthy. It's also more difficult,
to do that as well. We're like right now I'm in a
few discussions with different tools that I'm trying to
acquire and they don't even, they never even had the
thought that someone would buy them out. So like you email and
they're like, oh wait, you want to buy my website? And they're like super
confused, but then they're like, I don't even know what
I'd sell for but like, what's your offer? And then, so now there's a negotiation, - Out planting tool, not just, hey, I'm a data recovery company, I'm buying another data
recovery company and we're just going to merge content. I guess it's like a complimentary
tool, like I could go, I'm a data recovery service provider, I guess I could go out there
and seek to buy a better recovery software provider. - That's exactly right
and I'll just give you a practical example. Like we have an STD testing
company that we work with and we've been trying to think
of linkable asset ideas. And we found a tool like, a
really old tool that like will help you determine if you have STDs. And it has a ton of links
from .edu and.gov sites. And I just told the client, why don't we just go out and
try to acquire this tool? And if we can't acquire it, why don't we just rebuild it
and go out and outreaching at the same exact links So you can go either way, but that's another way to
obviously acquire more links in a natural way is to rebuild
tools or rebuild resources that have already been proven to acquire links. - Okay, so that's with every direct sale, another we're also building a SAAS, a form builder online form builder. And one of the things that I
kind of came up, I don't know, it's probably a common
strategy, but I saw a lot of, for example type form
versus using type form. I think so we're building
a competitive tool, but not as a survey, but it's more like embedding
in a website and still look like a bunch of functionality. So we'll go forms and
drugs or non steroids, whatever you want to call it. But let's say Typeform versus
JotForm and then we will, we were thinking to add, so some people probably
searched for that stuff and they do a lot, they
compare tools like this, this versus that so we
wanted to do like jot form versus type four versus
mighty form, that's our tool. So we add in a third one
to the, to these websites. So when somebody searches and
then they see a third one, they're like, oh, who are these guys? And then it can also drive
legitimate content and traffic. And they're like, oh,
what's, I'm going to really consider it the third one
as well because somebody, some parents, so we kind of, we're building some concept like that. - Would these be separate niche
websites or would they be on the actual site itself? - It would probably be on our
side where we are comparing three different tools with us. And we'll be honest comparison, not try and like make
ourselves all that much better. We'll just take certain features
and compare them because we want people to read it
then like say, okay, this tool is better for that. Like we realized Typeform
is better for the questionnaires and so forth, like service, we're just not built for it. - Yeah, that's a common tactic
in SAAS is the versus posts. And they work well and in fact, a lot of those types of
keywords have low competition. So you can really dominate for those. - What I found was the
first time that we took, recently they had a PR there's
a really popular product and that has ton of links
and a ton of searches. And then these guys are kind
of like you, and then I'm like, why, well, we could give you the rights. And then it has your K E you know, and nobody's searching for
the product name, but I mean, nobody's really competing for the product. So we could really like review
even that product and compare it to your product right on your website, all that free traffic, right. Thousand search queries every month. - Yeah. You know, that is what
you just described is one of the most untapped things
in SEO that I've just been seeing across so many industries. It's just brand targeting
brand names and not your brand, like other brand names, it's
so uncompetitive, it's crazy. and it doesn't even take, obviously your CTR will be low because it's a navigational term. So like a lot of the key, the navigational terms we rank
for the CTR are really low, but still they're easy to rank for. So it doesn't really make a difference. So, and you're getting, you're just getting brand recognition too. So if you're competing against that brand, you're ranking near them, you're still getting
that brand recognition, which is obviously an intangible thing, but still it's a big deal. - So we're gonna tap that
and see how that works. - Yeah. That's a good idea. - So what about speech speed? Especially like the Google tool, page speed sound like a
new Potel, for example, their website is insanely good. As far as the Google page speed
score goes, but on our end, I checked his WordPress
site has like three plugins, Yoast and WP rocket, and any
in the markup and our sites. I mean, we have sometimes
50 plugins in the, we just can't get away
from that, they need it. They are very complex
functionality, so we have to, then I would just go away
from WordPress this way, if I will just lose them,
so for me, it's like, okay, the website's still loads
super quick for 1.2 seconds. like if I turn off all the
plugins and score top score and 1.1 second, but my support
can be like 20 on the mobile, 60 on a desperate, for example. But the question is how
important, because Google now has Google search console and is actually showing you like, hey,
your pages are slow. and that's what they're telling me, but I know they're not and
then in the real world testing, they're not slow at all, so
how should we go about this? - Yeah, well, if you
take a case like Neil, of course you can see his
page speed is really good. Like obviously that's a
beneficial thing, but reality, like that's not the thing
driving his results. The thing driving his results are all the links that he has. That's obviously the factor that outweighs that substantially. But when it comes to page speed, there are diminishing returns. So like going from going from 1.2 to, below a second, you're
not gonna see anything, really any difference in
performance as far as SEO. But if you were to go from
eight seconds to two seconds, that's a huge deal. But when you start getting below, I like to say three
seconds is like my target. So if you can get below three seconds, it's the returns are going to
be so diminishing that it's like, yes, you can go faster. Yes, you can do more
stuff to make it faster. But at that point you're really doing it just for a better user experience. Not necessarily for SEO performance. - I know until I saw Google will actually put it in the Google console
and the search console, and started complaining
about my page being slow. So I'm like, you're judging me by that. - No, I wouldn't worry about it, honestly. I mean, if you're already
around one second, it might be wasted
effort to even try to go, - We have some pages that are going to be around three seconds, but like we took the main
pages and we went through like, I forgot what the plugin is for WordPress. And we just stripped all
the unnecessary scripts, we deferred them and
everything was loads way later. So the content loads up in
1.2 seconds are mostly pages. - Yeah. I think that's totally sufficient. - Okay, let's see what else
I got not a whole lot left. Let's see, so yeah, with that new SEO client that
we're kind of looking at, obviously as all SEO clients, they want the fastest result possible, they want something, right. So we kind of divided it
and told them, hey, look, I mean, it's going to
be some long term stuff. That's mostly gonna take an effect. Some stuff we can probably do
faster because there's a lot of stuff that's just pure out broken. You have low CTRs because you're not, you don't have, you're not utilizing any
markups or anything like this. Your titles are too long or, your descriptions are too short
and things of that nature. So that might take immediate effect. Is there anything else that
you would suggest to do that could drive faster results
besides the new content and offset and willing building? - Yeah. As far as faster results, well, it's going to depend on
the state of their website. So if they're like, if
they've never done SEO before, that's going to take some time, but if they already have
established traffic, they're already ranking
for some key words, then the fast, they're not. Okay, so then maybe it's not, So for future reference, if you do get a client that does have decent results already, the fastest way you can drive
more results is just adding title modifiers and adding some
modifiers within the copy of the target pages. So like for example, if they're targeting, I dunno, Nike shoes. - Body skin care. - Exactly, best Nike
shoes, I'm pretty sure when they gave you that SEO content brief, I probably said something
about title modifiers. - Yeah, we do a lot of that always. - So that works pretty
much across every industry. There are some scenarios
where it doesn't make sense to use years, but in most cases you can, you can squeeze that in for
a lot of keywords and that's just the fastest thing you
can do cause right away, you immediately start dominating from those long tail queries, cause they're not competitive at all. And so yeah, that's the
fastest thing you can do. And then outside of that, which does require more logistics would be optimizing the site architecture. In my experience, that's
one of the fastest things that will increase results is just increasing, pushing up the most important
pages in the architecture. So if you're trying to rank, let's say you have five
target pages you want to rank, I would try to get those no
more than one click deep. Exactly, do you can get them
on the homepage even better, but sometimes with some clients
that can be a little tricky. So, but yeah, I mean trying to push it on as high as you can, cause it's
really not super complicated, I do it all the time,
but it's also a huge win. And then I would say thirdly, the biggest thing is trying to
find assets on the site that are relevant and then consolidating
those with some of the pages that you're really trying to target. So I'll give you an example. Like we have a personal injury
lawyer and he just had so many articles about car
accidents and car acts and lawyer and just all kinds of stuff like that. So what we did, we took like
a bunch of those assets. We consolidated on his
car accident, lawyer page, his word count on that
page was like 800 words, Now it's 6,000. So it didn't require us
to create any new content. We just had to go through and make sure it was logically structured, - But you need the lesson as well. - Exactly, so where it's
kind of you're getting, it's kind of a lead domino
by doing that because you're eliminating all the thin and maybe duplicate content and
you're building out this like super authoritative page. So those three are the ones
I'm always trying to identify, when I first work on a site. But yeah, after that, you're gonna start to
go through the grind of creating new content, obviously
fixing technical issues, which some technical issues
aren't really going to drive. Aren't really going to
push the meter at all. Optimizing them is it's important to do, but that alone isn't really
going to do anything, stuff that's going to do
stuff is content and links. and I wish it wasn't that way, but that's just the way it is. And those are the two hardest
things to do, of course. So that makes sense. - So we'll push on that. - Yeah, and it's all and
I'm just going to say too, since you guys are probably
new to taking on clients, it's all about managing expectations. - I don't know that stuff has, I said, hey, maybe if
we're lucky we can get some stuff pretty quickly,
using modifiers, like you said, and like consolidate in some concepts. So I mentioned some of those things and, fixing some technical issues
that they had like really no markups at all and things of that nature. So driving higher click through, I thought maybe worked better as well and google would appreciate. - Yeah, and I'm all for
under promising when it comes to SEO. So like when I'm on an initial
sales call with the client, I literally under promise, I'm like, yeah, hopefully we can get you at six months, but we're probably looking around 12. And the reason I do that is because I know it's in the campaign. I can probably get results in three months to at least show something. And then that way they're like
pleasantly surprised by it. So that's just the way, that's
the way our industry is. So you gotta kind of,
you know, do it that way. - Otherwise you will
do it with complaints. - Exactly and trust me, that's not fun. - We're testing waters, I mean,
I don't know if I want to, it seems I love doing it and this is the only reason I took that client. They just came just,
hey, you guys do well, can you help us? And then they just knew that person I don't know if I should
take you, but I'm like, sure. Okay, let's see what we can do. I love doing it, maybe I'll enjoy it. If I do, I'll keep doing it
and I'll take more clients. - Yeah, good things take long for sure. So if you actually enjoy
it cause it's yeah. - I love doing that part
always for my projects, my websites, my businesses, but like commercially doing
it is a whole different level. So grinding clients, calling
you, I have to take it slow. - Yeah, that's for sure. - Let's see if I can
squeeze a couple of one or two more questions. So any so that the client
that we're working with is an e-Commerce website. I guess it's very similar
approach that goes into it when doing SEO, but anything particular you recommend for e-Commerce websites, I
know you spoke before about like really optimize product pages, making sure their unique
content and so forth. But is there anything like, obviously we'll do markups
for products and so forth. Anything else you think that would, you could throw in there? - Yeah, a few things. Number one, be careful with your content. That's a plague of e-Commerce sites. And now fortunately with a
lot of the content management systems for econ that handles that issue, but I've just seen it so
many times at the econ site. So that's the one thing, make
sure that's not an issue. But then from there, the biggest thing I recommend
for e-com is a reverse silo. And that's just so important
because it's really hard to acquire links to category
pages or product pages, unless they have some sort of
unique quality or some yeah. Or some unique like marketing angle. Like the shave, I can never
remember the brand name, the Dollar Shave Club, no Shave Clubs. So they had good marketing
and that led to links. So that's a situation where that works. But for most e-comm sites, you're not going to have
that level of marketing. So you're going to have to
build out informational assets that will be used as the catalyst to grow the site's authority. And then you'll just
have to leverage into, really smart internal linking. So that's, that's kind my go
to for building e-com is just focused purely on growing
site authority and less on driving links to category and product pages just because it's. - Yeah. - And it's not necessarily
pointless, its not natural. - Who's going to really buy, who's going to really link to
somebody that's just going to sell your product, it
doesn't seem natural. - Exactly, yeah, that's right. - All right, last one, let's see. That's a struggle we have
with one of our businesses. So we have a bunch of locations
and one of our competitors always shows up on any
keyword in that industry for a local page, so for
example, we are in Cleveland, you search for data
recovery, they're showing up, they're recovering Cleveland's
for the Cleveland page. So they have the clinic which
we have at the same thing. We have the GMV set up
their LinkedIn so forth, but unless you search
data recovery Cleveland, then we don't show up at all, we just, I think Google doesn't like
our Cleveland GMB in particular for some reason. Well, yeah, this competitor
somehow mastered this local SEO. And no matter what you search
is always going to show that local city page, anything that you would recommend
for us to investigate or what can help us perform
better in that regard. - Yeah, so when they search, so are they showing up in the local park? - They always show in a local
pack organically and even ads. So they do ads on the maps. Well, it's I think it's all
the medical links to it. They are definitely a top three. And I think this is where
they perform better, which is something I just
don't get how yet their GMB is incredibly good. Like I can be, they have a location in, in Brooklyn and you search from Elizabeth, New Jersey and they're
showing up in Brooklyn. I'm like, how the hell? Because you have so many
companies right there. And then for some reason it
shows all the way across the map and even like, the number
of reviews is not that many. So I'm kind of confused, how the heck did they
build up such good GMV? - Yeah. It was very difficult for me
to obviously give you a reason without seeing it myself. How strong is their
site compared to yours? - Stronger? Not that's strong, they're black hatting. I mean they buying like
just from one Indian dude, like 2000 guest posts a year,
so I know that for sure. - Oh yeah, yeah. - all the same websites.co.uk,
all websites same domain. same thing, one link in the
footer, just the structure. - Okay, So they're, they're aggressive. They're doing aggressive SEO then. - Well, you could call it that, but it definitely is one person
writing all that content. Just like 500 words each article. It's the same thing, same text. - Yeah, well honestly, just
pulling, purely from experience. When I see someone who's just
dominating that way more than likely it's been factor
because of domain authority, just pure strength of their website. And secondly, you may not see
everything that's going on behind the scenes, which they may have entire
network set up of that are linking to them that are
hidden from crawlers. So that happens a lot and it's very easy. I can block HRS majestic,
they can all be... It's very, very easy. So that's typically what
I think, but you know, I've just come to a point of
SEO where I just don't even care much about the competitors, unless I can pull something
from them that is, I can replicate, if there's nothing I can
replicate from them that they're doing well, then I just like, okay, we just need to make our
website stronger and we can just need to crush them, so
that's the only way, like unfortunately, whatever they're doing to
perform well has no impact on how your going to perform. So you can really only focus
on what you're doing and if your website isn't
as strong or stronger, then you just have to kind of
accept defeat at this point and then know that once
you get to that point, hopefully you're going to beat them. - Speaking of stronger,
do you believe in DA? you actually checked, I know
Google doesn't care for DA. They have their own
algorithm, but you go by. - No, I mean, only because
I have to sometimes as just a qualification metric, but it's not important for ranking to me. I just look at links in general
and if a website has a good link profile, then I say, okay, that's definitely a strong website, but I'd probably lean more towards DR than DA at this point. I'm not really a fan of Mazda's metrics, but the only reason why I use
them is because it's kind of like the industry standard at this point. But I think that will change over time. Cause I think HRS is starting
to kind of push them out a little bit, but like I said, those are just third party metrics. I take them with a grain of salt. It's like if you look at
Gotcha CEO's traffic on a it will like show crazy traffic, like big spikes and big declines. Like that never even happened on my way. - Unfortunately it just completely
disregard some local SEO. And then our dire, one of our brands entirely
built on local SEO. So they don't understand that, that we always show up in local
listings and in some cities we're just completely absent
in some cities that were dominant, you know, they just
completely disregard that. - They do, yeah, that's exactly right. I'm not sure why that is, but maybe they just don't
have the capabilities to handle all that. - That multiplied by however
many locations you go and wherever you want to. I mean, there's bright
local that we use for that, for that particular purpose, to get a real picture of how we perform. - Sure. I wish I had a more straightforward
answer for you, but. - These were no easy
questions, so I would expect, more or less, your thoughts and what you've shared as a professor working with in the industry for
quite quite some time. - Hey, so I hope this
video answered some of your advanced SEO questions. And if you enjoyed this video, once again, please like it and subscribe
to my channel because I'm gonna be publishing a lot more
videos, just like this one. In fact, I do have a
video coming up very soon about OnPage SEO. So I'm super excited to show
you that video I've been working on it for actually
a couple months now with my video editor. So I'm excited to show you that
and if you want my personal help or you want help from
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