5 Digital Marketing Myths That Kill Business Growth Well And Truly Busted – Episode 42

We thought we would do a myth buster podcast, bust a few myths that we that we hear quite a lot. So the first one we're going to look at is the idea that just having a website is enough. Just simply building a website and putting up a few pages is enough to say that you've got a digital marketing strategy and you're effectively doing a kind of web based business development piece of work.

Yeah. No, that's a myth. Busted. Is it? Um, I think I like to think that there was probably once a time when all you had to do was stick up a website, and people would kind of naturally, organically come to it and read about what you were doing and be interested. But no, I mean, the internet's a noisy, noisy place, right?

Okay. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Uh, I'm with Alex again. I haven't been with Alex for a while. Uh, not in the office, anyway.

No. It's been. Yeah, a couple of months, hasn't it?

Has it really? Yeah. Wow. Okay. We've done a few over the wires using the Zencaster tool, but, uh, yeah, we haven't done any in person, uh, podcasts. So Alex is in the office, so we thought we would do a myth buster podcast, bust a few myths that we, that we hear quite a lot quite regularly. We hear the things we're going to talk about today. Um, and we're just going to kind of say what they are and, and then talk about them and, and, and why we believe them to be, um, nonsense.

Without making anyone feel too bad.

Without making anyone feel too bad. That's right. Um, I've realised that I'm in the creaky chair. I didn't swap my chair, so I'm going to sit very still. So don't worry if I'm sat really still. It's me trying not to creak the chair because I didn't swap my chairs out. Okay. Um, I've got, I've got five written down. Um, so we'll, we'll start, we'll start with the one I've written down last, which is.

I knew I told you this is exactly what you were gonna do.

Yeah.

Trick me.

Yeah. Well, you don't know anything about any of them anyway, so.

I don't know anything about anything.

Which order? I put them out in.

Full stop, according to you and Dave.

That's right. So the first one we're going to look at is the idea that just having a website is enough. Just simply building a website and putting up a few pages is enough to, um, say that you've got a digital marketing strategy and you're effectively doing a kind of web based business development piece of work.

Yeah. No, that's a myth. Busted. Is it? Okay. Um, I think I like to think that there was probably once a time when all you had to do was stick up a website, and people would kind of naturally, organically come to it and read about what you were doing and be interested. But no, I mean, the internet's a noisy, noisy place, right? There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of businesses in the exact same space that you are in. Um, sorry. I'm just distracted by Dave monkeying around. But, um, that are in the exact same space that you're in kind of making a noise online, talking about what they do. And if all you do is stick a website up there and expect people to come to it, it's I mean, the sad reality is it's just not going to happen nowadays, is it?

Well, back when I were a lad, um, in the nineties, late nineties, when, you know, the whole web thing was still relatively new, there used to be a kind of, I don't know if you would call it a meme these days, but anyway, it used to be build it and they will come. Sure. Basically, just build a website and customers will come and find you. And it was probably true ish.

For like a day maybe.

Yeah, not for very long. Um, yeah. But the idea that you can basically put up a website with ten pages saying, this is what we're called, this is what we do, this is the team. Here's our latest news Constitutes some sort of digital strategy and is going to generate business for you is. Well, it is a myth. It's just it is not reality.

I think it kind of speaks to like a deeper myth as well. Doesn't it? Just about the way that the internet and digital marketing works? I think a lot of people kind of have mixed up in their heads, because people really only use the internet when they want to know something quite specific, right? You don't just nobody ever just goes on the internet and thinks, I'm going to look for, you know, businesses that supply a service. It's it all starts with somebody, you know, kind of with a problem asking a question. And I guess the whole thought process of, you know, if you just put your website up there that says, you know, we're, I don't know, Acme engineering and we make do engineering companies make engines, whatever that anybody would ever know about or care about that, you know, in this day and age, you have to be kind of on there answering questions. You have to be on there kind of producing content that helps people learn about something peripheral to what you offer as a business. You can't just it's not a solutions first market, is it? At the end of the day?

Yeah. That's right. I mean, we're saying that people expect your website to do more than just tell you who you are, etc.. Do you think that's absolutely true? If you're looking for a solution to a problem and you search and you find a business and all the business does is say, you know, we sell a particular product or service, then that might be enough for them.

To.

Pick up the phone.

This speaks to the conversation we were having earlier. Right. So earlier on, we were talking in the office about the idea that, you know, when somebody lands on your website, you have to really kind of grab them with like an emotional hook or a reason for buying from you because absolutely nobody lands on a website, even if you sell exactly what they're looking for. If you tomorrow are looking for a brand new pair of running shoes, and you land on a website that sells nice running shoes, unless it's the best web page in existence, it's probably not going to persuade you to part with your cash there and then, is it? You have to do a little bit more, I think, to convince people.

Yeah. I've spoken before about I think it's something like Mike's swimming stuff.

Sure.

And I bought, I bought, I bought flippers, I bought, um, swimming trunks. Um, I bought swimming hat. I've bought goggles from, I think it's Mike's swimwear and it, well it may not any, it may not be now, but it was just the most basic looking website that looked like it had been built in nineteen eighty. And there was something about it that just looked honest. And I thought, but they've got the products I want. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna buy, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and do it. And, and the service was fantastic, right?

But I mean, you know, you know, there's an argument to be made there for the fact that that was very clever marketing. That was their bit of extra, right. Rather than just running a standard off the shelf e-commerce store with a template, which, let's be honest, is the easiest way to run an e-commerce store. They'd gone the extra mile and made it look deliberately kind of pared back.

I don't think it was just because.

Because it was, it was.

Yeah, I don't think it was a clever marketing ploy, but what do I know?

Yeah. I mean, you know, I just think it's by and large, you have to go a little bit further nowadays, don't you? Especially, I think because let's be honest, if you're especially if you're selling something, whether it's engines or swimwear, you know, there are a hundred other people selling the exact same product. So yeah, I don't think it's enough to just kind of set your stall out and hope people will come to it anymore.

Okay, so a nice, easy one to start off with. Just having a website is enough in order to succeed online. That is a myth. Yep. It's simply not true.

And if you have a business and you're not doing any marketing and you're succeeding online, we'd love to hear from you. I would love to hear from you.

Absolutely. Okay. Um, I'm just looking through our little list of myths. What we are going to bust and we'll pick another one. Um, around, uh, Google ads. Okay, PPC. Yep. Okay, so I have lost count of the number of times when I've been speaking either to a client or a prospective client and suggested that maybe we could use some Google ads in order to get them some exposure and to potentially generate some business for them. And the response has been, I don't want to do that. I never click those adverts and I don't know anybody who does. You must have heard it.

And yet and yet. Well, yeah. And yet somehow Google makes however many hundreds of billions of pounds in advertising dollars every day. That's right. Yeah. I mean, obviously people are clicking those ads. They wouldn't be there if they if they didn't, would they? At the end of the day.

Where does that mistrust come from? I mean, first of all, it's a myth. People do click those ads and they click them in in their millions, because that's how Google probably makes the vast majority of its income.

That's the only that's all their income comes from advertising.

Well, yeah, but I mean, we use the Google Suite, don't we? You know, for Google Docs and all that. Well, come July we have to pay for it. It's not fair anymore.

Yeah.

So they are branching out into other areas, but by and large. So but what I'm interested in it is a myth that nobody clicks Google ads, but just let me watch. She's buzzing. I wonder if it's another Boris Johnson story. No, apparently his chief policy adviser has now quit because of the comments he made about, uh, about, uh, a certain dead DJ. Excellent. Oh, yeah. So anyway, um, why does why is there a perception that Google ads that nobody clicks them and, and they're just a complete, completely ridiculous, expensive waste of time.

I want to take this in a direction. It may turn into a little mini rant, and I apologise in advance. I think in general, with strap.

Yourselves in.

Everybody, with a lot of these digital marketing myths, they come from people who I guess maybe just don't really get that. A lot of people don't have their knowledge and experience. I think this is a really common problem in online marketing in general, right? All day, day in, day out, we sit there and think about ways to sell to people. So we assume that everybody else has the same thought processes as us, notices the same things as us, understands the same things as us. I don't think that's true. I think we look at Google search results page and we see the ads straight away because we're used to putting them up there. And I'm sure it's the same for a lot of business owners who are paying for Google ads. You're going to notice them because you're thinking about them. But the average consumer, they just don't care. They don't even know whether it's an ad or an organic search link, especially on mobile, you basically can't tell the difference anymore. But there's this kind of pervasive problem, I think, where if you do this stuff day in, day out, you just start to think that everybody else is kind of on the same page as you or understands the same things as you and I just yeah, I think that's part of the problem, isn't it? It's like if you, if you found somebody random on the street and you said, look at this search engine results page, which of these links are you going to click? They point to the top of the page. That's where everybody's going to click.

That's right. Yeah. I'll tell you what else as well. I think there's a lot of people, a lot of people just had a go at doing Google ads. They put their credit card details in. They didn't set a campaign limit. They didn't set a daily limit. They didn't set the thing up properly. So they were getting relevant clicks and they accidentally spent a couple of thousand quid, didn't get a single lead as a result of it, and then just decided, yeah, exactly. Which is, which is I can understand why they'd be fed up about that. Yeah, but that isn't a reason to decide that Google ads either doesn't work or nobody clicks Google ads. You think actually the opposite, because if they spent two thousand quid, they must realise surely somebody clicked their adverts in order to check the two thousand quid out of their bank account.

Well, the other thing I will say as well about Google ads, just very quickly while we're on the subject, is a lot of it is to do with the quality of the ad as well, like how captivating your headline is when you see like, I don't know, when you Google something like what size engine do I need for blah, blah, blah. And you see loads of really generic ads at the top of the page that are like, you know, kind of buy your engines here or great engines for sale or whatever. You look at them and you think, I'm not clicking that. It's clearly a spammy ad. It's not relevant to what I'm searching for. And you scroll past it. The good and effective Google ads, the ones that everybody is clicking, are the ones that, you know, speak straight to that. Somebody needs that. Anticipate what somebody is looking for that, you know, start with a question or kind of lure you into thinking, oh yeah, this is the website where I'm going to find that free guide that I need to answer this question. You don't notice the good Google ads. And I guess that's the kind of art of the platform really is in, in writing ads that people don't necessarily look at and think, oh, that's just an ad trying to sell me something.

Okay. So the myth that Google ads don't work, they can't generate leads. Nobody clicks them is exactly that.

It's just, I think horseshit. I think so, I think, you know, good Google ads get clicked and bad Google ads don't.

Yeah. Well, bad badly set up. Google ads get clicked as well, which can finish up just costing you a lot. Okay. That's great. The next one is one that you raised, and I'm not sure what I've got to say on this subject, although knowing me, I'll find something to say on it, but I'm going to let you lead off with it. And it's the myth that people come out with along the lines of my industry is a word of mouth industry. I don't need digital marketing. I don't need a website. I don't need to do anything on social media, etc.. Talk to me about that.

Yeah, well, I think it's something that we work with a lot of B2B companies, right? And I think we hear this quite a lot as people just assume that because their industry is small and insular and they know the major players in it, that nobody is going online and googling questions or trying to find out anything, or trying to procure services or trying to research people. And they have this idea, this kind of old school idea that business is just done in like the golf course clubhouse, right? With handshakes and whatever. But, you know, demonstrably that's false.

Handshakes. You're getting all Masonic on us.

Um, that's you've ruined my thought process. No, it's false, it's wrong. And you can tell it's wrong. All you have to do is log on to any tool that lets you.

Trick Freemasonry is wrong.

Now you're putting words. I might be a mason for all you know.

I might be. Right. Sorry.

Um, yeah. All you have to do is is find any keyword research tool and type in something related to your industry and you will see search volume around it. People asking questions every day.

Very unusual to not see that, isn't it? You do from time to time put something into search. And literally there are no adverts. It's there's just some organic results to. Yeah, probably some pretty poor quality pages. I mean, it's often a case of like, maybe we just found a great opportunity if we come across something. But it's rare.

But this is my this is my thing with it. It's like you can see, I mean, even for really specific edge case businesses where they're selling like quality assurance software to like a subset of engineers or something like that, we see search volumes, people on there googling questions there, they're asking questions, they're trying to find the right software. They're trying to find software that does something specific. There are ways of getting in front of people and yeah, okay. Fair enough. Maybe people in your industry prefer to go with big established players. And maybe, you know, there's a limited number of companies, everyone knows each other. But that doesn't change the fact that there's still people out there kind of searching for that information. And if you start providing it and establishing yourself as an authority, you can win business like that.

And one of the, one of the easy ways to, to disprove that myth or to bust that myth when you're actually speaking to a prospect is to do some research right there in front of them and not only show them using the various tools like SEMrush and stuff that people are searching for, this thing that they sell, which they didn't believe anybody was, or nobody searches on Google for what we do. And you can show and then you show them not only do people search for it, some of your competitors are running adverts to make sure they find those people and get in front of those people. And then you go to those websites that are advertising or showing up in the organic search results and say, these are the organisations that are doing it. And sometimes they'll, they'll say, well, they're our competitors. Yeah. And, and the penny drops.

Yeah, that's exactly it. I would, I would hesitate, I don't know, I'd hesitate to challenge our audience, but honestly, if you can find me something that where people literally don't Google it and there's no results and nobody's advertising on it, then I'll eat my hat.

I guess there's always gonna be, isn't there? Um, I mean, if you're trying to buy, um, some, um, slightly hooky uranium. Yes, you might Google that looking to. And nobody's going to come up in search. Probably maybe MI5.

In masonry and.

Contact us. Yeah. So there's going to be, as you to use your phraseology, edge case terminology, edge case and situations. But for the most part it's pretty unusual.

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, if you're working in an industry and you're selling product, there are people out there buying it, aren't there?

Well, the thing is as well, if you've got one of these situations where you don't think many people are searching on Google, the chances are back to our one of our other myths, like the Google ads, the clicks for Google ads are going to be really cheap because there's very little competition. Um, it's going to be relatively easy to get in front of people to get to get a decent search ranking, a page one ranking for some relevant search terms. So it's not difficult to test the theory, is it?

No, not at all. Not at all. I guess there's probably some work involved in kind of discovering what I mean. I guess that's the thing, isn't it? We might be slightly oversimplifying. There's people out there searching for what you do. They just might not be searching for it necessarily in the way that you think they are. Right? So that I guess that's a kind of related peripheral myth. Sometimes you'll sit down with a client and you'll type something into Google Keyword Planner that you assume has search volume, and it'll come back with absolutely nothing. And you're like, oh shit, maybe I was wrong, but then it's always just that you're not quite thinking about it in the right way. You're not quite anticipating what people are asking. And I think as long as you put the time and the effort into working out what people who are looking for your product actually search for online, maybe they use the wrong terminology, maybe they don't know quite what they're asking for, but there's a way of getting in front of them.

And just to clarify, and this isn't me picking you up, honest search volume. When we say search volume, using the tools that are, you know, readily, widely available, you can find out not only if people are typing certain things into search engines, but how often they're typing it in. So some, some, um, search terms have what would be called heavy search volume, where they might be getting typed in to search engines thousands of times a week or month, or even thousands of times a day. So there's lots of search volume there. The ones that are high competition and difficult, often difficult to rank for. Um, but that's the nice thing. I mean, there are situations I've had plenty of conversations with customers who are in some niche industries and, you know, trying to use those tools to show them search volume can sometimes be a bit of a challenge because the tools are not that accurate.

They're not that accurate, especially with kind of low search volume cases. Right.

Sorry, I meant to say not that accurate. When you get into some really very specific things, which sounds like we're contradicting ourselves, I can get I get that it sounds like we just kind of gone full circle with that. With that.

It's an important point though, isn't it? Because at the end of the day, like one of the things I see a lot is Google Keyword Planner, which is what I prefer to use for keyword research, often spits back kind of ten monthly searches. And for a long time I thought, it's weird that, you know, so many kind of low volume searches just have ten monthly searches, of course. Turns out that what Google Keyword Planner is actually doing is just if it's below a certain threshold, it just has a ten. Yeah, nothing. Don't bother with it. But for businesses in a niche industry, sometimes you only need one or two people to, you know, make your week or your year even. Um, so, but didn't.

You say to me earlier today when we were talking that the keyword planner had suggested a certain search phrase had maybe ten searches a month, but you're running a campaign for a customer and you can see that there's been three hundred visits to the website from that particular search term.

Right? Which is kind of like where I guess I was going in a roundabout way is you can't take those things too literally. Now we are kind of contradicting ourselves, I guess, though, because we're saying use these tools to prove the search volume. And then also if they say there's no search volume, they might be wrong. But I think it is a really important thing to remember. You know, sometimes they're gonna estimate very low. Um, especially AdWords is really bad for it because it does an average monthly search volume. And if you get one hundred visits to something in January and then none for the rest of the year, your average monthly search volume is going to be lower than ten. But in actual fact, you know, if you're there in January when everyone's searching for it, there's hundreds of people. Um, so it's just being aware of that kind of thing, I guess.

So in summary, on that particular myth around, um, people thinking their industry is word of mouth only, um, there is nothing wrong with word of mouth business. Referral business is often the best sort of business you can get. It's great to get an opportunity because somebody has recommended you. Um, so without question, but you've also got to recognise there are plenty of people out there who are not connected. Plenty of people who kind of need what it is that you do, but they don't know somebody who's going to give them a word of mouth recommendation.

Or even if they do, people are still going to go on and research, aren't they? They're going to double check. You know, somebody recommended a different company to you. They're going to go and check that the service is what they need, that it's going to do what they want it to do, that there's somebody offering it for better value. And those are all opportunities for you to kind of position yourself in a way to kind of capture that sale, I guess.

So okay, um, this next myth is a little bit controversial, I suppose, like so many of the things that we talk about. Um, so the idea that you can buy links, but before we dig into that, just to explain to people, when somebody puts a link on a web page that they own that they have access to because they can put a link on it and they link to one of your web pages. For example, you might be talking about a specific subject, and you create a link to a page on somebody else's website about that subject, which, which either, um, either, um, supports the argument that you've put forward or whatever. Um, that's a link. So a link from somebody to you. Those links are one of the metrics that Google uses to try and figure out if a web page is important. Is this web page being linked to from other web pages? And are they in turn being linked to from other web pages, i.e. there's kind of a trust, A circle of trust.

It works exactly the same as citations in scientific articles. Exactly. The more your article is cited, the more trustworthy and authoritative it is. And the web is exactly the same. Really?

Yeah, that that one's an interesting one, because I did work in academia and, and, and went through that whole process of citing other papers and everything else. Um, and one of the things that amused me was, well, what if like you're writing a paper and you can say, you know, um, Doctor Smith said such and such and clearly Doctor Smith was talking complete nonsense. And you link to Doctor Smith who was talking complete nonsense. In Google's world, you're actually giving Doctor Smith some credibility because you're linking to Doctor Smith's paper. Yeah a bit odd.

Well that's one hundred percent what happens online though isn't it. If you think about it, I think a lot of the time you'll Google something. The top search result will be wrong, factually incorrect, or a really shit website. And you'll be like, how on earth have they got to the top spot for this really competitive search query? But it's because ultimately, like user error is a thing and Google is relying on other people to say, oh, this is trustworthy and reliable. And, you know, at the end of the day, if lots of people say a rubbish article is trustworthy and reliable, Google are going to take their word for it, even if in actual fact, it's not really very good. So yeah, I think that's probably one of the big flaws with Google really.

Yeah. I guess their algorithm is like unbalanced when pages get linked to those. Those links are trust signals. Authority signals. Right. Sorry. Go on.

I was just going to say there's a really good example of where this is dangerous, right? Because for a lot of medical conditions online, if you Google them, you'll notice sites like Doctor Oz and stuff like that pop up, like all those American hucksters that sell like snake oil. And they rank for search terms that are about medical illnesses. And they've done it because they're so widely cited, because they have a kind of rabid fan base of people out there saying, oh, this is brilliant news, and you end up with this kind of weird misinformation where it'll tell you to, I don't know, like swallow conkers to cure a cold or something like that. And that doesn't work.

I've got a sore throat and I didn't have to swallow those conkers. That's just all sorts of are wrong that um. Right. So we now understand if you can remember remotely remember what we were talking about. You now understand what what the importance of links. So there's an entire industry out there, some of it um, credible, some of it, um, not credible, um, around the idea of like, right, my website doesn't have much credibility authority. So I'm going to go out there and I'm going to pay somebody to get my website linked to from lots of other places.

Yeah.

You wanted to talk about this. Don't just say, yeah.

I was gearing up. It takes a minute. Okay, so I guess the thing is like, first of all, that is one hundred percent possible, right? We have to acknowledge that. We have to accept that people are buying links right now. I think the problem with it is that it just doesn't really work very well anymore. Like there was a time when this is what SEO was mainly about. Um, and I remember when I first started doing some SEO work, um, when I was in uni, it was for a company that used to bribe, um mommy bloggers, um, with like free shoes or free trips to the spa. If they'd put a blog post about a specific company up on their website and get them a link. And I think that kind of thing used to be really prevalent, but Google's got very, very good over the years. I think spotting links that are there are naturally that look like they've been paid for. And while I'm sure there are people out there who do it in very clever ways, in very roundabout ways, I think by and large, Google has learned to kind of ignore those paid links, really.

I think they'll I don't think any of these, uh, super duper black hat people, um, that's people who set out to.

Break the rules.

Create websites that rank really well and get good trust signals, but they do it in a way that's like against Google's guidelines and they basically cheat the system. But I think there'll be plenty of them listening to this. If anybody, any of them listen to this at all, and they'll just be pissing themselves laughing because they, they know fine well that it works. I mean, it gets to the point where like websites get hacked, Not so they can steal data or steal.

But so people can insert.

Purely, so they can go into a piece of content and insert links. And we've seen it. We've seen it on on government websites, we've seen it on, on, um, I don't know, maybe even military websites, but websites that people know are trusted by the search engines because they're owned by governments, they'll, they'll, if they can hack into them and see links in there, put links and they'll do it. So I'm, I'm playing devil's advocate. I know that you know, this and, and that it's possible. It's possible to trick the algorithm. However, you're dead right that Google is doing a ton of work to try and get around this problem. And maybe ultimately it will look at a link and it has an algorithm which figures like, should this website have a link from this? Why? Why would this website link to that website? And if it can't confidently say, well, yeah, it makes perfect sense, it'll just ignore it. It won't necessarily penalise the website.

For.

Getting the link. It'll just say, nah, I'm, I'm not going to use that as a trust signal.

I mean, there was a time when Google used to go around the internet in a very heavy handed way, handing out manual penalties, which were literally like, you would get a little notification in Search Console or Webmaster Tools as it was at the time that would say, you know, we know you've done something in contravention of our link building practices. Here's a penalty. Your website won't rank anymore. And then you had to kind of prove to them that you got rid of all the dodgy links that you'd built to your website, and they don't really do that anymore. But I think part of the reason they can I don't think they need to, because I think by now they've kind of learned how to just ignore those.

Well, that's what I mean. Isn't it much better just to rather than say, that's really bad, don't do it. In other words, saying like, we can't, we can't detect that. So please don't do it. It's easier if they now can detect it just to ignore them. And it's like, let the people howl into the wind. Yeah, absolutely. Don't care how well you like.

Over time I'm kind of coming to the conclusion as well. I don't know, this probably will be controversial, but I just think links are becoming significantly less important as time goes on, as Google gets better at ranking content because it answers a question or serves a user's interests or whatever. It just seems to me that we're seeing content rank a lot more frequently. That doesn't have as many links to it just because it's better than what the competition.

Yeah. I mean, measuring things like dwell time. So how long did somebody spend on a web page or, you know, did they do a search and then immediately come back into the search results from the page they visited because the page was no good. I mean, there's been a lot of debate about whether that gets measured, and I'm sure they must be looking at it, social signals as well. I mean, you know, links, you know, if you write a tweet and you link to somebody's website, that link doesn't add any link value. It doesn't add any credibility value because it's won't go into the technical details of it. It's a nofollow link and it doesn't, it isn't used by the search engines for their to measure their trust signals. And however, if, if, if a web page is getting thousands or tens of thousands of links from social media platforms, is Google just going to ignore that? I can't see it. You know.

And part of the problem with links in general that I would say is that there is no reliable way of measuring how effective or how impactful they are, you know? And again, this comes back to the whole paid linking thing. You know, you can buy a link for five, six hundred quid and it'll never crop up in Mars or Ahrefs or any kind of link tracking tool that tells you how many backlinks are pointing at your website, and you don't necessarily know whether that means Google's ignored it, whether they're ignoring it. It's a there's a lot of unknowns and a lot of question marks around link building in general that make it very hard to tell whether something is effective or not, which is why I guess the the simple and straightforward thing to do is to not pay any money for links because you don't know whether they're going to have a positive impact.

However, the emails that we get daily, lots of them every day saying, I own these websites and if you want, I will put a piece of content on one of these websites and link to your website in order to help you with rankings. They all, they always send you the domain authority. So they say this page, this website has a domain authority. It's trusted of, say, fifty out of one hundred, which is a quite a highly trusted domain, believe it or not, fifty out of one hundred. So they so they're stating that. So they know what they're doing. They're actually saying this is a trustworthy resource. And if you then go and check that domain right enough, it'll come up in Moz dot com or SEMrush as a trusted, authoritative domain. And you can buy these links usually for, you know, sometimes it's like ten dollars or something for a link, a link embedded in a, in a, in a blog post or something.

But just to unpack that. So domain authority is a really good example, right? So that's a proprietary metric. It's made up by moss. Moss think that they can do a good job of understanding how Google looks at links and websites and trust authority since.

Google stopped publishing PageRank.

Right. And this is the problem. You can't actually tell how Google perceives one of these private blog networks. We can say, oh, you know, they've duped Moz, but that's not the aim of the game. The aim of the game is to dupe Google, and nobody really knows how convinced they are by those things. So yeah, I don't know. I just see the whole thing as kind of a very murky and problematic. I don't think it's difficult to trick people into thinking there's value in your private blog network. I think it might be harder to trick a multi-billion dollar company whose interest is, let's remember financially in making sure that the web is not adulterated or messed with in that way.

Yeah, no, I agree totally. Um, I do worry and I'm trying to remember what I worry about. I worry about lots of things. I do, I worry about a lot of things. I do worry that um, people. Resort to link building because getting links is bloody hard. I mean, if you've got a fantastic piece of content that's totally relevant to somebody else and you've you've done the research, you've found a piece of content and you said you've written about this and I've written about this. I think your readers would really benefit from reading the stuff I've written because it's genuinely useful. Helpful. Can you maybe link to my content from your content. Nine times out of ten, ninety nine times out of one hundred people are going to say no. Yeah. Or they're going to say, yeah, but they never do it. Or they turn around and say, I'll do that, but I want five hundred dollars for it. Or, you know, it's, it's so hard to gain links, um, in a, um, by, by having content that people love to link to. We've done it, we've achieved it both for ourselves and for, and for customers. It's not impossible, but it's really hard. And that's why people start resorting to cheating. So when we're saying, you know, we're trying to bust the myth that you can buy good links in order to rank better, it's a difficult myth to bust because you can buy good links to rank better. I guess the challenge is ultimately those links could come and bite you on the bum.

Yeah. Or just stop having any effect, in which case you're five, six, seven hundred quid down the hole and you've got nothing to show for it, I think. Yeah, you're right. It's probably fair to say it's impossible to buy links to rank in the long term, um, to, to kind of maintain a digital presence in the short term, I'm sure.

And it's one of the reasons we use um, like response sauce, etc. because there is a way to provide content to journalists that will be published in reputable publications, online publications, and you will get links back to your website.

Because.

You've provided something of value.

Every day looking for that information, aren't they? They want to have things to cite and resources to point people towards. It's just a case of not doing the thing that everyone else is doing, which is bombarding them with emails saying, please link to my guide because it is. It's an old tactic. And let's be honest, it's a little bit worn out now, but the the thing to do in digital marketing in general, when something gets worn out and tired is not to just cheat, it's to find a smarter way of doing it.

Yeah, yeah. In some respects, you know, it's digital PR, um, is, is very much digital. It's very much link building isn't it? Very much. But, but if you look at what PR was all about, I mean, PR can be really successful. It can be a great way to get your company noticed, etc.. But what a lot of the successful PR companies had was fantastic relationships with journalists so effectively they were gaming the system as well, because it was like, if you come with us and spend two grand a month on a retainer, we'll write content. And we know John Smith at the Times, and we know Susan Smith at the Telegraph, they're all called Smith, by the way.

Yeah.

Just it's just how it works out. You know, we know these people and we know exactly what will flip the switch is. And we can give them content and they'll put it in there. And it's a virtuous cycle, isn't it? It's kind of like you give us money, we'll make sure that the right people are publishing your content and linking back to your. Well, in those days, not necessarily linking, but nowadays, you know, it's about linking.

But I think the flip side of that is, you know, if a digital PR, if a normal traditional PR company started going to journalists with shit articles, not vetting their clients first and taking this crap content to journalists and saying, publish this, eventually the journalists would stop bringing them up or listening to them when they rang them up, because to maintain the relationship, you have to maintain the quality. And that's the thing with traditional link building methods. It's become a kind of race to the bottom really, hasn't it, where everyone just kind of churns out rubbish content and hopes to get links.

I suppose the the equivalent race to the bottom was the advertorial. Remember, like newspapers used to run advertorials so you would start reading some content. Oh wow. Look at this, this this, this company have got this huge. Ah, wait a minute. Right at the.

Top.

Right at the.

Top of.

The page advertorial. And then suddenly, you know, just like that, you just switched off. This is bullshit. I'm not going to read it anymore because they've paid for it. Yeah, I don't know, I guess, uh, it's funny how there are so many parallels between like the old way of promoting businesses and marketing businesses to the new way of doing it. There's so many things that are more or less the same, aren't they?

I guess it's the same problems, the same teething problems that eventually get overcome in the same kind of way, isn't it? I mean, eventually we'll end up in a place where the links go to the agencies that can be trusted to bring the journalists good content, and then they will effectively just be PR agencies with Backlinking as an extra step.

That's right. Okay, so we've done four, um, myths and hopefully busted them. The last one, um, is, is it's about The idea that your website doesn't rank very well because your meters are wrong. Okay, so people come to us and say, oh yeah, we need search engine optimisation. We need somebody to fix our meters. You know, meta meta keywords, meta title it, you know, they don't fully understand what they're asking for. And that's not a criticism. There's plenty of things that it's confusing, don't understand, you know, outside the world of digital marketing. So it's not really a criticism of them. It's not meant to be anyway. Even even though you can hear the sneering in my voice. Um, but it's this idea that there's just something broken and you can just fix it.

Yeah.

It's very rarely the case. Or rather, it's usually the case that it's broken, but it's not broken in the way they think it's broken.

Well, just to yeah, just to kind of, I guess going on the meta thing. Right. So meta content is content about your content, right. You're telling the search engine. Oh, well, it used to be that you used your title element and your meta description to tell the search engine. This page is about this subject. I'm pretty sure it's fair to say that search engines just ignore that now, right?

It's not the title element.

No, but well it's not.

Certainly the meta description isn't a ranking factor. It's a clickthrough factor because it's often the text that's used in a search result, which we've talked about before. So you've got control over it. So writing it. Write it in a way that's going to entice.

People to click, but not search engines. And I think this is part of the problem, isn't it, that a lot of people go out there with this kind of idea that what your metadata should do is say to the search engine, pick me, pick me. I'm the best article about this. Even if that's not true, or even if your article is about a slightly different subject or whatever, that you can somehow kind of like trick the search engine. The way too sophisticated for that. Nowadays, they don't care.

The myth that we're busting is the idea that you can drop keywords into a web page. So drop the word key, you can drop words into a web page, which are magically going to help it to rank in Google. Now, on one level, not having the search terms that people are typing in on a page means that it's less likely that you're going to rank. So it's not a complete nonsense, but the complete nonsense. The myth is that if you just drop these keywords in to the page or even just in the, you know, the meta keywords tag, um, element tag, whatever you want to call it, then then suddenly your website's going to rank. And I think, I think plenty of people still do think that. Oh yeah. Yeah. You know, I've optimised my website, I put the meta keywords in and stuff like that. You still hear it quite a lot. It is a myth. It's just nonsense. It's not going to work.

Yeah. I was doing a piece of work earlier for a client where I was researching all the different content that was ranking first for vehicle remapping, engine remapping as it was. Um, actually the keyword was engine remapping. The top ranking article was vehicle remapping. Um, not even the right keyword. Right. But it was such a good article and Google thought clearly it's relevant and related that it was ranking above all the people who'd kind of painstakingly optimised their websites for engine remapping. And it just goes to show, there used to be a time, you're right, when you could just kind of bung those words in there and it would guarantee you a top spot. Nowadays, I think you just have to think more holistically about it, if you like. What does the what does the reader want to see? And then Google will pick up on that. Yeah, we've been very pro Google this episode, I have. You have. Yeah. I mean.

It's for me. Um, sorry, I'm just scribbling so I don't forget to ask something. Um, for me, I think the thing that people miss and this is relevant to this, this last thing about, oh, you just put the keywords in and fix my website. Um, ultimately I've said this before. Ultimately Google is trying to, to show relevant results. It's trying to put things in front of people that will help them solve the problem that they're trying to solve. When they type whatever it is they've typed into Google. And, you know, we know that we've said it a thousand times. And I think people somehow think that it's a game that they're playing, and it's not about stepping back and saying, right, people are typing this into a search engine. So because they've got this problem. What can I do to give them the the the amount of content, the quality of content, the different types of content that are going to. That's going to help me to rank. When people type that in and when they land on my web page, they're going to think, wow, I want to speak to these guys. You know, why are we not like more thinking about how can we deserve to secure this ranking as opposed to what do we have to do to trick the search engines, to rank.

To jump through? Yeah, I think it's a holdover, to be honest. I was having a funny conversation with my parents the other day, bought a house recently, and we're in the process of renovating. The parents did know I bought a house recently and we're in the process of renovating it. And I was saying that we were considering getting, um, laminate floors and my parents were like, laminate floors are shit. They look really ugly. You can tell at a glance. Um, and that was true thirty years ago when they were last decorating a house, now virtually indistinguishable. Um, but it's a really interesting thing because I think the same thing is kind of happened in our industry too, right? A lot of people have been doing this for ten, twenty years back when a search engine could be tricked and they just their mindset just hasn't changed. They're just still in that place where the Google bot is something to trick into ranking your content. But the technology has been evolving the whole time we've been working, and we're in a place now where it's so sophisticated. It's so good at picking up on what you're saying that you don't really need to try and game it anymore. You can't really game it anymore. Like you say, you just have to earn people's trust. You have to earn people's time. And if and ultimately that is the game we're in. You know, you're earning a click, you're earning somebody's sitting and reading your web page. And if you can't do that, then you're not going to succeed. It's there's no kind of tricks left really.

So if you're playing a quality game, if you're, if you if you're setting out to, to be the best, I mean, the last, um, the last podcast, which, uh, we did with, uh, Julie and Caron, we talked about people having the will to succeed. We, they want to succeed. We were talking about sport. So they want to be successful. Um, but whether or not they had the will to do what was required to be successful. So what we're talking about with some of these myths, myths that we bust today is, is if you like, want to succeed online, you've got to be prepared to do what's required. And often what's required is to, is to look at what, what other people are doing and not just copy it, but blow it out of the water.

Excel. Yeah. Do better.

Yeah. I mean, we're trying to do it. As you know, we're in a very competitive market as a digital marketing agency. And so, you know, we've, we've, we've kind of hit the motherlode now and again with some of this content that we've produced. And then we've produced tons of stuff which has been not good enough to dominate the page one results. You know, it's kind of, you go and look at what other people have done. And, and if you're honest, you look at it and go, well, they've nailed it. They've, they've put a ton of work. I mean, the, you know, the famous, you know, well-known digital marketer, Neil Patel based I think he's based in New York. You know, he's he's talked about this a lot. I mean, he will his team will spend twenty thousand dollars, developing a piece of content in order to try and secure good, good, unbeatable search rankings for something that's going to generate his business. A lot of money.

The thing is, most good search results are probably worth that though, aren't they? If you think about what you're talking about. And this is the thing, like the internet has matured. Like you say, it's become very competitive to do something now. Like we have an article on our website, the what is SEO article that used to do fantastically well, now does slightly less well to get it back to where it was before. It would take an inordinate amount of effort to knock everybody else out of the water. But that is kind of what you have to do if you want those those.

Yeah. I mean, to that point, we over the Christmas break, um, because I'm a sad nerd, I basically spent a lot of time doing some restructuring on our website because we recognised that we, we'd kind of let things slip. We had a lot of really what you would call thin content pages, pages that were written to try and attract certain searches, people who were carrying out certain searches. And they were rubbish. I mean, they were graphically, aesthetically rubbish. The there was hardly any content on there. They were almost created cynically. But, I mean, you know, in my defense. Yeah, yeah. They were created a long time ago. So what we did is we you know, some of them we got rid of and the ones we didn't get rid of, we, we revamped them and made them much better than they were. And guess what's happening?

Yeah. Impressions go up, clicks go up. You get more traffic.

That's right. Exactly.

But you can't fool it anymore, I think. And that's kind of the proof really, isn't it?

Yeah. Okay, so we've busted the myth that just having a website is enough. We busted the myth that Google ads don't work. Uh, we busted the myth that you, uh, your industry is word of mouth only, and having a website and a digital marketing strategy isn't worth having. Uh, we busted the myth that, um, you can buy good links. We didn't really bust that one, did we? Because you can. You can buy links that work. You can certainly do that. But we, what we tried to do was say, look, ultimately that probably won't work. Um, and we also busted the myth, the idea that you can just kind of fix, fix something that's mystically called metadata and it's going to magically help your website to rank. They were the five that we set out to bust. Hopefully that was of some use. Um, anything you want to add on any of those five? I don't want you to bring up number six.

No, don't don't be.

Up on that because I'm, I'm, I've had enough.

Now. I've had enough. Um, no, I think that's everything.

Okay. That's good. Um, if you want to come on the show, then redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface, go on to the contact tab, get in touch or go to redevolution.com. Every page on our website I think has got a contact form on it. So fill it in or jump on our live chat and come and talk to us. If you've got any questions, fire em in. Um, it's been Dave and Alex, uh, on Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Alex?

Yeah, that's all from me.

Okay. And me. Bye.