So when you type in, uh, what is SEO? It's a very broad subject and understanding what people are searching for. That's one thing. Figuring out whether or not you think your website is capable of appearing in a search result for that is, is, is one of the most important things that a lot of people miss.
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point, actually. Yeah. What is SEO? I mean, really is the whole process, right, of working out what people are searching for, how they're behaving, what they're doing online, where you stand in the kind of pecking order of people you could potentially go after a search term. And then finally, I guess the act of optimising for that search term. But that does come quite far down the as.
Long as you appreciate that if you find a search term that, you know, if people type that in Google, I really want them to find me. Yeah. Then that's only the beginning of the journey. The next thing you need to do is figure out how realistic is it to get my website into the search results where it's likely to be found. Okay, welcome back to Alex.
Digital Marketing From The Coalface.
We were both kind of struggling a bit today because it's a it's a very muggy kind of.
Yeah, it's one of those awful kind of slow, lethargic.
To whatever it is. It's twenty past four in the afternoon and we've kind of run out of steam a little bit. So, um, what better time to have a nice relaxing conversation around the subject of what is SEO?
I hate it when it's nice and relaxing for you. I'm always on edge.
So it was just I was looking through, uh, our search console data because I was looking for some inspiration about what people.
Actually care about.
What people actually care about. That's right. And one of the things that leapt out at me when I did a little filter, um, looking at some of the questions that people ask is there's, there's lots of what is SEO? What is SEO in marketing? What is a lot of SEO questions and apologies in advance if it's a little bit of noise in the background, but it is a lovely kind of muggy kind of day. And so we've left the door open to the downstairs part of our office building where we often record the podcast. So there might be an odd car going past maybe a Harley Davidson or two, an odd Aston Martin, a Ferrari, that kind of thing. All cars that we've seen in that car, it is true in quite in the quite recent past, so it could happen. Speaking about posh cars, before we start talking about SEO, you know, I've been I've been kind of musing over this whole idea of, of like, I've got a golf GTI. I do it getting rid of my modern golf GTI and for the same money, getting a kind of worn out classic.
Yeah. You know where I stand on this?
Yeah, I know it's tempting because you think, all right, you have to chuck money at it, but it's probably bottomed out price wise and it's gonna slowly maybe edge upwards, whereas the golf will keep edging downwards. And it's just kind of like it's a right pain in it. You know, it's the right it's a pain in the backside.
And also the money you spend maintaining it is, is fun. You know, you get something cool out of it.
It's fun. If it's not money you have to spend because the thing broke down when you were halfway between here and wherever you were driving to and that sort of thing. It's unlikely.
But then, as you know, successful digital marketers, you can just call your helicopter, I suppose.
I saw a really interesting tweet, uh, where a helicopter was had landed like these commercial little, little ish, you know, the sort of helicopters that that well-heeled people would you hey, you there, take me here.
Sure.
Um, one had landed and rotors were still spinning, and then another one came and landed next to it. And, um, then must have just nudged over a little bit too much and then the rotors just collided. Nobody was hurt, but the two helicopters looked like they were written off. Yeah. Expensive.
Expensive bill.
None of this has got anything.
I mean yeah, we've wandered very far.
to do with search engine optimisation.
Very far.
Off. Yeah. So if you search, what is SEO you used to find read evolution right near the top. Um, we've got various things like our SEO superhero, which who explains SEO in very simple terms. And, and there's loads of dogs barking outside. Now obviously we've started talking, um, and we've got various, you know, SEO resources on our website to help people understand it, but it seems people are still really confused about SEO. What is SEO and give me, give me your sort of initial take. We'll see where this wanders. But you know what, in the broadest sense, what do you think is the answer to the question, what is SEO?
In super simple terms.
Yes.
I think it is about putting your website in front of people when they are searching on an organic search engine like Google. Yeah, I can't refute that. Don't care about it either. Do an organic.
Search engine like Google. No wonder people are confused about SEO. I mean, even that.
I mean, yeah, it's true. Actually, it's a really interesting point, right? Because I think the kind of the boundaries between these different platforms and services are slowly getting more and more diluted. So yeah, I guess the idea was originally like, you could either pay for your traffic through paid advertising or by going on a social media platform and promoting posts.
That sort of thing, or banner adverts or all sorts of.
Or you could tap into organic traffic by getting your website to rank in Google search or whatever.
Yeah. So any activity that is being carried out in order to, to improve the way a web page performs in Google search is pretty much yep, classified as search engine optimisation. Yeah. Okay, let's explore some. Let's try and keep this, you know. Really?
Yeah.
Non. I'm not going to say simple language because your listeners are not simple people. But at the same time, we don't want to bombard people with acronyms. Well, yeah, so let's keep it simple SEO. Obviously acronym right from the start. I've heard it called C or I've called it's or I've called it.
SEM engine marketing.
Search engine marketing is, broadly speaking, all of the kind of stuff you can do with search engines. So that includes paid search and stuff like that. But search engine optimisation, first of all, is it a black art? Is it is it something that only super geeks can understand? Is it is it.
To to do it, you have to have a special black robe. You have to have a book of dark magic, wind direction. Important. And the.
Moon.
Full moon. Phases of the moon. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, you have to make sure that you're, you know, not standing in the shadow of an elm tree or, you know, it's absolutely not a blackout at this point. It's like an incredibly well documented art, right? It's just like a thing that you can find.
Is it true to call it an art?
Uh, I don't know.
I don't disagree, I don't disagree with that. I think it probably is because there's a book in that bookshelf behind you called the Art of SEO, which, which used to be the Bible and to a certain extent is still hugely relevant. I would imagine the book the Art of no, no, no. Eric was more, more into the whole link building sort of thing. But the art of SEO was kind of suggesting, if you like that, it's part science, part art.
And I think I really do agree with that actually. Like, I don't really know what the actual official distinction between art and science is, but certainly we do make a lot of judgment calls, don't we? And a lot of kind of instinctive. But yeah, it's not whether it's an art or a science. The point is it's well documented. It's not a black art.
I sometimes wonder if that's why I'm kind of drawn to search engine optimisation, and I've, over the years kind of enjoyed being involved in it is because the way my brain works is I am a creative person, but I'm not like, if you said, oh, go and sketch me something, then that's useless. But I've got a creative side and I've got a technical capability as well. But my technical capability in brilliant and my creative capability.
You found something.
I'm kind of somewhere in the middle, you know I am. So I've always felt like that. And I think when I finally realised that it was hugely helpful. But yeah, this idea that it's partly art and partly science, I think is. So let's just explore some very simple concepts around search engine optimisation, SEO to try and paint a clear picture about what it is. And probably as we go, what it isn't. Yep.
Um, where to start? I'm trying to avoid.
What? What is Google trying to do when somebody goes and types something into the box on the Google page? What what are Google trying to do in response to what the person typed in?
Find the content that best serves the query right. That answers the question that engages people well.
Before that, what are they trying to do? The first of all, they're going to try and in inverted commas, understand the query.
Yeah.
Because you've I'm sure you've typed things into the search engine and looked at the results and thought, w.t.f.
Yeah, absolutely.
This has got nothing to do with the question I just asked or the search I just put in. So Google does still get it spectacularly wrong.
It does, but mostly it's getting better and better at understanding both.
It's mostly amazing.
Yes. And I think a lot of people will talk about certainly if you go and Google kind of what is SEO or whatever, a lot of people talk about intent behind search terms. And I think that's that's largely what we're talking about, isn't it? How does Google perceive what kind of information do they think you're looking for? Do they think you're after a location. Do they think you're after an answer to a question? Do they think you're after detailed information about something? It's yeah, it's kind of running through everything. And okay.
So when somebody goes to Google and types in accountancy services, Aberdeen, what do we think they're looking for?
Right. So a specific type of firm, an accountancy services firm. And they're looking for it in a specific location. So Aberdeen. So yeah. So it's gonna go.
Search has got potentially has got commercial intent because somebody is looking for an accountancy company who provide accountancy services. Um and so it will treat that a certain way. Yeah. As opposed to a research based search, something like what do accountancy firms do.
Yeah, exactly. So you'll see that straight away, right. If you type like what or how or whatever into Google, you'll get blog posts, articles, research. If you type just like, like, say like accountancy firm or something, it'll bring up a listing of businesses because it knows roughly kind of what the yeah, what the type of content it needs to serve for a certain type of searches, right.
So in order for Dave Robinson accountancy services based in Aberdeen.
They wouldn't let you be an accountant.
Would they.
Not?
You know, anyone could be an accountant. Anyone can call themselves an accountant. So we were talking about this in the office about like, not anybody can call themselves a surgeon.
Moderately.
Or, or even an engineer to a certain extent. But people can call themselves accountants, apparently. Um, right. So somebody types in accountancy services, Aberdeen. How do I um Dave Robinson, who runs a little five person accountancy firm, how do I even start to understand how I would get my, um, a page on my website to appear near the top of the search results. How is Google deciding how to rank list pages in a search result?
So actually, I think there's kind of two elements to this, right? Because the first thing you're actually going to see nowadays is that little map box with all the local businesses profiles. Is it a three pack now?
It used to be a six pack. Is it? I think it's more than three because I think I was doing something recently and it's has it gone back to six?
They experiment with it all the time. Do they. It goes up and down. But yeah, so that you'll see that. And that is drawing from something called Google My business. And that's like you go on there, you create a profile, you tell them where you are, what your hours of work are, and then they use it to populate those map packs.
Okay. But there's like maybe there's twenty or thirty businesses in Aberdeen that have all got a Google my places, a Google my business account. So how is Google deciding which three to show.
The awful science of local SEO? So there's a lot of things, right? So you can optimise those Google my business listings. You can write a little description of your business and pack it full of keywords, right?
So you, broadly speaking, put some effort into it.
Yeah, absolutely. Um there's also that will be rewarded. Yeah. I mean, uh, to a certain degree, like don't spend days on it. Um, and then there's also all this thing about local citations, right? So it's like the more places your business address is listed accurately, the better, the more kind of proof Google has that you are actually a business that you operate in those premises. So that's like one of the only places on the kind of in the, in the whole SEO business where it's still worth going out and building those kind of free citations or getting listed in directories and stuff, isn't it? Because it does actually kind of help Google to kind of verify that you are where you say you are and that sort of thing.
Okay. So if I've got a website and on on the page that I hope will rank for the search accountancy services, Aberdeen, um, on that page, Norway on that page. Do I have the word Aberdeen, Norway on that page. Do I have the word services.
And what have you written on this page?
I've just written. I am a dead good accountant.
Well, that's your problem.
I do accountancy.
Stuff.
So is that good? Is that.
Okay? I mean, no, it's terrible, isn't it?
Why?
Well, because you have to. I mean, this is the thing, isn't it? Google is not omniscient. And it's it's not even, I would say actually particularly clever, right? If you don't really clearly signpost this page is about the fact that I offer these services in Aberdeen. Please rank it for the search term. It's not going to pick up on it.
How do I tell Google what I want my page to to rank for?
Well, this is the thing you can suggest to Google by talking about that thing a lot, right?
How do I suggest to Google?
You write it on the page many times.
You write it on the page many times. Just like accountancy services, Aberdeen accountancy services, Aberdeen accountancy Service just like in.
two thousand and twenty.
Times.
two thousand and one, that would have been absolutely fantastic, right? But now Google's smarter than that. It knows that it wants to serve content that looks real, that people are going to engage with. That's going to satisfy people's interests.
Why does Google care? Why? Why does Google want to serve good search results?
If you typed accountancy services Aberdeen into Google and the first link was a page that just said Accounts Services Aberdeen fifty times. You probably wouldn't go back to Google, right? You'd be like, this is a rubbish search engine. I'll go to DuckDuckGo.
I could write that on the page, but hide it so that so that people can't see it. They clicked on it, can't see it. Yeah, I could do like white text on a white background.
And that also used to work. People used to do it. And then Google will. Hang on a minute. That's sneaky. So now yeah, content that doesn't render on the page for a user gets ignored. So yeah. No. Oh that's annoying isn't it.
That's fantastic.
Um, but yeah, so yeah, obviously people have kind of worked through all these tactics bit by bit. And Google has had to learn each step of the way. Okay. This is something people are going to try and do to game the system. So now it's become very good at very sophisticated at looking at the content on your page and saying, is it real? Does it satisfy the query? Is it of interest to people? So now if you want to rank a page for accountancy services Aberdeen and you want it to be a page of your website, you have to actually go out and create a piece of content that satisfies the query that does better than all the other pages trying to rank for accountancy services. Aberdeen. That tells people useful information.
Okay, so as long as I have the words Accountancy Services Aberdeen on the page somewhere, that'll do.
So there's also this whole concept of latent semantic indexing.
Oh for goodness sake.
I can find bigger words. Just you wait. No, I mean, yeah, so the idea is that Google has also become very adept at saying, okay, so if somebody's going to use the word accountancy service, we would also expect them. And it does this just by combing through the internet, right. And looking for patterns. We would also expect, does.
It really do this? I mean, you hear people say the LSI is just a heap of nonsense.
I mean, well, maybe I mean Google. Okay, Google want you to believe they do this. It seems like they do this.
It would make sense.
Yeah. And you can sort of if you don't do it, and then you go back into a page and you put in some of these related terms, you can, you know, you'll notice the page suddenly performing better. So I think it works. Does it actually, I don't know. You'd have to ask an actual scientist. But the point is.
Yeah, you look like a scientist.
Thanks. Is it because of the crazy hair? Yeah. Um, yeah. So it's really hard. When you talk about, I don't know.
Thinking Dora the Explorer.
Yeah. Thanks. Oh, the monkey. I forget what his name is. Um, yeah. When you talk about cows, you often talk about milk. When you see the word dog written on a page, it's often accompanied by the word kennel. Right. So Google gets used to seeing these patterns. And then if you write a count, a page called Accounts Services Aberdeen, but you don't talk about financial planning or you don't talk about, you know, risk management or whatever Google expects to find. There isn't necessarily a variation of the keyword. They'll be like, hmm, this looks a bit weird, this looks a bit artificial. And that's something else that Google tries very hard to kind of weed out.
Well, are there specific places on the page where you put the keywords, the thing, the search terms that you want that page to rank for?
Yeah. So that broadly speaking, it has to be in the page title. Absolutely. Um, it has to be in the headers. So you will on the page that you're writing, you will end up marking up some of the things as heading one, heading two. Your keyword needs to be in there.
Just like a word document, like you have different levels of heading in a word document. It's similar to that. Really?
Yeah, exactly. That's the logic, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. So let's assume that we've got a fantastic page of content that talks all about these amazing accountancy services that we provide, and we've put the words on the page that we want to rank for accountancy services, Aberdeen in the right places in the title, and we've maybe mentioned them in the meta description. So that that's that's usually the text that pops up under the search result, blue linkable text. Um, but what if there's like a hundred and fifty pages in Google's index that Google knows about and all of those pages tick all of those boxes.
Then well, then you give up and go home though. I mean, you just have to do better, right? You have to be more detailed, more informative. You have to have more content, has to be more relevant than. What they're saying.
Is that the only thing you can do. So you could finish up having like ten thousand words on a web page about accountancy services in Aberdeen. And that's what you need to do in order for Google to believe that you're the most relevant, the best result for people carrying out that search.
No. So the other thing Google's looking at is how authoritative your site is, right?
How does it measure that.
Alex.
Got there in the end. Jesus.
You're in a mean mood today.
I'm just kind of looking forward to going golfing tonight. Yeah.
Um, yeah. No. So obviously, um, the way the web, the whole idea behind Google, the reason that it was originally so much better than all its competitors is because it looked at how many times other people cited or talked about or referenced your website. So if you have typed a thousand words about accountancy services, Aberdeen, you still lagging behind the competition? You think I can't realistically write more content than they have? It can't be better. Then the other thing you can do is go out and build links pointing towards your page, right? So the more people cite the page, the higher its authority, and then Google will look at it and say, okay, even though this page is a bit shorter than the current number one page, three hundred more people link to it. Therefore it must be better.
And so it's just a numbers game. As long as I get three hundred links I'm going to rank no.
So they're also looking at how many times the websites that cite you have been cited. Right. So they have a kind of trust metric. And a website that is linked to a lot will have a lot of trust behind it. And then when they link to you, some of that trust is passed on. They're saying if you're being linked to by a trustworthy source, then you're trustworthy.
So Accountancy Weekly magazine, the online version of that that's got an authoritative article talking about some complex and.
They reference your website.
Reference.
Yeah. Bingo.
That's that's a good link to get. Okay. So I think people do get confused about links, don't they? Whenever we've spoken or whenever I've spoken to people, they mean, oh, you mean things that I link to. And it's.
Like, no.
It's actually linking to you.
To you.
Yeah. It's like an automated way of becoming trusted. Yeah. It's an automated an automated way of measuring if your content is trustworthy.
I also think it's probably one of the hardest bits of SEO to get to grips with, right? It's really quite hard to build good links, especially nowadays.
Yeah. Because if you've got a page accountancy services, Aberdeen, that is effectively it's not it's not an educational piece of content. It's talking about the services that you offer. It's trying to sell something. Why would anybody link to that.
Yeah. Unless you can give them something really useful and say, by the way, can you, you know, can you sign me or.
Something.
Like that? Yeah, that'll do it. No, no. So if it's.
Really, if it's really difficult with some with I mean, if you've got a piece of educational, useful content, like a really good blog post, a really good video, something like that, if it's got the potential to attract links because somebody might be talking about something and they might link to it saying, oh, it's worth checking this out because it's really useful or whatever. But on a page that is purely there to sell the services and tell the world how great you are. And that's a whole new subject. Even on a page like that, telling people how great you are is not a good idea. But anyway.
Yeah.
Um, on a page like that, are there any alternatives to getting links from other websites?
Um.
Well there is.
Is there?
Internal linking.
Ah well. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's true. So that's true. So Google's looking at.
What I'm saying. Links Google only looking at external links.
No not at all. So the.
Internal links.
Yeah. And they carry less weight right. They're less impactful. But the point is if you link to your own page a lot in blog posts, in peripheral articles, in other bits of content, then you're saying to Google, this page is really important to my website. And then when they're trying to rank something in search, they'll be like, okay, so maybe this page doesn't have a huge amount of outside interest, but you know, they're linking to it a lot. They think it's a valuable resource.
You will read a lot if you search on the subject about internal linking and how many businesses. Many organisations miss the opportunity to link internally. And a good example. I think you mentioned it. There is if you're say, for example, with our fictitious accountancy firm, you've written an in-depth article about some aspect of personal taxation, for example. Um, and within that, you, you know, you talk about particular aspects of that personal taxation question. It might be relevant to link to the services that you offer to help people figure out the best way to manage that personal taxation issue. And that's, that's a relevant.
Yeah, it's.
An internal link, but it's relevant.
Yeah. It's relevant. It's topical. It's going to be useful.
Okay. Okay. So let's go back to our question. What is SEO? Do you think anyone listening to this is any wiser?
I mean, we've talked through the process of essentially optimising a fictitious web page for search. Yeah, I think that's probably part of the story. Okay, I think it. I think there's probably more to it. Um, I don't know how in-depth we want to go really, but.
No, it's not so much going in depth as it would be nice if once people have listened to this, um, to this episode of the show that they, they at least go, okay, I get it. I get it now because it seems odd to me.
That people are still kind of. Yeah, yeah.
It seems odd to me that people are still a bit perplexed and a bit confused. Well, I almost think sometimes I've been having conversations and it almost feels like they are wilfully confused, as if like, no, I don't want to understand this. Yeah, it's way beyond me. And it really isn't.
I mean, I think yeah, because like another, there's another kind of aspect to this too, isn't there? So recently somebody wrote in and asked a question. Um, Tom, um, who was asking about how to get featured in the, you know, the featured snippets at the top of Google search, for example.
Um, yeah, I think, I think people listening will understand that concept featured. It's like, could you like people also ask that kind of thing?
Well, this is exactly the point. So when you Google something in the old days, it used to be ten organic listings, right? It used to be the top ten websites that ranked for this search term. Nowadays, Google are kind of always playing around with the the way that search looks. So if you Google any given query, sometimes you'll see a little pop out that says, you know, people also ask and then a list of questions. Sometimes you'll see that they've just kind of like grabbed some of the content of somebody's article and stuck it right at the top of the page. Like, especially if you Google like a question, like how many pounds in a ton or something, it'll just literally be like a little block of text that tells you the answer and then a link to someone's website. And I think it's also like a really overlooked aspect of search engine optimisation that you can place content in, in those bits of the, the search results too. You just have to kind of mark it up carefully. You have to make sure that you, when you're creating the text, you're writing paragraphs that are specifically designed to feature in this. So they have to be a couple of sentences long and they have to have like really clear headings and that sort of thing.
There's another butterfly just flown in the office.
There it is. And then yeah, like you say, the people also ask stuff. So like, one of the things that people often do is write like FAQ pages and then.
Frequently asked questions.
Yeah. And then mark it all up. Um, and kind of help Google discover it, find it. Yeah. Rank it.
Yeah, we've done that. So we've, we've, we've certainly put FAQ markup and it sounds a bit geeky, but frequently.
When you say schema.
Markup is a specific way that you tag the content so that you're saying to Google, hey, this is an FAQ. These are the questions. These are.
Questions. This is the answer.
Yeah. And you can grab more screen real estate. You can grab more of the search result page by having them in there sometimes.
But this kind of like, because this is kind of like what I was working towards in my head. While you were saying that some people are still confused about search engine optimisation, because I think at its simplest, the actual answer to the question, what is SEO is it is the act of making your web content easier for Google to understand. We can get really tied up in this whole idea of like, it's about optimising for specific queries. And, but ultimately, your goal when you're doing SEO of any kind is to actually, you know, lay it out so that Google can see at a glance, this is what this page is about. This is what I should rank it for. This is why it matters. And I think that is the actual answer, isn't it? Really?
Yeah. Yeah.
Make it easy for Google to pass because Google is kind of stupid. Really?
Yeah. What, what effectively what Google is trying to do is give people an answer to a question. Usually, you know, all right, accountancy services Aberdeen isn't really a question. Well it is it's they're actually saying please show me a list of accountants in Aberdeen. So it's kind of a question, you know. Yeah. But it's not like, you know, how long is a piece of string. What happens is Google implode if you type in how long is a piece of string.
Interesting question.
I'll have to try that. We might break the internet and we don't want to do that. That butterfly just went out again, by the way. Clever aren't they? Um, okay. So hopefully people understand that aspect of SEO, the idea of the words. How do we decide, um, how do we decide? Give us some of the ways that we can figure out what we should be ranking for. You know, we've got this idea of what is SEO? So we've got like, you know, yeah. So you've got, you know, if somebody types X into the search engine, you want your page to appear, how do we go about understanding what we should be ranking for in the first place?
So what we should be trying to. So I guess that's a question of like, basically what is keyword research, right? So that is the art or the act of going out.
Tell me about keyword research. But talk about, tell me the words, use the words keyword research, but don't use those words. Tell me, tell me what keyword research is using the term keyword research.
Every time somebody types a search phrase, Google takes note of.
How about every time somebody types some words into the search.
Box every time Google. Somebody asks Google a question.
It might not be a question. They might just type random words in.
Do you have a medal for pedantry or is it just a just a hobby?
I have a master's in masters.
So a Master of science or master of.
I have actually got a Master of Science. I earned a Bachelor of Science as well. Believe it or not, I know, I know, I sound thick because I'm from the north of England, but I'm actually not as stuffed as I as I sound.
I'm also from the north of England, so.
You don't sound duff, though. You sound educated. You went to a big, proper university and everything. Sorry. Right. So?
So no. So I was going to make a valid point. Yeah, yeah. So yeah. So every time somebody types some words into Google, Google takes note of it and they collate all of that information and then using various third party platforms that that is like SEO software like SEMrush or Google's own keyword planner. You can basically look at how many times people searched stuff into Google, and you can use these tools to say stuff like, okay, so I'm selling accountancy firms in Aberdeen. What other search terms do people use when searching for accountancy firms in Aberdeen? And it'll spit out what it thinks are kind of one hundred related phrases and how many people search for them and that sort of thing. So you can. The keyword research is essentially just looking at people's search habits to find the phrases that talk about what you're doing and that are actually searched by visitors. Because I think, yeah, this is a really good point actually, isn't it? One of the key things that a lot of business owners do is they think, oh, okay, I sell oil field repair services or well, plugging services for the oil.
Field repair services.
Look how many.
Of our oil related clients do you work with? And you think oil field repair services is a thing? It's not like a puncture on your bike got fixed. I have a puncture repair kit. Oh, and while I'm here, I've got a broken oil field. Have you got a repair kits as well?
This the place I was going with this is that you might think that this is how people search for your services, but then what people are actually searching for is like, as stupid as my well is leaking, right? Or I have a leaky oil well, which is a thing that people legitimately search. So yeah, like there's a real danger when you're doing this kind of thing of thinking, okay, I'm going to optimise my pages for what I do, but what you should be optimising for is what people are searching for when they're looking for your business.
Okay. And I'll ask you another leading question. When you do this research to find out what people are typing into Google, you notice how I said all that? And I didn't use the word keyword research once, but when when people type words into Google because they're looking for a solution to a problem, you can get access to that data. As you just said, it's in various tools, um, including the search console that you can actually find out data.
Which is actually probably.
The best place for your own website.
To start, right?
Essentially, essentially, um, it is that it, if you figure out that lots of people are typing a specific set of words into Google, you should go and build a page optimised around those group of words. Would you say, that's it?
I'm looking for the obvious trap. Yeah. No, yeah, I see it. Yes. So so no, no, because because one of the things you should always do is go away and check what is already ranking for that page. Because what you will find a lot of the time is that the obvious phrases like accountancy firms in Aberdeen or whatever, people have known about them for years and people have been working hard to optimise pages for those search terms for a long, long, long time. Um, so they are very competitive. And to be fair, some tools will actually help you kind of gauge the competitiveness of certain search terms, which is really helpful. SEMrush is great. What does it do? Well, it literally just tells you this is a very competitive search term.
And what else does it tell you?
Uh, what I don't know. Oh, what does it tell you?
It says, if you want to rank for this.
Keyword.
You're gonna need well structured content. You're going to need a really authoritative website. Loads of it actually gives you loads of metrics, which is basically saying, and, you know, for example, it scores keywords. I have to use keyword phrases. It's got it Scores! Search phrases out of one hundred. And if you you know, you might find something that's like twenty. So it's basically saying, yep, dead easy to rank for this. No, it's not competitive nor the websites are particularly chasing it. Um, the holy grail is to find something like that, that lots of.
People.
Search for that nobody else has figured out. They're searching for very rare these days, not impossible, but very rare. And then it will go right up to things that are keyword difficulty, seventy, eighty, ninety. And as you said, you type that search into into a Google search box and all the, all the pages that come up on page one, possibly page two and page three as well, uh, household names.
So it's like.
You're just going to struggle to compete.
With it. Yeah. And it's not to say you should never do it. I mean, by all means, uh, you know, try it's just when you're kind of. Yeah, when you're doing this as an exercise and you're choosing how to optimise generally, I think we would recommend that people go for the more achievable ones, right?
So in answer to the question again, what is SEO? I'm just checking the time.
I see what you've done here. Yeah, it's it's way broader than it seems isn't it?
When you. Yeah. So when you type in, uh, what is SEO? Um, it's also, uh, you know what? I was going to say something genius then, and.
You were right on the cusp of, uh.
I was, I was, I was gonna, I was, I was gonna wax lyrical about something. Um, it's, it's, it's a very broad subject and I'm waffling now because my brain is actually working away in the background trying to figure out what I was going to say, but understanding what people are searching for. That's one thing. Figuring out whether or not you think your website is capable of appearing in a search result for that is, is, is one of the most important things that a lot of people miss.
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point, actually. Yeah. What is SEO? I mean, really is the whole, the whole process, right, of working out what people are searching for, how they're behaving, what they're doing online, where you stand in the kind of pecking order of people who could potentially go after a search term. And then finally, I guess the act of, of optimising for that search term, but that does come quite far down the.
As long as you appreciate that, if you find a search term that you think, well, you know, if people type that in Google, I really want them to find me. Yeah, right. If you find that search term, then that's only the beginning of the journey. Yeah. The next phase, the next thing you need to do is figure out, well, how realistic is it to get my website onto the into the search results where it's likely to be found?
Yeah. Yeah. I'm also just thinking about a conversation we had quite recently with a potential client about images as well, which is the same thing, right? They were like, should I bother putting alt text in my images? Is it worth trying to rank an image in Google? And it's like, yeah, if somebody, if you have kind of like relevant and exciting imagery and somebody searches a search term and you could be up there then. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is, this is not like a, it's a broad church, isn't it? We're not saying specifically SEO is make a website, a web page on your website optimised for search terms or are a million and one ways to get into the results. You just have to let you say do it. Find the terms that you want to rank for. Put the work into making sure you can rank for them.
Given that SEMrush. SEMrush. Although you can get a free trial, I think. But it's it's a paid tool. Paid for tool. Um, does the keyword planner, Google's keyword planner tool give you estimates of costs per click?
It does. Yeah. So you have to be spending a certain amount. Otherwise it just gives you a threshold. Like it'd be like this keyword is between ten and one hundred dollars.
Okay. That's not useful.
No, but if you're spending like more than I think it's one thousand pounds a month. They tell you the actual figures. Okay. Um, the other thing they do do is they have their own like low, medium, high competitiveness metric for search terms. Um, and also sometimes you can just kind of, if you. The other thing I would say is even if you can't access any of these tools, sometimes just searching the phrase is enough, right? Because straight away you'll notice some phrases that are like thirty odd people advertising on them straight away. That's a competitive phrase because people are paying for it. Sometimes you'll Google a phrase and you'll see like, it's like Amazon, eBay. John Lewis.
So if you see tons of adverts, when you type a search phrase, it's a candidate search phrase into Google that you think I'm thinking I'm gonna do.
It makes me think people are willing to pay for this.
Yeah. What I'm saying is as a thing people can do, that's not going to cost them any money. If they type it in and there's a bunch of adverts, then that's telling you that, well, all those companies, unless they've all set up their PPC pay per click.
Very badly.
Very badly, then they are bidding on that term and.
Willing to pay.
And willing to pay.
two or three pounds for the keyword.
Planner might tell you. I mean, SEMrush does tell you what it would cost for a click. And that's, that's another alongside the keyword difficulty. If it says like one click for that search term is going to cost thirty quid. Well, that tells you that it's not going to be easy to rank for that search term organically.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's worth like what we're talking about is I think it's worth saying that like something like SEMrush, it's not a huge investment if you're interested in optimising your website, if you're interested, I think.
It starts at about one hundred dollars a month, something like that.
Yeah. It's probably well worth it though, just for the capability to look at these things. Um, yeah, you can get so far making educated guesses.
Yeah, okay. So what is SEO? We've covered. It's about understanding what people type into search engines. It's about making sure your pages are well optimised for those search terms. If you think they are not too competitive. It's about building authority by having content on your website that people link to, which helps build authority, which is really hard to do. Um, let's just touch on and, and I mean touch on because we, I do hear a lot when we have conversations with potential customers that they'll say something like, our website isn't performing very well, it's a bit slow. And we know that that's really important from an SEO point of view. Talk to me a little bit about this whole core Web vitals website speed thing in layman's terms. That's it. You've got nothing to say now, have you?
I only know buzzwords. I'm a creature of jargon. If you open me up, that's all that's inside. It's just jargon stuffing. Um, no. So...
I like the idea of that.
People like to split SEO into two camps, and I'll tread very carefully here. I think there's kind of what is kind of seen as like normal SEO and what is seen as kind of technical SEO. And I feel like technical SEO is broadly now where the kind of black magic is thought to reside and people get very tied up in knots about things like, like you say, site speed, performance and how fast your page loads and what your time to first interactive is. And there's all these buzzwords. What they're essentially looking at is when Google is ranking websites, it's also alongside looking for all the contextual information, looking for websites that it knows are going to perform reliably. Because what it doesn't want to do is serve a search result that people can't interact with the page that doesn't load something that takes six minutes to load whatever. They don't want any of that because it'll put people off using Google. So the other side of this is they also, why do.
They care if people don't use Google?
Well, they wouldn't make any money.
It's all. Do they make money just from advertising search results? Literally.
It's the best business model ever. And I'm very sad that I didn't come up with it, but there you go. Yeah. No. So they have a vested interest in making sure that all the sites that they're trying to rank actually perform well. So as long as, as well as the contextual information on the page, they're also looking at the technical quote unquote stuff.
Another butterfly just came in.
How fast it loads and.
I am listening.
No, you never listen to me. It's fine. Um, and there's also stuff like the URL structure, there's like how deeply the page URL. So the without jargon, I don't know how to do that.
The web page address.
The address at the top, the bits, the slashes after your domain, you know.
URL stand for.
Uh, oh, um. I don't know.
What uniform resource locator.
Oh, there you go. Fantastic. Interesting. You learn every day's a school day. Um, no. Yeah. So so there's things like that, like matter, like the, the phrases you have in the URL before the, the final kind of page name. Um, that sort of thing matters. But it only matters inasmuch as it's sending Google a signal, you know, this page is accessible. It loads quickly. It's, it's high up in the site's what's called hierarchy. Okay.
Question question question, sir. So there are two web pages. One is fantastic. Any everybody who reads it gets something valuable from it. They learn something from it. It's a fantastic web page, but it's a bit slow. It's a little bit rubbish on the whole speed thing. Yeah. Another web page is lightning fast. As soon as you click the link in search, bang, the page is there, but the content's a bit rubbish. Which one's Google ranking best?
The content. The good content. Definitely. I think I think that people get very, very, like I say, tied up in knots about this site. Performance is important to a degree, but it doesn't outweigh the importance of having good content. Google, at the end of the day, would much prefer to render content that, like you say, is useful and informative than something that loads quickly.
Um, do you think it's fair to say that people are often confused when they see their website getting a poor site speed.
Score.
Because they say, well, I, when I go onto our site, it's lightning fast. It's fine.
Well, and to be fair, one of the things that I think is quite confusing about when you use things like the PageSpeed insights tool is it's.
Google PageSpeed insights, and you'll get a link to Google's tool. Put your web address in, press the button and it'll tell you how good or bad or indifferent your website is.
I'm a creature of jargon. Um, yeah, one of the things that's confusing about a lot of these tools is they will default to showing you your mobile, um, websites.
It's a mobile first index. Google's index is looking at the mobile version of your website.
But then when you go and Google it on your laptop and it's lightning fast, that's like where a lot of the discrepancy comes from. Um, and they also do things like when they're loading mobile sites, they always use like a 3G connection, for example.
4G.
Usually.
Yeah.
But it's not the fastest. It's not the best, you know. It's well.
You say that, but the 4G, I get at home through my mobile router, the one I take with me when I go away in the motorhome is way faster than our normal broadband.
That's sad.
Way faster.
You need.
Fibre. I know. Um, yeah. You're right. So if you think your website's fast, try it over. Yeah. Turn off your Wi-Fi on your, on your phone and you know, just go onto your data connection and preferably 4G and not 5G and see if your website's still fast. But what Google is doing, as Alex said, is it's basically looking at your website as if it was using a mobile device and it was over 4G. Sometimes I think you're right, 3G does 3G even a thing anymore?
Yeah.
Whenever my phone goes onto 3G, I just put it in my pocket. Oh that's it. Don't work anymore. It just doesn't work. It's.
You remember the glory days when we first got smartphones and they weren't connected to the internet? And you're like, wow, I can Google things on the move. And yeah.
I do remember.
How far we've.
Come, but I remember fourteen, four hundred, in fact. Nine thousand six hundred baud modems as well, which you definitely don't remember. I can probably even make the right noise.
No, I do remember it used to do the dial up. Yeah.
You don't remember dial up?
I do. I was born in nineteen ninety one, not like twenty ten.
But by nineteen ninety.
There was no broadband.
Oh, no. Actually, by certainly by two thousand, broadband was pretty much on the on the way in. Even if it was a bit rubbish.
I still remember the supermarkets. They used to get those magazines with the little AOL CDs. Oh yeah, that came with them so you could get onto the internet.
CompuServe is the one I used. That was my inauguration into all things internet. CompuServe. Yeah. Fantastic. Back in the day. Yeah. I mean, I, I started when were you born? Ninety one, ninety one. Okay. So you were a toddler when I was I started doing internet stuff in nineteen ninety six.
I was stuck, isn't it when you think about. That's a long. Yeah. Big old gap.
It is. Yeah. Okay. Um, so the technical stuff is just, it's definitely worth looking at, isn't it? A really slow website is potentially going to miss opportunities. It might have fantastic content, but it's going to miss opportunities. So looking at the technical aspects is important. Some people will argue it is the only thing that matters. Make your website as fast as and you will see massive improvements in search traffic.
But I think it's one of those things where like, you know, everybody had like that GCSE subject where you just wanted to get a C and get it done. Like you just want to pass and you don't give a shit about about what you actually get, just get through it. That was like physics for me. Um, and I think that's the same with technical SEO. You need a passing grade. You need your website to not be terrible, but you don't need it to be the best website in the world. And once you've got past that point of it's not slow when you load into the website, a big banner doesn't pop up, you're not confronted with thirty different things, whatever. Then you get diminishing returns on the time you spend there, and that's when you want to think, okay, fine, this is good enough. Now I'm going to focus on the content. The content you do want an A star in every time.
So do you think getting good content and getting that side is still way harder than the technical SEO stuff?
Yeah, I think the thing with the technical SEO is it seems really complicated until you know how it all works and it's just a checklist exercise. It's just you just got to.
And there are tools that will give you that checklist as well. In fact, Google's PageSpeed insights will tell you exactly why your website. And we got a good score.
We also use things like site bulb and there's like software out there that will do it for you that'll grade your website and it'll tell you exactly which bits to fix. And you can just go to a developer and say, look, fix these issues. So yeah, I think technical SEO, it's good to be aware of it and it's good to be on top of it, but you don't think you need to prioritise it. I know of a couple of agencies that are technical SEO agencies, and all they do for people is a technical SEO, and I don't really understand it.
Yeah. You know, one of the things you could do if you were really wanting to try it out, would be to rebuild your site and build all of the pages as standalone pages and don't use a content management system, and then every single page, you can look at it and decide what technology that page needs. So when you use a content management system like WordPress or something like that, it often loads things up into the web browser that that page doesn't actually need or it loads, loads a ton of code and that page only needs a little bit of it. And that's one of the things that, that affects the, what's the one it always comes up with render blocking. What's it, what does it come up with? Uh, time to first Contentful paint is one of the things it talks about, uh, time to interactive. Now that one, the time to interactive. I think that is a useful metric because how annoying is it when you go on to a web page and you go to click something and it moves before you get a chance to click it because the page is still building and rendering. Oh, that is infuriating.
Are you trying to like click a link and it's just not doing anything. And it's like, come on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think.
That's, I think what Google's driving at more than anything with this stuff is like, you know, it's a bad user experience. The worst of the newspaper websites was the story loads. And then.
Would you like to pay a pound for your.
Story? Well, yeah, but then you start trying to read the story, like on The Guardian. I think, for example, if you start trying to read it, then suddenly it just goes all, all over the place because.
They're fining Google search somehow. Like, yeah.
Because they've got massive authority, because they've got content coming out their ears.
But I think, you know, the funny thing with the technical side of things is it's a relatively kind of like, well, it's not new, but it's a new ish discipline. And I think the place we've got with the content side of SEO is now people say, oh, just write naturally, write for users, and the machines will figure it out. I think in the long run, that's where we'll get the technical too. If you provide a good user experience, if you work on making it good for the average person, the machine will figure out that it's a good experience and you won't suffer for it. And I think this whole idea of trying to like, like, yeah, like run up because these metrics, they're based in something really useful. It's just you don't want to get too tied up with trying to get your time to first interactive down to oh point one of a millisecond. Because do people really care? I don't know.
Probably not. But, um, yeah, I think it'd be good to look at some case studies and see how search performance was dramatically improved.
Could do it with their own site.
Down to technical SEO. Yeah.
We could take a page and like you say, hardcode it so that it's not running on the.
I mean, one thing I've noticed is some of the really good content management systems like HubSpot, for example, I've seen HubSpot.
They do really.
Bad pages performing abysmally.
In.
In a page speeds page speed page speed insights test.
Well, another one.
Which is annoying because Hubspot's not a cheap piece of software. It's a brilliant piece of software. It works fantastically well, but it does seem to be having a major headache with the whole core web vitals.
I mean, the same is true of Magento and all of those, some of the ecommerce platforms, right? They're just really heavy, the full of code and they just load very slowly. It's like you've paid a fortune for the subscription and now your website's really slow. Yeah, I know.
I know. And it must be difficult for those organisations because people are invested in them. They've built, you know, sometimes quite a large website inside, say Magento or Shopify, HubSpot, all of these things. And then they go and test it and they say, hey, you know, software as a service provider, you know, my website's not performing well and I pay you all this money.
Making them fix it. Yeah.
It's one of those things that they're really struggling. In fact, you know, it used to make people laugh because Google itself, if you go and put Google through some of this. Yeah, Google. Google doesn't do well at all. And I wonder if they did kind of go quiet because there was a massive thing coming down the line. Was it twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, the core web vitals? If you don't tick these boxes, your website's going to disappear. And then it all went very quiet.
Well, they launched it and then immediately rolled back a load of the like, they were like they were ranking people down for not scoring well. And then they were like, actually, we can't really hold people to that standard and dropped it. But yeah, I mean, I think that the other angle on like, what is SEO is to a certain extent, it is kind of like putting up with the whims of Google, right? Because Google are kind of notorious for doing this. Every so often they'll just be like, right, here's a new standard. A new thing we've decided is important. And then you're kind of everybody is like racing to play catch up. And I mean, I certainly remember when Panda and Penguin dropped those are named Google updates that basically said, okay, if your site has really thin content on it, we'll start penalising you. Um, or if you've copied content, we'll start ignoring it. And, you know, suddenly overnight, the entire game changed. And that is like the other aspect of this is that Google are ultimately the arbiters of what gets to rank and what doesn't. And if they decide to change the script and say, right now, only pages that start with the word the can rank. Yeah, you're gonna spend the next six months racing around changing all your web pages.
Yeah. I think it's worth mentioning that people do get their knickers in a twist when it comes to thinking about Google changing. Yeah, all the time. I do what Google is trying to do with all of these changes, and there are hundreds. Every year is. Beat the gamer's, beat the hackers. It'll figure out that that way, you know, because they've got quality guidelines. They've got they've got quality scorers, human beings who look at arbitrarily, not arbitrarily randomly look at search results. And and then they've got quality guidelines to follow. And then they say, well, that web page is appearing really highly for that search term, which is very competitive, very difficult to rank for and the quality of the web page, the content. There's something's not right about it. They then reverse engineer and try and figure out how that web page is ranking, and then they will then tweak the algorithm so that that web page doesn't rank anymore. They don't just go, well, we'll just take that web page out.
They it's not random.
They look at it from a. They look at it from a much more sophisticated point of view and say, well, how can we change our algorithm so that that web page doesn't rank anymore? And people get horribly wound up about that and confused about it. But if you're not doing anything to game the search engines, you don't really have to worry about what Google's doing. You don't agree with me, do you?
Well, I'm just thinking of a specific instance where I was working on some content for somebody a couple of years ago, and they were. So there's this whole thing that Google has with what's called your money or your life websites. So health insurance, anything that's deemed like a touchy subject. Yeah. And they just tweaked the algorithms so that basically your domain authority mattered way more than the content on the page to stop people who were, you know, trying to scam people or write rubbish content. And suddenly all these websites with like buckets of really interesting content, like cancer research charities and stuff like that, their content was disappearing and being replaced with like very well health dot com and stuff like that. Because Google had just like looked at the wrong signal. They were like, right, let's push this now. And it just didn't really work. But yeah, I mean, broadly speaking, I think as long as you behave yourself, you're fine. There's just always an element of Google can just kind of pull the rug out from under your feet.
Okay. Um, I think we could exhaust we could continue with this until we exhaust it, but I think we've gone far enough to answer in. broad terms. What is SEO? Um, if you've got any digital marketing, SEO, content marketing, paid search related questions.
No accountancy related questions.
You could ask us accountancy related. We know good accountants. We can refer them. We can refer the questions on to a good accountant. Um, if you're, if you're a if you've got any questions that we haven't answered yet on the podcast, or if you want to come on the podcast, you know, get in touch from the coalface dot com is where the podcast lives. Red evolution dot com is where Alex and I live, uh, and the rest of the team. So anything else just now, or should we go out and enjoy what's left of this muggy day?
I think that's a good place to close. Thank you very much for listening.
Thank you very much for listening.
It's not polite. I'm being polite. We don't care about them. Bye.
I care. That was rude. Bye, everybody. And I apologise for Alex's closing statement.
Uh.