Quite recently we had a thing from a client, didn't know where they were saying like, oh, what SEO have you done on the site? We were just like genuinely perplexed as to how to answer that question because like, for starters, lots and lots and lots of things that are just digital marketing things fall under the umbrella of SEO. Oh yeah. Don't think of your digital marketing as something that needs to be kind of split up into all these little buckets, and you need to do them all separately. It's one. I hate the word holistic. It's like, yeah, but it is. Yeah. But it is. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's all marketing comes back to, you know, what you're trying to achieve. Who's your audience? And then what is the best way of reaching that goal? And the more things you do, the more chances you have of reaching them. You know, one, one thing in its own is probably never going to be enough. If you're out there in a few different places, it's going to have this sort of accumulator effect.
Yeah, definitely. So you can't buy half a pound of SEO. Hello and welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, this week we are going to be talking about SEO and how you can't buy half a pound of it.
That is my favourite saying you can't buy half a pound of SEO. Um, it's a little harder than that.
Yeah. And, and I guess it kind of stems from, I guess sometimes we get enquiries, right, where people are looking to buy a set number of hours of SEO.
They just tend to say, I need some SEO. How much is it going to cost? And I always kind of go, you want half? Well, I don't say to them, but I say to myself, you know, you want half a pound of SEO. Like how much is how much does that cost? Yeah. And it doesn't.
Uh, yeah. You have a, you have an interesting theory on this, don't you?
I have a theory that there is no such thing as SEO. No, not not no, not that there's no such thing as SEO. But you can't buy SEO because SEO isn't a thing. SEO is a result of doing lots of other things. So and I know you don't agree with me, but. No, but I think it's quite a good way of explaining like what SEO actually is that it? It doesn't it's not a thing. It's not a thing you can buy. It's an end result. And you have to buy lots of other things to get the optimised search engine optimised website that you want. And that's the end result.
Other things like.
Well, that's, that's what we're going with this podcast. I don't, I don't want to peak too soon here, you know, otherwise the whole podcast will only last five minutes. But, um, yeah, there, there are lots of disciplines involved in getting yourself a website that is optimised for the search engines. And that's what SEO means. It's search engine optimisation. It's doing lots of things to optimise your website so that it shows up really well in the search engine. It's not a thing in its own right. It's not it's not one thing you can do. You can't just.
Go, right.
Yeah, for an hour. I'm gonna spend an hour, I'm going to do SEO. But there you go. Well, we somebody said to us, right, go do some SEO. You'd have to.
Do.
Lots. And you'd you'd have to pick one thing, which is a tiny part of what makes up SEO.
This bit I completely agree with. Yes, I think, yeah, I think what it comes down to, because I think a lot of the people listening to this will maybe, you know, found themselves in a situation where they've been advised to do some SEO on their website or go and find someone.
Yeah, go.
And go and find someone to do something. And I think part of it is actually a problem with our industry, right? Part of it's a problem with the way that marketing agencies sell SEO, because if you pick any random marketing agency website right now and you go and look at it and they have an SEO page, there's a very good chance that somewhere on that page, they're selling SEO packages or SEO services with a, you know, from five hundred pounds a month or whatever. And I think that kind of buys into or tricks people into this kind of idea that it's something that can be commoditised, that you can package up, that you can sell a finite amount of.
You buy a chunk of it.
And I think the other thing I see that makes me one hundred percent agree with what you're saying. Is this kind of really egregious thing that happens online sometimes where you'll see people being like, well, I need to SEO this page now. You know, I've done the content for it and now I need to SEO it. And there's this kind of strange thing that's happened, I think over the years, just either because people have been kind of mis selling the idea of SEO or people don't really quite understand what it is, where people have got it into their heads that you can just kind of do it, whatever it is exactly. To a page or a blog post.
Sort of magic thing that agencies go and do.
And do the SEO thing.
Once everything's finished, they then do some SEO and that magically makes it appear in Google. And I've never actually worked out what people think it is they want you to do when they ask that, because I just sort of sit there and go, what, what do they what do they think SEO is when they're asking us to do the SEO now?
And we had.
People sometimes just think it's backlinks and stuff as well. You know, sometimes you get an SEO agency and all they do is like buy backlinks and publications and stuff. So it's really confusing.
Yeah. I think because quite recently we had a thing from a client, didn't they, where they were saying like, oh, what SEO have you done on the site? And yeah, and it's like, we, we were just like genuinely perplexed as to how to answer that question because like, for starters, lots and lots and lots of things that are just digital marketing things fall under the umbrella of SEO in the sense that they're kind of helping you optimise your site for a search engine, but you can't necessarily kind of like, you know, rattle off how many of them we've done or what they are like, what SEO things have you done? It's kind of a meaningless.
If you're trying.
To.
Separate it off from other things, which are all part of the package, basically. Yeah. Anything you do to your site to help it move.
In search.
In search results is SEO.
But again, I think this comes back to that whole idea of like SEO, black magic, right? We were saying earlier, like, people expect you to wave the magic wand. And I think again, part of the problem is that for like maybe ten or fifteen years, people have been kind of like, oh, we'll just do the SEO. You don't need to know.
What it is. We'll do, we'll do something and we'll SEO your site.
And I think, yeah, I think a lot of people like you say think it's like backlinks or like meta descriptions or like you go and like type something technical into the back end of the website and that makes Google see the page. And, and to be fair, there are bits like, I mean.
That's part of.
It.
Yeah, that's all part of it. Maybe, maybe this is where we now dig into, right? Talk about all the different bits that go into the ultimate end result of an optimised website. You know, maybe we can explain what some of them are. Yeah.
Because it is complex together.
Yeah.
It's yeah.
It's not one thing I get quite upset about.
This.
It's not one thing.
No, it's not one thing. And it is quite complex. And I guess you're right. Like every so everything you would do under the umbrella of trying to optimise a site or a page for a search engine, as in to make it easy for somebody like Google or Bing or whoever, to see a page and rank it for a relevant search term is technically search engine optimisation, right? Yeah. Um, I guess the difficulty is that that's not just the technical stuff that starts right at the beginning when you're doing the keyword research, right? When you're deciding what the page is going to be about.
Yeah. Yeah. Even before. Yeah. Right at the beginning. Yeah. What do you want it? What do you want it to show up? What? Even before that, what are your potential customers? Even before that, who are your potential customers? I would say it goes right back. Who? What sort of people do you want to bring to your website?
On your website? Yeah.
Which is like, what sort of people do you want are going to make profit and buy your products? So who do you want to speak to? What sort of thing? What sort of questions are they asking? Then from there you do the keyword research. You can you can now go back to the thing.
Yeah, that's really interesting actually. So I guess you're right. Like even things like audience profiling, even the kind of consumer research bit is technically falling under the umbrella of SEO because you're going to use that knowledge and that information to inform your eventual kind of.
Yeah, you can't do the rest of it without, you know, we'll get into that. But you can't write content. You can't plan content. You can't do keyword research.
You can, but you shouldn't. You can't.
You can't do it with a view to actually optimising your website. Because I think knowing all this stuff.
I think some of this speaks to the kind of complexities that we often come up against when we're doing SEO in inverted commas campaigns for people, right? Because I think one of the things we struggle with as an agency, it's fair to say, is like in explaining the breadth and depth of what we're doing for people and.
Explaining why it's quite expensive. Yeah, explaining why you can't do it for a couple of hundred quid.
But it is because before you can do any of the techy site stuff, you actually have to do all of this research. You have to know who the target audience is. You have to know what their search behavior is. Otherwise you're not really doing SEO. You're just kind of randomly optimising pages for keywords, which is, you know, you're.
Doing it, but it, it's, it's, um, it's not the, the most effective way of doing it because you're guessing and you're, you're optimising for something that may not be right.
Which I think is something that I would say probably fifty. Well, no, actually, I'm gonna be brave and say like eighty percent of SEO engagements actually are right. Most people paying for SEO are actually paying somebody to optimise their pages for randomly selected keywords or keywords that have been spat out by a keyword research tool. Like all that beginning bit where you kind.
Of the keywords that the CEO types into Google and goes, our site isn't showing up for this word. So then everyone runs in one direction like a bunch of sheep, and decides that they have to optimise for a certain phrase, even though their potential customers don't actually use it.
Yeah, yeah. So I think I've mentioned a really podcast. I think I've mentioned a really kind of, um, bad example of that. Once that I've come across where somebody was absolutely adamant that their website had to rank for lawn strimmers and that's what they sold. Um, but in actual fact, what people were actually typing online were lawn trimmers. And you know what I mean? Like people just weren't using quite the same keyword. But the CEO was absolutely adamant that that was the keyword we were chasing. That's what our audience searches for. And it wasn't at.
All spend a lot of time and money, you know, chasing that. And it's not right, which is why proper SEO.
It starts at the beginning, way.
Back before that.
And in a way, I think what we're essentially saying is that the line between proper SEO and just general kind of good digital marketing is very blurred because ultimately SEO is a tactic, but it's a tactic that you use once you've done all of this. Alex.
It doesn't exist. It's not a tactic. It's an end result. The tactics are the research, the buyer personas, the content plan, you know, the everything else. I will come back to this again and again. I think it's my, my recurring theme.
Yeah. No, definitely. And, but I think in a way, it's really helpful advice for anyone listening, right? Because ultimately, if you're going to an agency and you're saying, I need some SEO and they're not saying to you, well, okay, that starts with persona by personas. It starts with keyword research. It starts with audience profiling. If they're not making those noises and they're not talking about those things, then they're probably what they're going to do for you might work in the sense that your rankings go up or whatever, but it's not going to work in the sense that it actually helps you grow your, your business.
I mean, you might be ranking number one for, you know, really obscure random keyword, but if you know, if the people who are actually going to spend money with your business, don't ever type really obscure random keyword into Google, then you've completely wasted your money.
And I really want to come back to working through the kind of process of what SEO actually is, but it just, it makes me that you saying that made me want to kind of jump in there and say that as well. Like part of this is a broader strategic thing, right? What SEO isn't specifically and should never be is ranking your website or increasing your website's ranking. It should be always about growing the business. Yeah.
I mean, you can rank your website, you can get, you can number one for obscure random keyword if, if that's what you want to do. But that is not what it's all about apart from like an ego trip. So that when you type that in, you're like, oh, look, we're at number one. It's completely pointless.
Well, I noticed this because we were rewriting one of the pages on our website, um, the other day and I was doing some research for it and I was looking around other SEO companies and how they were kind of talking about what they did. And one of the things I noticed was that in loads of the case studies, they talked about the number of keywords that they'd ranked, and they were like seven thousand keywords in position one. And I was like, that's such a bizarre thing to broadcast. It's such a bizarre thing to even talk about because like, who cares.
If I'm writing reports for clients, I always go like this many relevant keywords.
Like why?
And I always, I count them and if it's like some nonsense word that they just happen to, to rank for by accident because it happens to be on a page. I don't count that one.
No, exactly. You should always be. Again, I guess if you're looking for an agency, what you should always be looking for is somebody to sit down and say, okay, like it's not about the number of keywords you're ranking for. It's about ranking for the keywords that are actually going to drive business. And that's, it's not always necessarily like cut and dry. You can't say, okay, we'll rank you number one for this and it will definitely generate leads, but you should be able to say, well, there's clear commercial intent behind this keyword. This is obviously something people are using when they're shopping. It's not like you say random or.
Or it's relevant insofar as it's people at the very, very start of their buyer's journey, doing the research, finding you, you're helping them find, learn something which can then lead them down the path in the whole inbound marketing, you know, scenario.
But I think even then.
The path, but it's relevant. So it could lead to a sale. It is, it's, you know, it's planned and it's strategic and you know that, you know why you're doing it and you're doing it on purpose.
Yeah. And you can demonstrate the value and you can talk to the CEO or whatever about why that keyword is important. But if that's missing and it's just like, oh, well, we're just targeting this keyword because it's about what you do or we think it's relevant, then that's that's a red flag.
That's it. I mean, you get all these emails through from, from sort of the, the.
Did you know that you're not ranking first for, you.
Know, we can get you to, to number one in Google. Well, yeah, I'm sure you can. But but for what? You know.
Definitely. Okay, so we've kind of sort of established then that SEO isn't necessarily a thing, but if you are paying somebody.
Touchingly admitting that now, aren't you.
Grudgingly, we'll see if it lasts. But if you are engaging somebody to kind of do SEO for your website in inverted commas, it will or should generally start with that kind of audience and buyer personas, that sort of stuff. And then I guess we moved to keyword research, which we have covered off in other podcasts, so we won't waste too much time.
Go in and listen to those other podcasts. If you, if you want to know what that's all about. But basically it's about finding out, identifying what people are actually typing into the search engines and then picking the most Appropriate.
Phrases to the ones that you think.
Will.
Drive business.
To sort of focus on.
So then, what's next?
What's next after that is, I would say, a content plan of some description. You know what phrases you want to be targeting. And therefore you need to be creating content on your website that actually talks about those things. So yeah, so that Google goes, all right, somebody types that, I show them this page and they need to know that this page answers that question.
Yeah. And, but I think content that I think it's fair to say, content that specifically targets each of those keywords individually, right? Because this is one of the other things that I think it's probably worth mentioning, because sometimes when agencies talk about SEO, they talk about the fact that, you know, everything should be nice and holistic and user focused and user friendly. But I do think one aspect where you do have to kind of be a little bit technically savvy is around how you're targeting specific keywords. You normally need a piece of content to target a keyword, and you can't really target six keywords with one article, for example.
No, not unless they're very variations on pretty much the same phrase, but yes.
So your keyword research, your list of target keywords that you found from doing your keyword research is going to turn into an equally long list of articles that you need to go away and write.
And then then you, I guess from there you look at intent, which is maybe a bit confusing, but it's like, is that, is that somebody just trying to research how to do something, in which case it's some sort of blog post or whatever, or, you know, is it some sort of comparison where they're wanting to, you know, see, right. Who's better? Because they've just sort of decided, narrowed it down to a couple of things. Or is it a, you know, I want to buy this now. So you then need to know.
What a product page or.
Yeah, that page is a pricing table is a, uh, um, you know, some, some other kind of page or is it, is it a really sort of introductory blog post or is it a YouTube video on, you know, how to do such and such? Yeah. So yeah, you kind of need to figure out what kind of.
People.
Want.
To see.
When when they type that in, what what's going to be the most helpful thing for them to see at the end of that search?
Yeah. Because I think that speaks to there's kind of two core reasons for that really aren't there? The first is that if somebody's typing in like, uh, you know, do I want WordPress or Joomla, for example, or do I want, you know, bacon or sausage or whatever? They want to see something that compares the two. Yeah. And if they don't find that, they're probably not gonna a appreciate what they're reading or B kind of come back to your website because they're gonna look at it, they're gonna say, well, this isn't really for me. This isn't.
It's only half the story. You're just talking about sausages and you haven't mentioned bacon. So I know why sausages are great, but you haven't told me if it's better or worse than bacon.
You haven't answered my question. And I'm not gonna waste my time here. The other aspect to this is that as well as users doing this, Google is also doing this right. So in search results, they're looking at the intent and they're trying to work out, okay, are people searching this keyword looking for really in-depth information? Are they looking for a little short article? Are they looking for a video? So if you, if you don't get the intent, right, you end up with your content not really ranking particularly well either. So yeah, I.
Think it's yes, you've got to figure out what, what's going on in someone's head when they, when they type that in or shout to Alexa to, to find it or find it. Yeah. Um, and you, you, you need to know what it is. They're, they're expecting to find and what's going to be most helpful.
Definitely. Um, okay.
That's all part of your content plan. Yeah. That's all part of, you know, we're trying to do this, this sort of subject and this type of content because that's, that's what people want.
So I guess at this stage of the kind of SEO process, if you like, you'll have a big old list of keywords, a big list of the content you're going to create to, to answer those, to match those keywords, and also what that content is going to be focused on, what it's going to do, what it's going to feature. And then I guess go away and write lots.
Pretty much, yes, write lots, get some video, um, some nice pictures, diagrams, whatever is is going to explain it most. But yeah, mainly writing.
Yeah. And I guess probably worth touching on then I guess the technical aspect of, of writing for search engines versus users and that sort of thing.
Which is sometimes the bit that people think is SEO. It's the once you, once you're sort of in the middle of writing something. Yeah. It's like, how many times do I have to mention the keyword and all this sort of stuff?
Yeah, I think that's the most kind of obvious example, isn't it? Is. It's like people think they're doing SEO when they write an article, and then they go back through and they jam in like the target keyword. So if you're writing an article about, I don't know, sausages, sausages. Yeah. You write your big old article and then at the end of it, you go back through and you say, okay, I've only mentioned sausages six times, and I need to mention it fourteen times in order to reach my one keyword saturation. It gets silly. It gets very silly. Um, people get very hung up on completely the wrong things. And ultimately all we're really saying, I guess, is when you're writing it, make sure you use the keyword a few times.
Times, but don't make it sound shoehorned in and completely ridiculous. You know, use it, use it in a way that that makes it sound like it's natural.
Yeah. And also, I guess, use lots of kind of natural variations.
Of the.
Keyword.
So, you know, if you're, if you're writing about sausages, you know, Google would expect to see the word pork or beef or something like that, you know, context.
So that speaks to that whole idea of like latent semantic indexing keywords, doesn't it? Which is that whole idea, that.
Context, I like to call it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a fancy way of saying context. Basically, if you are writing about something, use lots of other words that you would think that people would associate with that thing.
Talk naturally and you can, you can, there's a lot of tools that help you do that. You know, you can, you can actually put, um, articles into various sort of checker tools and.
You can SEMrush.
Is a good one. Yeah. If you're, you're writing about this, Google would also expect to see these words and you haven't mentioned them, which is actually really useful. Sometimes it's utter nonsense, but sometimes you're like, well, yeah, just because everyone else happened to use the word, you know, um, I don't know, grass on the site doesn't mean it's, you know, on that page doesn't.
Mean I was doing it. I was doing it with the, um, SEO page. I was writing for our website and, you know, it was saying like, oh, all your competitors use the, the phrase years of experience. And I was like, oh, come on. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it just seems really kind of hackneyed. And how is that relevant?
Something else on that, on that list that was even less relevant. I can't remember what it was, but it was just just a few words that happened to be used on a few different pages, but there wasn't anything to do with, um, with what we were writing about at all.
Yeah. And I think sometimes with these tools, I think it's probably worth kind of covering this off actually, is that sometimes with these tools and especially things like Yoast and anything, those plugins for WordPress that are designed to give you little ticks when you've got the SEO right in inverted commas, there's a real danger if you're doing SEO of getting trapped in this, like, weird kind of, I don't know, like Twilight Zone where you're kind of doing stuff to please a plugin or an algorithm or to get a green tick that isn't actually relevant at all to Google to your users, to anybody. So I think, you know, with all of these.
Tools of salt.
Yeah. And don't think to yourself, oh, Yoast says my page is well optimised. Therefore I've done the SEO because that's just not a, it's not how you should be thinking guidance.
Yeah. But apply plenty of common sense in that situation. I would say.
Yeah, SEO is not a box ticking exercise. I think that's the thing, isn't it? Like there are rules, there are guidelines, there are best practices, but they change literally every week.
Yeah. And there's there's not. Yeah. There is definitely not a if you do these ten things.
You are guaranteed to rank. Yeah.
No, it's it's much.
Be nice if it would. I mean, we'd be out of a job.
So subtle and it's much more confusing and it's much more random basically. Yeah. In, in certain extents, you know, you can do everything right in inverted commas and still doesn't work. Um, but I think it's not set in stone.
Just to counterbalance that slightly. I guess the other way of looking at it is that if you generally push for things that you think will help Google and help users, and you generally try to create content that is just useful generally and talks, as you would expect a good article to talk around a subject, it will probably rank quite well. And if you get too hung up in doing things that are kind of weird or spammy or overoptimised, like jamming keywords in headlines and, you know, making sure that you mention something a specific percentage of the time, it probably won't work. And it probably.
Was really a case study the other day, somebody, they'd sort of optimised their, their blog post or whatever, and they'd put, you know, keywords or things related to the keywords in all their headings. Mhm, mhm. And then they checked something and they, they rewrote all their headings and took the keywords out of all their headings. And it ranked a lot better because it was just too much.
Yeah. And there's a real danger of that, actually. And I think a lot of the time, to be fair, you know, just going back to the, the subject of this podcast, you know, we were talking about people who are selling SEO services where they're not creating new content and where they're kind of going in and they're saying, oh, okay, I can optimise your site. Yeah, I can do some on page optimisation to your pre-existing content. A lot of the time, that can do a lot more harm than good, right? Because that is just going to be somebody sitting there and kind of cramming keywords into your, your stuff. And Google really doesn't like that. It's learned to kind of spot those things and say, okay, that's somebody trying to game the algorithm.
But sometimes we, you know, we inherit sites that basically have had nothing done to them so that they have no page titles and they have no meta descriptions. And by going through and we'll get on to this, but by going through and just writing decent page titles for all the pages, you can make a massive difference. You can if the if they're really bad in the first place, like if your page title on your homepage is home. Yes. Then and you actually write, you know, you know, we sell sausages and bacon in Aberdeenshire, then yeah, it's going to make a massive difference.
Yeah. Although it's really interesting because just coming back to the I was gonna very glibly say, oh, so you mean SEO optimising a website? Julie. Because that.
Is.
That is how people sell it, right? Um, but but no.
It is part of like, yet again, it's another tactic that is part of this overall end result of an optimised website.
But critically, because I remember relatively recently we took on a client's website where somebody had tried to do exactly what you're describing, which is go in and give every page a meta title and meta description that was optimised for a keyword, but they hadn't done the first bit, which was the proper audience profiling keyword research. So all the pages had page titles, but all those page titles were approaching completely the wrong keyword. It was just from the wrong angle. It was, you know, it was phrasing and language that only somebody who sold the product and nobody who bought the product would ever use.
Yeah, exactly. So again, it's part of the process.
You can't just do.
After strategic or the researchy bit.
And you can try and do it in isolation and just quickly optimise some pages, but it will always, always fall short of where you get, if you actually start at the beginning of the process and work through it properly.
It'll, it'll help, but it might it, it's not as good as doing it properly.
Yeah, exactly. Um, okay, so I guess we've kind of touched on the idea of meta descriptions and stuff. Yeah, yeah.
Page page titles, which, you know, I'm sure you, if you don't know what a page title is.
Oh yeah. David will shout at me when he listens to this actually. So I think I said meta title at one point and that's one of his.
Pet.
Pet hates I think. Yeah.
Page title element I think is its official term. But yeah, it's a bit that that shows up on the little tab at the top of your browser if you want to know what it is.
Um, it's also I think where Google first looks right when it says, what is this page about? What's in the title?
So look at your page title.
And then we try to squeeze a keyword in there.
Yeah, yeah.
But not in a spammy way.
Yeah. Put it in. But yeah, don't, don't repeat it over and over again. I think, but you know. Right, right. It so that it makes sense. Cause it's when you when you search in Google, it's the sort of blue bit that comes up at the top. So people see it. So it's part of what makes people click.
On yeah.
On your site and actually click through and visit your site. But it's also what Google looks at. And the next thing Google looks at are the headers.
And which.
Ones and each twos and h3's, which again, but you don't want to get like that. That case study I mentioned, you don't want to stuff them full of keywords because Google kind of goes through them. And if it keeps saying the same thing, it'll go, well, wait a minute. This is written for me and not for humans.
This is another place where I guess SEO becomes more kind of art than science, isn't it? Because generally speaking, you'll have headings breaking up your text. And generally speaking, those headings are subtitles will have little tags in them that tell Google, this is a title, this is a subheading.
This, each one is the sort of first header on the page, or it should be the sort of main header on the page. And you're only ever allowed to have one of them.
Right. Well yeah, because this is the thing isn't it. People again get very kind of caught up in the rules of this. And they look at this as the kind of like on page SEO bit. And it's like, you can have a, you have to have a clear hierarchy and you have to have so many H1, so many H2, and so many H3 tags. I don't think in real life, like you say, I think you have one H1 tag because that's your chance to say to Google, this is the title of the page.
I think you do have more than one H1 tag.
Probably ignore one.
Gets a bit, gets a bit confused or it doesn't, it doesn't help. But yeah, I think that that's a pretty solid rule to follow is only have one H1, but after that.
But I think generally the idea that you have to have a certain number of H2 and H3 or that you have to have so many H3's under H2, like all of that is just kind of nonsense, really isn't.
It's like just after that, lay it out. So it makes it easy to read.
Yes.
So it's a decent, well structured piece of content.
Another often overlooked.
Things, you know.
Yeah. It's another really often overlooked bit of SEO, I suppose, isn't it? Because we're optimising to rank a page in search in the hope that somebody will click it and the hope that somebody will read it. And then if you forget to actually make the page look nice, it's.
It's.
Just not gonna work, is it?
In the hope that somebody will think it's so good that they link to it from their.
Side or buy something from you or whatever.
So share it or something. So you know how it looks, how easy it is to read. You know how useful it is, how attractive it is. All, all that stuff adds to, you know, one of those things, whether it makes it shareable or linkable or, or just yeah, great. These people, these guys look great. I'll buy something from them. But all of that helps. Also things like bounce rate.
Mhm. Yeah.
Page engagement. You know, the longer someone spends on your page, the more Google thinks. Well, that's probably quite useful then.
Yeah, we think there's a controversial subject because people like to say, yeah, Google doesn't track engagement. Google does track engagement. The point is, if you make your content look and feel really nice to use, then people will spend longer on it. And that can't be a.
Bad thing either way. Yeah, either way, that makes them more likely to buy the thing that you sell or, and possibly it makes Google. It gives it gives a signal that it's a good page if people are spending while on it.
Yeah. And it's an interesting point actually, because we, we have some clients who we are ostensibly kind of just there to, to do the kind of SEO side of their, of their digital marketing. And they have other people taking care of other bits of it, but we still spend money on those, um, accounts. We spend money on design work, we spend money on improving pages because it's not a case of just put some content on the internet and hope it works. Like this stuff has to look and feel good. It has to be nice to engage with. It has to invite people to kind of come in and spend time on your website. So that is another really essential part of SEO, I guess. Yeah. Um, so before that, we were talking about meta descriptions. Are there any other kind of techy technical bits.
Internal linking as well?
Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Which is for clarity, we've talked about this so many times. I'm sure everyone's sick of. Yeah. We know what people.
Have just found this podcast and haven't ever listened to any of our delightful podcasts before. So just in case.
Links are like citations in a scientific article, right? Every time somebody links to your website, you're they're telling Google, we trust this site, it's useful. And Google looks at that and it says, okay, this site is linked to by lots of other people, therefore it's trustworthy.
External link. Well, that's inbound links.
Well, yeah.
So yeah. Okay.
Sorry, but you can also, you can also kind of give your own pages the same kind of like help by linking to it lots from inside your own website because Google will look at that and say references. Yeah. This page is referenced frequently, therefore it must be useful and informative and it must be relevant to. Yeah. Um, and it makes it slightly more likely to, to link to rank it. So yeah.
Internal linking internal links such as site links from one page on your site to another page on your site. External links is a link from your site to someone else's site saying we think this site's useful, which doesn't help your site. But yeah, it's a, it's a nice thing to do and it just makes makes everything more useful because you're. Again, it's like references.
Well, there's a big part to this as well. Like certainly with the interlinking, like the internal linking stuff that I think people overlook is that Google, when it's crawling a website, it's not omniscient, it doesn't know everything that you've ever written about. It has to find all of that stuff manually. So if you are writing about a subject and you're frequently linking to other articles, you've written about that subject, and it all links back to a, you know, a big, strong kind of category or pillar page that is your kind of umbrella page for that subject. Then Google will find it much easier to see, okay, these guys frequently talk about this stuff. They know what they're talking about. Here's all the relevant content I could be trying to rank. If you don't do any of that, Google's got to try and kind of piece it all together. And we see this all the time with client websites, don't we, where they've been blogging or something, but none of the blog posts link to each other, and none of them link back to a category page.
There's no way of Google figuring out that that's got something to do with that, which kind of builds a body of evidence around a subject.
If you're not doing that, you've just got to kind of hope it guesses that or realises, oh, these guys frequently talk about, I don't know, whatever it is, sausages. Therefore, they're a purveyor of fine sausages. But otherwise it's just guessing and it's not that smart. So yeah. Yeah.
So yeah, link link them together in a, in a sensible sort of way. So figure out, you know, which is the, the really big important page that you want Google to really get stuck into and then link to it from lots of other pages on the same topic. So then Google goes, wow, you know, they.
They know everything about this.
Talk about this a lot.
You know, they.
They must know what they're on about.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then I guess on the tail end of this kind of process that we're describing then, is there anything else? I'm just thinking like schema potentially. Does that count as SEO schema markup?
Yeah, I think it does. So that's you can explain schema.
It's I guess it's using it's a very specific markup language, isn't it? It has its own rules.
Language, isn't.
It? Yeah. And you use it to essentially flag or highlight bits of your content that Google might find interesting. So things like the publication date, things like who wrote it, things like what the, what the type of article is. Um, if you've got like reviews for a product, that kind of thing. Yeah. FAQs is a good one actually.
Yeah. You tell Google. So that.
Look here, this page.
Has somebody answering, you know, a certain type of question, then, you know, you this might be useful.
Yeah, definitely. Um, so that's just a way of then I guess at the end of the process of kind of researching your audience, researching your keywords, writing your content to, to say, okay, Google, this is what I've done. This is where all the information you need is, um, which I guess again, is the bit that people think is SEO. But yeah, isn't.
It's, it's an extra, it's a little extra, which helps a bit.
Yeah. Yeah. And then I, I guess you were saying earlier that a lot of people think SEO is going and building backlinks. So it's probably, I mean, we've discussed what links are, but it's probably worth covering off the fact that, yeah, a lot of SEO engagements are just people building backlinks for the sake of it, aren't they really? Yeah.
Which unless they're, unless they're really good and yeah, they're the, the it's hard to say how much um, how much influence they have. And I think I think the answer is usually it depends.
But I, I think again, it comes back to this whole kind of like cart and horse problem that we have with SEO, isn't it? Which is if you know, if with the best will in the world, if somebody went out and built a million links to your website from the best websites in the world, but you didn't have a landing page and you were trying to rank for sausages. Yeah, but you didn't have a landing page that talked about sausages. It doesn't matter how much domain authority or how much link juice your website gets. Those are arbitrary ways that people like to measure the power of links. It's not actually going to do anything for your rankings for that keyword, because you've missed the whole step where you have to create the content that Google's going to look at and rank for the keyword. So yeah, I think links, backlinks are really important part of the picture, but I think it's completely pointless to think about them until you've done all the other stuff, which is get really good content.
And if you've got really good, really attractive, really shareable content, you know somebody will find it. And if they link to it naturally, that's what you actually want.
Yes.
I'm still like somebody think it's so good that they actually want to link to it from their blog post.
I'm still eagerly awaiting the day that somebody links to a piece of really dense, boring B2B content about sausages off their off their own back. But yeah, in principle, that's.
What you want. I mean, and it does happen and it depends on your subject area and, and things like that. But the, the better the piece of content, the more likely it is to get linked to by somebody out there one day.
And, and interestingly as well, you know, we were talking, we're talking here about, you know, why you can't just go and buy kind of half a pound of SEO and why it kind of crosses over into other areas of digital marketing. And I think one of the other things that I think is really interesting is this whole idea that, you know, for a piece of content to do really well organically like that, to get people kind of reading it, linking it, sharing it with their friends. You do also have to do a fair bit of social media marketing, even organic social, social media marketing, where you're not paying for promotion to promote your content. And I was reading something quite interesting online the other day, which is just someone's opinion on LinkedIn. They were saying that I think most brands have actually created enough content for twenty twenty two. Now, what they should look at is actually kind of promoting that content. Yeah, people.
Do forget this. The I, they, they can again, they see, see the two things as completely separate. They want to do the social media stuff. They want to do the LinkedIn posts and then and they forget to like have a chunky blog post for that post to link back to. Or they do the blog post and they forget to share it.
Promote it on LinkedIn.
They're again, they're just part of the same process. And, you know, once you've, once you've got that excellent piece of content, you want to be sharing it in various guises and, you know, taking bits of it. And if there's a video, share the video, if there's a, you know, really Insightful, um, kind of piece, tip or hint, then put that one out there and, you know, or, you know, put it on Instagram and in the different formats.
Definitely.
You know, make a podcast about it, whatever it.
Is. Yeah. YouTube video, you know?
Yeah, get, get it out there.
TikTok.
That's it, whatever, whatever. TikTok. But, um, we haven't quite.
I'm not experimenting with TikTok.
You will be.
I'm too old.
Yeah, I'm a lot older than you. Um, but yeah, you know, have the chunky content and share it, but also when you're thinking about your social media strategy, what's what, what, what, what have you, are you sharing out there? It's no use just putting pictures out there on LinkedIn. What, what do you want people to do at the end? And surely you want them back on your website reading this really authoritative stuff that you've written. So link all together.
It's interesting, isn't it? Because I think like in time, what I'm starting to kind of believe personally is that none of these tactics are particularly useful on their own. Like it's like the whole conversion rate optimisation thing, right? You can't convert. You can't do any conversion rate optimisation on a page. You can't test ideas and see how people react to them unless there's traffic coming to the page.
There's.
No.
Traffic coming in, enough visitors to get some sort of statistically significant results.
And then it's like with paid advertising, like pay per click advertising, Google ads and that kind of thing. Again, you know, nine times out of ten, to get a good quality score on your ads, you have to have good content on your website, which is also going to rank organically. And it's like, there's this kind of, I guess, this habit or this preference for splitting things up into little boxes and saying, I'm going to do something.
That's interesting actually, because we're doing like we do a paid campaign for a client and they've got a very sort of simple one page landing page and we send paid traffic to it. But, you know, they are getting enquiries from parts of the world that aren't being targeted by these ads.
So we know page.
Rank is also having the extra benefit of ranking organically. Yeah. Um, it's not, it's not a massive page, but it, you know, it's, it's got a lot of interesting information on it. And yeah, it is obviously ranking organically, even though, you know, that's not what we went out to do. So none of these things can be done in isolation at all.
No. And even the very first step that we were talking about, where you're kind of researching your audience and that kind of thing, like if you do all that work for the purposes of, of, of optimising your website for organic search, you will also have a load of information that you can go away and use to target people on LinkedIn or target people on Facebook.
And, you know, kind of who they are. So yeah, are they using Instagram? Are they using LinkedIn? Are they on TikTok? Are they wherever, you know?
And I guess that's the really important thing, isn't it is it's like reach people on the channels that they're spending their time on, you know, whether that's Twitter or TikTok or Google search or whatever. But don't think of your digital marketing as something that needs to be kind of split up into all these little buckets, and you need to do them all separately. It's one. I hate the word holistic. It's like, yeah.
But it.
Is. Yeah. But it is. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's all marketing comes back to, you know, what are you trying to achieve? Who's your audience? And then what is the best way of reaching that goal. And it doesn't matter. It it's it's whatever the best way is. That's what you do. And there's. And the more things you do, the more chances you have of reaching them. You know, one, one thing in its own is probably never going to be enough. Like just doing LinkedIn posts or just blogging or, you know, just paid ads. If you, if you're out there in a few different places, you know, it's, it's going to have this sort of accumulated effect.
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So you can't buy half a pound of SEO.
Buy half a pound of.
You.
Probably SEO isn't even a thing.
Well, I think, yeah, I think it's fair to say that you can't you can't go out there and buy three hours or six hours or whatever of SEO a month or you shouldn't. Um, because it won't help you. Um, generally, I think it's fair to say that you could choose to focus your marketing efforts on ranking in organic search, but ultimately to do that, you have to do lots of things that will inevitably help you in other ways.
Process involved in reaching that end result. Um it's not it's not one thing in isolation. It's a whole load of things that, that add up together to, to get you where you want to be.
Yeah. And I think irrespective of whether, you know, it's us or any other agency or whether you're going to engage a freelancer or pay somebody to do it in-house, it's really important to remember that that process and kind of following it through is actually what drives results.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think we actually agree on that one hundred percent.
Well thank you.
This has been, um, Digital Marketing From The Coalface. I hope you found that useful. I'm Julie. This is Alex because we forgot to say that at the beginning. Oh. Did we? Oops. Um, thank you for listening. Um, if you've got any questions, um, find us at.
Yeah. https://www.redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface or redevolution.com
Thanks for listening.
Excellent. Thanks very much. Goodbye.