SEO in 2022 » Livestream Launch Transcript

David Bain

Hi, I'm David Bain and welcome to the four hour livestream launch of SEO in 2022, the 329 page book and 66 episode podcast and video series, featuring many of the world's leading SEO experts. Over the last couple months, I've been rather busy interviewing 66 SEO gurus and asking them all one question, what is your number one SEO tip for 2022? And the answers that I received were incredible and every single one of the conversations I recorded on video for our YouTube series, and I also produced them in audio only form for a podcast and comprehensively edited them for a book that we're launching today, SEO in 2022. So where can you get your hands on a copy of the book? So I just want to share my screen with you just for a second. And there we go. And if you have a look at a small little known online retailer called Amazon, and this is the book on there, so that's on Amazon.com and we're already the number one new release in search engines, which is amazing. Three ratings on the USA site so far.

So thank you to Dre, Eli and Heba for sharing your tips there. On the UK store, of course, as well available in Kindle and paperback there as well. A couple of ratings there on the UK store there, Lazarina and Dixon, thank you so much for the ratings there as well. And look at that. Number one in search engines on Amazon Kindle in the UK already, that is absolutely incredible. So simply search SEO in 2022 on Amazon, whatever Amazon store is your local store. Hopefully you've got an Amazon store that you can get your hands on one of them. I mentioned that it's not just a book of course, it was recorded as a video. So if you go to the Majestic YouTube channel, we've set up a special section just for these SEO in 2022 videos. So we've got the 66 videos in order there, you can watch them completely free on YouTube.

And the audio only is available as a podcast. So that's on Apple and on Spotify. And I'm sure it's on any other platform that you happen to be wanting to watch in. So there we go. That is where you can get your hand on a copy of the book and you can consume the content in different ways as well. So today over the next four hours, I'm going to be joined by 36 of the SEO experts that took part in this project. And I want to give them as much time as possible today, because they're really the ones that have come up with all the tips in this book. But just before I pass over to them, I want to find out a little bit about you watching. So we've got quite a few people watching live. I can't see exactly the numbers at the moment, but share in the chat.

Where in the world are you joining us from? And secondly, how do you prefer to consume content like this? So it's always of interest to me. So do you prefer to read the book, watch the video series, listen to the podcast? Are you going to listening to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or something else? Kindle, paperback version of the book. If you could share that as well. And thirdly, there are thousands of SEO thought leaders around the world. We couldn't have included everyone in the book, so sorry if you're not there personally, I'm sure you could have added a lot of value as well, but we'd love to read some of your suggestions in the chat. So what's the most important thing in SEO in 2022 for you? What are you prioritizing and what is going to be having the biggest impact in your SEO success in 2022 personally? So let me know and I'll try and incorporate as many your comments in today's conversation.

So great to see some people chatting there as well. Simon Cox, great jumper, David, thank you very much, Simon. We've got a few people trying the Christmas jumper. Great to see everyone. Andrew's going to come on the chat very soon. Live with us as well. So share those comments live. We'll try and incorporate as many of that. Now SEO in 2022, the book is split evenly into four distinct sections. So firstly, we've got evaluate, secondly, plan, thirdly, deliver and fourthly CANI, which stands for constant and never ending improvement. And we're going to be having four distinct parts to this live stream, each focusing on a different section of the book. So without any further ado, let's go to part one. So the host for the next 50 odd minutes is a lady who is SEO manager for Debenhams. Let me change the screen to that. Her big tip was Go Big, Go Bold, Go Against SEO. Welcome Alina Ghost.

Alina Ghost

Hi, thanks so much for having me on the show. Lovely to be here.

David Bain

Yeah. Thanks Alina. Great to have you as part of it. So Alina has kindly offered to just host this informal discussion about part one of the book. She's going to be joined by eight of the other book's contributors, Billie, Emily, Izzy, Lidia, Nick, Rejoice, Andrew and Sante. So I'll leave it with Alina to get everyone to introduce themselves and share their tips and chat about the book. So Alina over to you.

Alina Ghost

Amazing. Thanks very much David. Great stuff in the book. Really loving it. I'm very much looking forward to catching up with every single one of these people here. So I'll probably start off with myself. So I'm Alina Ghost, SEO Manager at Debenhams. Essentially I've worked for eCommerce brands, mostly client side as well. So from Carpetright, Tesco, Debenhams, Amara, and yeah, basically I said Go Big, Go Bold. So what I meant by that is basically do something out of the box. Essentially I didn't want to repeat everything that I thought that other SEOs might be saying. So I wanted to say, try something new to get your name out there. So whether it's branded or whether it's SEO tactics, that people haven't tried.

Ultimately most of the SEO tactics that we know isn't because Google told us about it, but because people have tested it. So how would you know if you don't test and try new things? So essentially that's why I'm saying, just get out your comfort zone right now and do something different. But yeah, enough about me. Let's go. Yeah. Sante, very lovely to have you on the show. What was your tip and what's your background in case nobody knows you?

Sante Achille

Well, good afternoon, everybody. My name is Sante, I've been in the SEO business for a very long time. I think historically I optimized my first site in 1997. So I've seen a number of sites over quite a few years. And the tip that blends in quite well I think with the other insights and views from colleagues that are in the first part of the modern SEO, the first part, first chapter of the book, it's really about trying to avoid distractions, I would say, and focusing on things that are most important. We're surrounded by an array of apparently awesome tools often, but then we flounder in a lot of data and statistics. And I found a couple of quotes about statistics and data that are quite inspirational.

Like statistics are like bikinis, they reveal what is suggestive, but they conceal what is vital. And most people use statistics like a drunk man uses a lamp pole more for support than for illumination. So let's say my tip was actually to tell people to not get stressed about pinpointing positioning. I went back to the days of studying chemistry and the Heisenberg principle that says basically that you can never pinpoint what is happening with matter. And that's basically what's happening now. We're living in a very complex era, let's say for the search engines and hope for the rest for that matter as well. So I think it's important to concentrate on the bigger picture, looking at the forest. I think that really, I liked Laura's pragmatic approach and her advice to resist the temptation of the shiny new objects.

I think that was quite something that should be kept well in mind, or we get bored looking at the same tools over and over again, and when something new and shiny shows up, I'm the first one tempted to go and play with it. And then maybe let go of my other tools and then perhaps go back the other tools later on when you get tired of the new tool. And perhaps the second thing that I would really recommend to anybody in general from a professional point of view is to try and be creative about things as a second tip. If I could give a second tip, be creative thinking out of the box, like you said, Alina, I think that's very, very important because if everybody does the same thing, we're not going to achieve that objective. We're not going to get the results that ultimately we need or our clients need. I work for a number of clients. Everybody has a different need, different requirements and if everybody wants to be on the first page and everybody does exactly the same thing to be there, it's going to be tough.

Alina Ghost

Yeah, absolutely. No, I liked what you mentioned earlier. Let's not go and run around like crazy chickens basically. We actually want to use that data for something and ultimately that's why more and more of us are delving into data analysis a lot more. And actually as you pointed out there, making it more useful to us, illumination of anything else, we actually want to make sure that we do something with it. And the other thing around shiny new things, you're absolutely right. And I guess could Core Web Vitals be a little bit off that? Am I being controversial already five minutes in? But yeah, no, essentially I agree with that. The bread and butter, the first chapter is all about basically the basics, a lot of it. So when you are focusing on the basics, you need to get the bottom right. And then get into that creativity, do something different that nobody else is doing. So yeah, very much like that. Thanks so much Sante. Moving on to Emily Potter. Very nice to have you on the show.

Emily Potter

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Alina Ghost

Please give us an introduction and your tip.

Emily Potter

So I'm Emily Potter, I'm Head of Customer Success at SearchPilot, which we do A/B testing when testing for SEO, if you haven't heard of us. So my tip is probably unsurprising that if you're not testing already, you should start testing. But also if you are testing, I think you need to start testing CRO with SEO and start working with your product teams. You mentioned Core Web Vitals and we're seeing adding components and things like that. Be really positive for SEO for those teams that already have all those basics sorted out and are at this sort of already on the first page and trying to get higher up. And yeah, if you want to talk about doing big, bold things, especially if you're working on a big website where that's a big risk testing is a thing that enables you to do that. So you can try it out and you can just roll it back if it doesn't work. And it's a way to start trying to move up on the first page in ways that maybe are more creative that you wouldn't risk doing otherwise.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. I always liked a bit testing. Ultimately, as you said, if it's not just for SEO purposes, you can do quite strategic stuff like looking at particular pages or you can do a particular one page for example. But essentially just makes sure that not only does it have good impact for traffic, but going back to that whole CRO factor, UX factor. I think it was Tom Capper, Brighton SEO, who even said, "If I do everything that Core Web Vitals actually tells me to do, it will really impact the UX side of things. My website will be so rubbish, nearly swollen."

Emily Potter

Yeah. He has a lot of ways you can hack Core Web Vitals and technically mute it, but maybe isn't the best thing for UX.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. So testing is definitely a big one. So I'd definitely agree with that. Would you say you found any other tip or would you give a tip if you could?

Emily Potter

I still think what you said we've learned from testing. Look, the basics do still work as well. Some of our most positive tests are changing at title tag. Just piggybacking from what we've seen with our data, because we're talking about data and big bold things or going back to basics, all of that ties in. So we're seeing important things, but then again, some other best practice things like meta descriptions rarely move the needle, Google's overriding them. So I think be strategic with where you're optimizing as well. Some basic things are definitely still working. Some basics are probably a waste of your time and you really need to find a way to make sure you're not wasting time on things that just don't matter.

Alina Ghost

So I guess that's a question to you, probably put you on the spot, but what would you say, how would they prioritize it or how would they find out what is important to them?

Emily Potter

So, if you are testing, that's a good way to do it. SearchPilot was cool we're using the Meta-CMS or Edge technology as Nick and I have talked about at Majestic before. So you can change things without actually changing your backend code at your origin. So that enables a lot of that quick dynamic moving. Some of that's not available to you with resources, even just doing small one page testing or thinking about... And also we share case studies on our website, so you can learn from test that we've run on other websites as well. You can go on there and get an idea, but yeah, as Google's changing, overriding meta descriptions, for example is one thing, definitely optimizing meta descriptions. We haven't seen too much success with.

Alina Ghost

Amazing. Thanks so much for that. What about you Rejoice?

Rejoice Ojiaku

Hi. So I'm Rejoice and I'm an SEO Manager at Incubeta and my tip was originality is overrated, if it doesn't come naturally don't force it. Yeah. It was mostly around just content and the idea of repurposing content. I think during the pandemic, a lot of new original ideas came out, but I don't think we have to continue to always create new and original ideas, especially for brands and brands created so many diverse content, so many different content, which can be very much repurposed next year as well. Just trying to find a different angle or different intent maybe that you can target from content you already have, can still bring that rankings and bring people to your site. So you don't have to always be original because sometimes that's time consuming to think about new ideas constantly, just look at what you have, what's performing well and how can we make it different for your customers, your consumers or readers.

Alina Ghost

I like that. I think it's going back to that whole evergreen content. Is there something that you can create to bring value to your users? Is there any data in the backend that you've got that nobody else has? Ultimately I've heard from other friends in the industry, who've said the data is becoming so similar because everybody's using the same pools of data to create the content that all of the content is beginning to sound a lot very similar. So yeah, it's something to definitely keep in mind, don't force it also make sure that it's relevant to the brand. So yeah, I definitely agree with that one. Amazing. Would you recommend any other person's tip in the book or would you have a tip number two at all?

Rejoice Ojiaku

I think tip number two for me would be let's not focus around high search volumes a lot. I think that's something we need to move away from even though it's great. Absolutely. But I think the more we speak about intent and the more we speak about use of intent, it is contradictory to always focus about high search volumes, because intent is not obvious with high search volumes. A lot of long tail keywords do come with slow search volumes. And whether we're moving into this whole form of brands, trying to understand exactly what your consumers are trying to find out, we can't always be so fixated with, oh, it needs to be a 1,000 key search volumes. It needs to be such and such because you're going to miss out on quite a lot of content that you can create, especially with the low search volumes and long tail keywords. So I think that would be my tip number two, if you're trying not to be original, you have to be open in accepting very long tails volumes that actually could help you repurpose content moving forward.

Alina Ghost

Absolutely. It also creates that authority in that particular category as well.

Rejoice Ojiaku

Yeah.

Alina Ghost

So if you're creating clusters of content, it just makes sure that your brand is well known for that particular thing. So absolutely do agree with that. I think ultimately when it comes to the long tail keywords anyway, there's always such high conversion rate for those. So it seems like a win-win situation. I've seen in the past, conversion rate went up to 10% at one point and that's mad and that's a real stats, that seems really mad to me, but yeah, it does work. So thanks so much for that Rejoice.

Rejoice Ojiaku

Thank you.

Alina Ghost

Amazing. So let's move on to Nick. How are you doing and what's your tip?

Nick Wilsdon

I'm very good, Alina. It's great to speak to you. Yeah. I get really interested in some things, I'm usually involved in quite new Gen tech and I do that for a range of enterprise clients from eBay, Vodafone, Estee Lauder Companies. So that tends to be where I can play around that enterprise space. And I think what I'm truly trying to bang the drum for is Edge and the opportunities of Edge that SEOs can use, especially as we start to move from maybe being closer to the marketing side, to be closer to the product. And Edge is something you can do within product to really make a huge monumental difference to a business. A lot of people so far have thought about, and it's probably people's perceptions of Edge.

They're thinking about this a lot in a similar way to GTM injections and how to get round things on the origin server. So they've been working out very various ways of doing that, but Edge just takes us to a whole new level. It completely changes things, it's implemented in a structure and architecture that makes far more sense. You don't have the performance issues that you have when you're running things with normal JavaScript injection into the page. And you have the ability to pull in other data from the origin server to blend and do things in particular in the Edge environment. And this is where it gets really, really interesting. And this serverless environment that's been created at CDN level is as exactly as it sounds, you have computation, you have processor power, you have memory, you have data storage, you have everything that you can do within this Edge layer.

And that allows you to... It opens up a host of opportunities in terms of how you're handling your redirects. And I think redirects is really obvious one that I talked to people about because why would you get a user to come in through Akamai, come to the origin server and then redirect them back out to the next destination? Which I'll go back through Akamai and come back in again to the origin server. By doing this on the Edge, you immediately halved that time. You have things you can do around performance because the Edge gets called first before the origin server. So you can rewrite JavaScript, do image compression, change image formats, you can do all of this in that environment.

And then in terms of adding small bits of data, maybe schema or titles, or other meta, you want to add onto the pages, this is the opportunities you have with Edge or even I think Simon's point playing around with IndexNow as well within Akamai, there's native connections as well within that environment. So there's really in terms of 2022, nothing is going to be bigger than Edge really. So I think SEOs need to be aware of that. It won't necessarily be an area that we all get into. And I don't know suggest that we also need become EdgeOps or DevOps engineers, but understanding the potential for that tool set and what you could do for certain clients with it is going to be a central knowledge really for next year.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. No, it's quite obvious that there was quite a lot of lingo there. So Nick, if you had a suggestion for somebody who wants to get into that kind of thing, wants to see more information around it, what would you recommend?

Nick Wilsdon

So the easiest way to get into it would be to look at Cloudflare because Cloudflare is free. So it's very accessible and you can start to look at simple deployments through Cloudflare that you could do on your site as tests. So maybe you want to add schema in there or you want to add title tags, you want to change the title tags on a page. You could just start to learn how to do some of these very simple changes. So Akamai is going to be a lot hard because it's more closed environment. And so Fastly is somewhere in between, but Cloudflare would be where I would suggest people start with. But even if they just have an understanding of the architecture, they're going to know who to speak to within their companies to get this stuff working.

So I think really that's read around it, work out who's... We share a lot on it in talks that we've done, and I know Emily does as well. So you're going to get a lot of people who are going to be talking about this a lot over the next year. So try to keep your ears open, understand the architecture and the opportunities within it, and then you'll know the right people to speak to in your organizations.

Alina Ghost

Yeah, it definitely seems to be the new buzz word or topic that's coming out a lot more.

Nick Wilsdon

It will, but it won't be... Because it's an entire environment, it's not going to be a short lived thing because this is like saying Apache. Its got that bigger effect on web dev. Literally you have a whole nother environment, another layer within the Edge that you can launch all these different services within. So it's definitely something that's taking off very fast.

Alina Ghost

Amazing. Thank you very much. So tip number two from you, Nick.

Nick Wilsdon

Oh. Yeah. Keep learning is one I always tell people. I've done SEO now for 22 years and you have to reinvent yourself every three, four years, which is you have to love learning in this industry. So keep learning and enjoy it. And if you're not, if you find that your enthusiasm is waning a little bit, maybe you're not in the right job. You need to look around, find the right position for you to be in, find the right area that you can then get into. But this should be fun. I've loved every single day, the last 22 years. So this should be fun. So go and enjoy yourself would be my tip for this year.

Alina Ghost

I love that. A positive thing. Enjoy what you do guys. And if you don't keep learning and hop. Amazing. No, thanks very much, Nick. Moving on to Izzy, if you don't mind giving us an introduction and your tip.

Izabela Wisniewska

Hi. So my name is Izzy. I've been in the industry for eight years and I currently run my own agency, been working mainly in agencies for the past eight years. And my tip was, which I thought originally is going to be a bit against what everyone else probably will say, but I can see we're circulated around it. Many of us circulated around it is the tip was cover your basics first before you start on the shiny new things. So basically learn to walk before you start to run. I've seen so many and don't get me wrong. I love all the fancy new things. I love the shiny new stuff. I love thinking outside of the box. I love doing new stuff. I honestly think that marketing and SEO is an industry that it keeps changing so fast.

I remember in my first job, before they created a course at the university for SEO, it would change sometimes already. So definitely do the new things, but I've seen so many brands and websites and people just forgetting about the basics, the functionality of the website and just jumping straight away to the new fancy things that we like. And it just usually doesn't work. And then they really price like, oh, why it doesn't work? It meant to be so superb. I've heard in so many places, well, yes, but your performance is so low and your speed is so, so far away and you forgot to add any content whatsoever. You forgot to optimize your title tags as we've mentioned. And usually, that's the reason. And I've seen honestly, so many websites improving very well sometimes just the basics. And then if you add all the new fancy shiny stuff to it, then you're definitely going to win. So that was my tip. And I've got tip number two.

Alina Ghost

Hold on, hold on. Before you move on, though, I'm just going to agree with that because actually reading through the book, you're not the only one who said that. Fili Wiese, for example, he suggested he was a Google developer. He knows what he's talking about. Right. He's saying, why are people... I think he said something like, "Don't blame the algorithm update." And I completely agree with that. Yeah, you might have drops and things like that with an algorithm update, but ultimately you've got to look at, what are you providing? We as search optimizers are there exactly to do that, to make it as easy as possible for Google to understand our content, to crawl it, to understand contextually links wise, et cetera. But ultimately that is all the basics.

How did an algorithm start in the first place? It is links. It is content. It is coding and understanding what's page is, what authority. So taxonomy, for example. So yeah, no, I totally agree with that. So before you do the smartest stuff and try and test and things ultimately get your basics right. So yeah. No, thanks very much, Izzy. Your point number two, what was that you were dying to say?

Izabela Wisniewska

Yeah, so after you got all your basics right or majority at least, and you're positive about that. Forget you're doing SEO for a minute. Honestly, I know we've been saying that a lot, but think about your audience. Think what you are giving to them, what they're going to benefit from. Just forget about the search engine for moment, because usually what happens is what they want us to do. What they want us to do is what our audience wants to see, or they want to hear, what they want to experience. And sometimes we get into rabbit hole of trying to please Google so much that we honestly forgetting about our audience. And we like, let's just please Google, let's forget about every else. This everyone else is who is using Google and who they want to make happy in the end. Yeah, that's my tip number two.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. I think it was Luke Carthy, somebody also in the book suggested looking at the wider picture. So he's very much eComm focused, so paid search as well. It's about what pages are you creating and how can that work for the wider marketing strategy, for example? So your PLPs, for example, are they commercially focused for any keywords that you can push by a paid search? Also, looking at the UX side of things, ultimately SEO is touching so many different areas. It's exactly about that. So yeah. No, thank you very much for that Izzy. Yeah. No, good thing that we are moving on to GA and stuff like that with Andrew. So yeah. Please give us an introduction and your tip.

Andrew Cock-Starkey

Hi Alina. I'm Andrew also known as Andrew Optimisey. That's not my real name, would be good if it was wouldn't it? I spend way too much time on Twitter. So if you're looking for me, you can find me on there. I've got my Christmas jumper on as well as a tribute to my favorite game from my childhood, which I lost way too much of my time. So I don't do that anymore. I spend all that time on Twitter instead. I'm an SEO Consultant and my tip in the book was about Google Analytics. So it was along some of the things that like Izzy's covered there about just having the basics covered. That number of sites that I work on they go, "Oh yeah, we've got Google Analytics installed. Of course, we have. Yeah." But they just set it up out the box. They haven't done anything else with it.

All those things that you should do, like filtering out your own stuff because they tend not to buy your own stuff. From those things all the way up to really complex stuff where you have these handovers with eCommerce systems and you can... Again, I work with clients that have their biggest referral is PayPal. So they're not sending you traffic. It's just, they're just bouncing back after they've been away to pay for stuff. And your analytics is messing up all that data. So if you learn to love analytics, then you can get a whole bunch of useful data out of it. Which of course, I'm slightly biased, but I say it's the most important tip in the whole book, because if you can't measure it, then you can't tell whatever you're doing is working. Right? If you can't see.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. I think it's one that's taken for granted for sure. As you say, we're just saying, "Oh yeah, we've got GA, but we don't actually look at what's in GA. I think it was my other half who was saying he had a meeting with his work where they were telling him how to use GA and then he turned around. He was just like, "You do know there's an easier way to do this." And just pointed out simple things like segments, like-

Andrew Cock-Starkey

It's a really powerful tool, out of the box. Google set these things up to be good to you, but there's a lot in there and people get a bit intimidated by it. Just as you get used to things, Google have this lovely habit of shifting things around and they change the UI and everything gets lost. But it's you can now hook it up with lovely things like Google Data Studio, and you can start to blend it with other data that you're pulling in from other tools and start to really make it into useful stuff that you want to know like, when we change this thing, how many more did we sell? Or when we changed this thing, how many more subscribers did we get? And you can start to see all that data and filter out a little bit of the cruff that GA throws at you. You can start messing with GA you can get cool stuff.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. Not only do you know what's happening on your site, but also you are doing a little bit of testing by doing that?

Andrew Cock-Starkey

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, you can see that before and after stuff. Yeah.

Alina Ghost

But then essentially you can add tracking to links. So for example, something that I recently did is take on some Debenhams Google My Business pages and added a tracked link to our homepage. So it is going too organic, but I can also see how many people are going via those local pages, which we don't have the stores for anymore. And that's actually a tip that I got from Arnout Hellemans. So I guess, Andrew, what would you say if somebody wants to know more about GA, it's not the easy just to delve in, see loads of data and loads of information, what would you actually recommend for somebody who's just starting out and wanting to do better on their GA?

Andrew Cock-Starkey

So the tip you talked about, about UTM tracking. I know she's just showed up in the chat as well, but Claire Carlile's got a great little spreadsheet. You can just go in there and you set up all your GMB listings and it'll spit you out with all the UTM tracking links that you need. It's magic. And I use listings and it'll spit you out with all the UTM tracking links that you need is magic. And I use that kind of stuff in a massive time saver, but in terms of where to start with GA yeah, start with some of those really basic things. There's so much help out there. I've written about it myself on my own website, but there's loads of things out there that teach you how to. You don't have to learn how to draw this stuff from scratch. People have done it for you, and you can copy their homework. So if you need to find out, how do I filter my own staff out? How do I do that? As somebody said in the chat about how do I work it, how to stop that referral coming back from those e-commerce transactions. This has been done for you.

If you use any of the big payment platforms, Stripe, and PayPal, and all these kind of things, everybody else who uses this has the same problem. They've all worked how to do it, and they've shared it, and you can find these filters, and you can just copy and paste it. Or there's ones in the Google analytics, it has a little store of segments and filters and things that you can just go get. I want a segment that shows me people in the US on a Thursday or whatever the heck it is you want, there's a segment that somebody else has already built that does it for you. And if you start copying other people's homework, that's how you learn, oh, okay, well, it does that thing.

And I can see how it does that thing. I could copy it and change it to do just slightly that better thing because that's what I want it to do. And that's how you then start to learn to build those things yourself. And then of course you share it back with the community, because we're all lovely and we share things like this and help everybody else. Right?

Alina Ghost

Exactly. But yeah. Before we move on Andrew, I want to know the nitty gritty. Do you have one example that it seems to be a common issue that happened on your client sites?

Andrew Cock-Starkey

Oh, common issues. So people install Google analytics twice. That's great. Because they heard about GTM and that's an exciting thing. And they install analytics twice and their traffic doubles overnight, happy days, bounce rate goes through the floor. That's great. That's a fun one. But I guess probably the most common one is not putting filters for their own staff. So they're based in Cambridge and they go, hey, 50% of our traffic comes from Cambridge. That's cool. And then you set up a new filter and you say, okay, well hang on, let's just screen out all traffic that comes from your IP address just for a couple of... Or look your traffic half though. So that kind of makes me popular with my clients because I smash their traffic to pieces before we start, because I rule half their stuff. Because people write stuff, they work for the company and they want to go and look at their blog that they just wrote and they send it to their moms.

Alina Ghost

Of course. Yeah.

Andrew Cock-Starkey

But your mom's not going to buy your stuff probably depending on what you sell.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. Who knows, who knows? Amazing. What about tip number two?

Andrew Cock-Starkey

Is it really sucky to say yours?

Alina Ghost

Oh, that is so nice.

Andrew Cock-Starkey

It’s about that kind of thing about doing stuff different. Like I feel like a lot of the time this year we get bogged down and it's what my competitors doing it, who are these doing it and how can I outrank them and stuff. And it's like, if you're always chasing where the finish line is now and the finish line keeps moving, you're always going to be chasing. Right? Try and get ahead of other people. Yes, of course it's important to see what your competitors are doing, but stop just copying all the time. Try and do some something different like push the boundaries a little bit, test it, see what it works.

Alina Ghost

Amazing. Couldn't agree more. No, thanks so much. Great. So let's move on. Is it Lidia? Did I get that right?

Lidia Infante

Yeah. You got it right.

Alina Ghost

Amazing. And so an introduction, hey, nice to meet you. And what's your tip please?

Lidia Infante

Well, I'm Lidia Infante, I work at Big Commerce. I've been in SEO for God, I don't know, a few years, not the 22 that Nick was talking about because that's way too much. Are you okay? You're not board of the industry yet, Nick? So yeah, my tip was about benchmarking your search landscape because ranking is not just for what you do. It's going to be about what your competitors do as well. And you might have competitors that are excellent, excellent and tech SEO. And maybe you're not that great, but you can outperform them with content or with off page. So typically, what I do is I benchmark the entire search landscape focusing on the three lengths of SEO. So I look at content, I look at keywords, how many keywords bring traffic, what do the rankings look like? And whether the traffic is editorial product or brand, then I look at the offed side of things.

So links and I also include brand that search in there because I've some somewhat of a background in digital PR. So I link these brand and search a lot. And then when it comes to tech, I really struggle to find the perfect metric. So about this, so I've been experimenting with a few and you can either put your competitors' websites on a tool and grab a health score, which is an option. It's never going to give you the full picture. You can look at Core Web Vitals, again, never going to give you the full picture. Or you can look at lighthouse scores. You can combine the three to get an understanding of how good your competition is at tech or how much focus do they put in that section of their SEO efforts.

Alina Ghost

Awesome. So I like that. I like the fact that it's like a bit of an audit, but not just about not your site, but other people's sites to see where you are standing against those. And I guess a quick example is how much content have you got on your site compared to other retailers, for example, on your PRPs compared to theirs. So is it hundreds of words? Whereas you've got none. What is the quantity? And actually putting that into numbers is quite a good one. But what would you say was probably the most common thing that you found in terms of competitors doing and the client not doing so?

Lidia Infante

I found many clients trying to go for links and authority while they're already leaders in their search landscape on that. So that's not going to make them outrun their competitors. They should be focusing on content instead. Typically, what I've seen over and over and over again is that commonly clients lack content or the content lacks structure. So that is the most common one. You don't need to get more links. You don't need to get your Core Web Vitals to perfection, just get the content out there.

Alina Ghost

So basically prioritizing things that they shouldn't be prioritizing is I guess, we've all been there. We've all done it?

Lidia Infante

Exactly. That's what I aim to do. Try and help out with that.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. It's taking a step back and actually having a look at the wider picture. I like that very much. And as you said, Core Web Vitals, there's a big part of that. If everybody is really rubbish at those Core Web Vitals, does it actually matter if you're trying to improve it too much too soon? Maybe you should, I don't know. Yeah, priorities, it's yeah, I'm getting controversial here.

Lidia Infante

You can keep furthering that, but maybe look at what you're not the best at instead.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. Love it. Cool. So what about tip number two?

Lidia Infante

Oh, for tip number two, I would definitely recommend Aleyda’s tip on the book. It's on SEO testing and what she recommends is stop being like fixing issues and stop being reactive. Just go be proactive. Test stuff, combine your SEO testing with your CRO testing and be brave, be bold, try different things and different technologies and just advance that way.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. I think it combines lots of things into one really, doesn't it. But I can hear her voice in my mind. It's like, yeah, testing, testing, testing. So yeah, I totally agree with that one. And we've had that tip earlier as well, so yeah. All agreed on that one. So last but not least, Billie, very nice to have you on the show. Please give us an introduction and your tip.

Billie Hyde

Hi. So I'm Billie. I'm the training lead at The SEO Works. The past few months, all my work's been basically around accessibility. So that's exactly what my tip is, don't forget about accessibility when doing your SEO strategy. So making sure your content is accessible for a big range of readers, making sure that it's technically accessible, that it's accessible for people with slower internet speeds, that it's accessible for people with limited movement that you can navigate around with just the keys, just if that's needed. And it is just, there's no point excluding anybody. If we're just looking at people with disabilities, that's 20% of the entire world's population. So why would we be leaving those people out?

And that's not even thinking about the other types of people that need accessibility support. So people with learning disabilities, even a mom who's carrying two kids around the house, trying to quickly get something on their phone. They need to still be able to access that without being able to use their phone. Accessibility is everyone and everything and we need to include them. Why wouldn't we? Sorry that sent it to a rant.

Alina Ghost

No, that's great. There's extra information that Google even provides about accessibility. It's been a focus for many years now and I think Core Web Vitals is probably just an extensive way of getting website owners to develop that even further. So yeah. How would you look at Core Web Vitals in your opinion?

Billie Hyde

So Core Web Vitals I think is first off just the start of this basically. Well, I don't think it's right at the start. We obviously we've had mobile usability stuff in the past, but it is going to keep becoming more and more important. So it's just going to keep evolving. But I feel with the Core Web Vitals, these are just more generic usability fixes at the moment. So it's improving the site speed for people with a limited internet connection. It's making sure that the pages load quickly enough and it's usable, but at the minute, I don't think it's enough to push business owners and website owners into going down that accessibility path. I think it's just the start. And I think as SEOs and the community, we need to kind of bully our clients into that one a bit more.

Alina Ghost

Amazing. So I guess what would be your top three tips for accessibility? Putting you on the spot here.

Billie Hyde

So the first thing every SEO needs to do on the planet is download the AxeDevTools plugin and run audits on your client's sites, that'll tell you the contrasting between text and the background as well as various other common accessibility issues. And it'll tell you exactly where that area is on that page and how to fix it. And half my life is that tool, basically at this point. I'd also spend a lot of time thinking about accessible language and understanding your users as well. So if you've got a site say that operates within the charity sector and is targeting people say with learning disabilities and things like that, have your articles, pages, whatever it is, and then have an easy read version as well. I just think that I could give a million tips, but the best thing is to just make things for humans and for all humans really, and think about it like that.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. It's like the tip we had earlier around not forgetting your audience ultimately. Yeah, we are trying to make it as easy as possible for Google, but ultimately, who are we trying to sell to, who we're trying to help and bring value to. So yeah, I totally see that. Thank you very much. So tip number two.

Billie Hyde

Tip number two is really understand your users and use that to make your navigation to the site better. So for one of my clients recently, I found out they've got three different types of users. They've got people that are ready to purchase, they're there. So I made their navigation for the people that's ready to buy, basically. People that are just looking for information about that specific product and service. And then people that don't understand that niche, just heard the term, searching for it. And from there, I've gone on to talk about a bit more what Rejoice was saying earlier. So in that navigation, I was able to target those low search volume keywords that people normally skip out because no, people just don't tend to go for the keywords that bring in 50 people per month. But because that's long, it's a long tail keyword, you can get hundreds of thousands of people to the site and all you've done is just think about something so small, so much. And that navigation is such a big part of the site, helps people, again, ties into accessibility. Yeah. Sorry, I started rambling there.

Alina Ghost

No, amazing. No, thanks so much for that. I think I totally agree. And it's actually a good way to start the next point. So as we have had all of our speakers talk, I thought we'll do a free for all. And basically talk about a few topics of our choice. So I know that basics have come up quite a lot. So who wants to jump in and talk out what the basics mean to you? Is it content, is it links? Is it crawling? Is it every... All of the above? And if so, how, if somebody is listening to this right now, what would you recommend that they do? And how would they go evaluate that? So who wants to jump in?

Sante Achille

I'll jump in quickly.

Alina Ghost

Thank you.

Sante Achille

I think one of the things that I see often neglected that is a basic, is a lack of attention around and love around images. Images are a great opportunity to optimize on site and give the content an extra boost. So it can take a lot of time to optimize three or four images on a page, just by giving the image a proper name and not some alpha numeric sequence because it's coming straight from a camera or what have you. Use a title so that you have a tool tip that you can describe. Use that as a long description kind of thing. Use an all tag to be more straight to the point, more search engine oriented kind of thing. That's a great place to actually seed the content with some second or third tier keywords or even your primary keywords. And if you do that, you'll see your images surface with a bit of luck. You always need a bit of luck in life folks. With a bit of luck, you'll see your images surface nicely in the Google images. And that's going to be a real second opportunity to have great traffic.

Alina Ghost

Yeah. I've seen that before from renaming before you upload to optimizing all tags to compression. There's so much that can be done with images that people just forget about or deprioritize because they don't think it's important, but actually, because the way we consume things is becoming a lot more visual is definitely something to think about. And it's definitely a gap in the market there that people aren't using that opportunity for. So yeah. No, thank you very much for that. Anybody else?

Izabela Wisniewska

I'll jump in.

Lidia Infante

Yeah.

Izabela Wisniewska

Sorry. We'll have you there.

Lidia Infante

Okay. We were talking about the basics, right? And we were talking about... Well, I was talking about how the legs of SEO or content tech and of paid. So we could talk about it as authority. I would say that these are not three equal legs that are just sitting next to each other. A good understanding of SEO is understanding that the tech SEO enables users and search engines to find the content and the authority side is there to validate somewhat the content and then link you as a source. So it comes down to content, but it cannot be accessed without tech and it will not rank without authority. So I think it's something that's worth mentioning. It's not just three separate legs. The three of them are working towards getting content in front of users. And there is a goal to that as well. So if I believe, and this is controversial, not everybody agrees that our jobs as SEOs go beyond when the users click on your site, it's who's clicking? Are they finding what they want? And are they having a satisfying experience? So.

Alina Ghost

Oh, yeah, no. So conversion data is definitely being seen even if it's not been validated as a ranking factor. So yeah, no, I can definitely see where you're coming from. And as you say, it's like the whole area is working together. It's not just about the one area that you need to focus on, actually. It's just what you're doing by stepping back and evaluating is actually making sure that you're focusing on the things that you are missing out on. Because if you are already strong in the one side, why are you focusing on that still? So that's really cool. Yeah. Izzy, were you going to say something?

Izabela Wisniewska

Yes. I was going to say something, but I just wanted to build that on what Lidia said, because I think it's incredibly important and I hundred percent agree. And just to build up on it, I think it's also basic to do. It's not so much about the website, but it's about your team. So we already know that it all works together. Yeah. And we've got digital PR working together with SEO and we've got tech and development working for it as well. And I just think it's super important to educate your team, especially in agencies, but also in in-house, if you've got a wider team to get them to understand the overall idea and overall picture, because I've seen so many times that we, and I totally understand it's not everyone, but I've seen so many times that we had, for example, people working in digital PR in agencies that didn't understand completely what do we do with this SEO?

And then it created so many issues that could have been... It could not have happened. We could prevent it only if everyone understood the bigger picture and the actual goal, how does it all work together? So I'm totally not saying make everyone expecting everything, because that just doesn't happen. But if, let's say, if you work in an SEO agency and you do digital PR, make sure that your PR team understands the overall context and your SEO team understands the overall context so they can work together, they can communicate and they can just take it further altogether. Yeah. So that would be the building up on what Lidia said. And also what you said, Alina with crawling and content. I think they're both super important. And I think once you crawl enough, then you will see that the issues that are coming up and definitely not... Don't crawl just for crawling, get to fix the issues that are coming up.

And what I've seen is the most neglected these days. And I hope maybe it was just my experience. I really hope it was, but I've seen that the absolute basics of the basics of on page, even being no title tax optimized, everything too long, everything not right in the place, out tax I think are completely forgotten. People just forgot they exist. Titles of images, even favor. Yeah. And these are the great tips that if we did that, then all our new shiny stuff I'm sure they would really work a lot better.

Alina Ghost

Amazing. So thanks very much for that. I guess I can see David coming back on-

David Bain

We have time for one more tip on this section. So if any last one person was to jump in. Who's the last tip?

Andrew Cock-Starkey

I'll go. So I want to tie it back to something that you said at the end of the book, David. So your little final thoughts about just start somewhere and it can feel quite overwhelming. I know some of the people on this call are super expert and some of them are super novice. And some of the stuff that we were talking about, like Nick talking about things on the edge and you're thinking, geez, I haven't even got enough used to the normal web yet. I can't get to the edge yet. And then we're talking about some of the basic. It can feel really overwhelming. So if you just start somewhere, but often the best place to start is to have a bit of a think before you start running off. So there is a topic in the book here that Maria covered about having topic clusters.

So just having just some kind of strategy, rather than just throwing content out there and seeing what sticks. Have a little bit of a think about, okay, where do we want to be authoritative? We want to be authoritative in the shoe space or in the shoe laces or iPads or whatever it is that your niche is. Have a little bit of focus to this and then just start somewhere and that'll make a massive difference.

Alina Ghost

Shoe laces sound fun.

Andrew Cock-Starkey

I don't know who sells shoe laces. That was a terrible example.

Alina Ghost

No, amazing. No, thanks very much. And just wanted to say thank you to everybody and for having me too.

David Bain

Oh, thank you so much. Look, Alina, Sante, Emily, Andrew, Rejoice, Nick, Izzy, Lidia, Billie. Thank you so much for being a part of this. Absolutely wonderful to have your thoughts here. You demonstrated today why you were part of it. Certainly, among the world leading SEOs, wonderful content there as well. We're going to have another panel coming up just a second so don't go anywhere at all. I just say Claire asked, is there a write up summary of the tips. It's in the book. Nick's sharing it there as well. So that's where you can get a summary of the tips of everything.

There will be a verbatim summary of everything shared within the live stream here as well, but all the core tips of everyone's in the book there. So that's the best place to get it. Alina, thanks so much for hosting this panel. Much appreciated and thanks everyone again. Absolutely superb. So just as we're going to the next section, I'm going to play a tip by Barry Schwartz. That's included in the book as well. This is a section of the video here as well. Just while I go and get everyone for the second panel.

Barry Schwartz

It's my number one SEO tip for 2022 and beyond. I think it's the, if you can make something that a search engine representative that writes the algorithm or part of the algorithm team notices that this website should be ranking for X, Y, and Z in Google or whatever search engine they're managing and they see it's not ranking for that term, and they're embarrassed by it, I think that's the goal. That's the number one goal for any SEO or any site owner is to make a website where Google or other search engines would be embarrassed not to rank it for the relevant keywords.

David Bain

So what would make a Google engineer embarrassed that your site isn't ranking Number 1 for relevant terms? Is it typical SEO, on onsite SEO, contents, relevance?

Barry Schwartz

No, it's not even thinking about SEO. You could build a website any way you want. Something that you think your users would find really, really valuable and Google is going to, or search engines are going to want to go ahead and just rank it. Even if it's like, back in the old days, a flash website that couldn't be indexed. I don't think you should really think about, at least the fundamentals when you build your website and you build your business, you should be thinking about what am I marketing or selling or putting up on my domain name that is useful for the user that wants to read it and more useful than any of my competitors.

It's kind of thinking like the way Apple releases their products. They put it in really, see behind me, all these boxes. They put it in really, really nice boxes, because it represents something that is really, really valuable to the company and the brand. And you want to go ahead and make sure to package your website and your content, whatever you're doing in a way that represents the highest level of quality possible for that, whatever that website is.

David Bain

Okay. So are you saying that in the future, perhaps keywords, perhaps standard optimization of things like titles or headings actually won't be that important? And it's all about thinking about the user?

Barry Schwartz

Again, if you look at the progression that Google has been making with MUM and RankBrain and Bert and Awe and passive ranking and all these different types of algorithms and AI and machine learning they've been deploying is about trying to find content that isn't optimized, that SEOs aren't having their hands on and trying to kind of convince Google that this is the best type of content because Google wants to find truly what the best type of content is. And not every website that's published every single day is thinking about SEO or even know about search engines. They just want to produce the best type of information for the users. And that's why Google's and other search engines are building all this technology just to find that type of content, even if it isn't optimized.

David Bain

Got you. Okay. So you say to stay ahead of the competition, does that mean that you still do competitor analysis and benchmarking about how you're doing and what you're doing versus the competition?

Barry Schwartz

Yeah, you should definitely look at your competitors. I don't think you should be bogged down on what they are doing in an obsessed way, like a daily basis or in a monthly basis. When I build products, I think about the user. I just want to make sure... I don't want what my competitors are doing to kind of say, oh, they're doing it this way, so I need to do it that way also. It's not always the case. You need to think outside the box, think differently as Apple would say or whatever it might be and come up with a new solution in terms of how you can actually help your customers. I built many software applications, many apps, many different things over the years. And of course we look at our competitors in terms of what their customers are and what they're looking for, but really not to kind of replicate what they're doing in any way. It's more about finding a new approach to what they're doing.

David Bain

So you say think of the user, how do you go about defining who the user is? Do you do online research? Do you do some kind of focus group? Do you do identifying of personas? How do you actually build your site for the user?

Barry Schwartz

So the way I've been approaching it and not every business does this is usually the best businesses, the best products that come out are solving a need for the founder of the company. So if I need something and I don't have it, or I know there's tools out there that do it this way, but I really hate the way they do it, if I could build something for me that I think is really, really great and then build it for other people who would want it, that's how the best products are built. Building a solution that you find there's some type of gap that you could fill and thinking about it in terms of maybe if I'm the user I want it this way.

And I don't think you need to do much market research. I think you just have to have a passion for it. I know there's books and stuff about different companies being built based off of that. Stripe was one example of a company... Or Square maybe, Square was a company that was built based off of that. A lot of companies were built based off of that. It's like, I need a credit card machine that I can carry around with me that I can plug into my phone and swipe it, simple concepts, but things like that.

David Bain

So there we go with that, is a small section of Barry's tips from SEO 2022. If you want to listen to the tip, the videos are available on the Majestic YouTube channel, don't stop just now. Actually go and watch it because you're watching this live hopefully as well. You can of course read it in the book. Just search Amazon for that. But let's get on to the section two discussion. So the section two of the book was called plan, but we're going to have a chat with eight, I think top SEOs from the book on this particular section and the host for this is a gentleman who gives every one of his guests, a musical introduction. So, I'm looking forward to that one. He is the founder of the brands app optimization platform, Kalicube, and his tip for SEO in 2022 was to educate Google about your brands.

Welcome Jason Barnard. Where's Jason gone? Has Jason disappeared? He was here a second go. Oh, no. Okay. Are we going to have to keep with... I think he's too scared there. Did I kick him off? Maybe I kicked him off. Maybe I'll have to start to have... Crystal's laughing there at the background. How are you doing Crystal?

Crystal Carter

I'm good. How are you?

David Bain

Yeah, I'm very, very good. Thank you. Feel free to unmute yourself everyone. You are having a discussion here and it looks like you've all got headphones on, which is great. I'm sure Jason will be back in a second here, but we can keep the discussion going anyway. So Jason's going to hopefully host this if he's back in a second. Maybe he's having meter issues with the internet, a bit of a storm going at the moment, but obviously. There we go. Jason appeared in the background there as all. I didn't want to completely take his place, but hey, Jason. How are you doing?

Jason Barnard

I'm fine. Thank you very much. I do apologize. Completely my fault, not stream yards fault at all.

David Bain

I think you got a little scared because I said the intro. I don't know if you heard that you were going to sing an introduction song to everyone. So I was really looking forward to hearing that.

Jason Barnard

Yeah, no problem at all. (singing).

David Bain

And now we've lost all our viewers. No. Jason's a wonderful presenter of his own podcast and sings in an intro to absolutely everyone. So you've got check that one out as well. I love the way you do that, Jason. So Jason's just going to host this discussion. I've introduced you in telling everyone that you're from Kalicube, Jason. I would just say briefly in this section, Jason's joined by Helen, Joy, Motoko, Natalie, Olga, Omi, Luke, and Crystal. So I'll leave with Jason in charge and get everyone to introduce themselves and share their own tips and just chat about the book in general. Shall I just pass over to you, Mr. Barnard?

Jason Barnard

Yeah. Thank you very much, David. Absolutely delightful. And thank you for forcing me to sing. I love singing when I'm allowed to, but sometimes I think it might annoy people so I try not to do it too often. Joy, I know you've heard me sing. You've been on my show. Absolutely lovely to see you all here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go round the screen in the order that I see you because otherwise I'm going to get lost and forget. And a lot of you, I haven't actually met. I've had Luke on my show, I've met you before. Olga, Motoko, Crystal, Helen, we've met, and Natalie, Natalie, I don't know you. Lovely to meet you all.

Crystal Carter

Hi there. Nice to meet you as well.

Olga Zarzeczna

Nice to meet you.

Jason Barnard

Thank you for coming along. This is going to be great. Now what I've calculated with my little brain is that if we've got about an hour before. If we've got an hour, we've got nine people, somebody else who's going to join us Omi. If he joins us, that's about five minutes each with a decent 10, 15 minute discussion at the end. So that's what we're going to try and keep it to. And I would like to start with Joy because you're top left for me. So if we can start with you. Can you yourself? Oh, David's just moved me. Now, I don't know where anybody is anymore. That was cruel David.

Crystal Carter

So cruel.

Jason Barnard

Oh, no. Right. We'll start with Joy who is next to me, literally. This is cool. No, you're not sitting next to me. Can you introduce yourself? I know you but maybe some people don't.

Joyanne Hawkins

Yeah. So my name's Joy. I live over in Canada. So across the ocean from quite a few of you. I run a local search agency called Sterling Sky. So we specialize in local SEO, help a lot of small business types like lawyers, doctors, realtors, things like that.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant. And what was your super-duper SEO tip for 2022 in the book. Can you briefly describe that and then tell us how it fits into the overall book, which basically is overall SEO strategy.

Joyanne Hawkins

Sure. Yeah. My tip was around images. So I think it's common for people in our space, where we're working, we're always looking at computers, right? I don't generally pull out my phone and then look to see how things look on my phone. I'm always staring at my computer screen when I'm talking to clients and stuff. So one of the things I think that people miss a lot is how different things look on mobile compared to desktop. And one of those things would be images. So we did a bunch of testing last year or this year I should say, around images and noticed that a lot of search queries will show images right in the search results, along with the website, but some queries show them and some don't. So I think I gave an example of like car accident attorney in a city in Florida would show a photo, but when you remove with the Florida off the end and just put like car accident attorney, and then the city, there was no photo. So it's kind of interesting to see that like some search results that look very similar, some show photos and some don't. So we were kind of like looking to see how do you get these photos and what do you do? And it, it turns out it's actually a lot simpler than originally. We thought it was going to be some like Schema markup maybe, or something like that it's really to do is just placement of your photos and the size of them.

So essentially you want to have a square photo on all the major pages of your site, the pages that are what we call the money pages, the ones that actually bring in conversions so that you're eligible to show a photo. It needs to be square and it needs to be close to the top of the page. So usually when Google's kind of picking them, they scan top to bottom left to, right. So any photo that you have higher up on the page will get precedence.

So we had clients where we did that. We like moved around photos just to see if we could manipulate which one Google picked and that worked. And then I tweeted something yesterday... It was really timely. Actually. I've been seeing more and more of these on desktop, so Google is testing that right now. Like not everybody can see it, but a couple people responded to me on Twitter and they were actually able to replicate what I was seeing on desktop. So I kind of hope it rolls out on desktop cause it's going to make even a more of a push for reason for people to kind of want to pay attention to it. But huge missed opportunity that I see a lot of big brands not even doing which kind of interesting.

Jason Barnard

Yeah, no. And I think multiple points there, the great point is we don't look at mobile enough every time I do it. I'm always surprised. You've helped me to do that with your kind of feedback that you gave me on the show. Also, the fact that we don't need technical implementation for these images to appear. I love that. I love the way that you, you guys come up with these great tips and tricks that are simple for everybody, which is I think part and parcel of your job as a local SEO consultant is a lot of your clients don't really know the technical stuff. And the third point is the desktop. I'm seeing it more and more in brand search and I think that's really exciting. And if people aren't doing the images now that's should certainly start. That absolutely wonderful. Second was whose other tip in the book did you think was particularly relevant and helpful without insulting any of the other people? Because they were all wonderful.

Joyanne Hawkins

Oh, I know. I actually just got the book like a day or two ago in the mail. So I guess shipping to Canada was probably somewhat delayed. I haven't read it yet, but I'm taking it with me on vacation next week. So I'm not sure Barry's was really great that I just heard a few minutes ago.

Jason Barnard

Right. Okay. Brilliant. And then, well, in that case, what we'll do is move on to, if you had a second tip, because you were supposed to give your number one tip, what would your number two tip have been, had David been generous enough to give you two pages in the book instead of one?

Joyanne Hawkins

Ooh, that's a tough one. Yeah. I mean, I think as far as I guess I'll stick to local SEO. I know a lot of people aren't necessarily in that industry, but in the field I work in, the local pack results are where it's at. So a lot of our clients get way more leads from Google My Business, or now it's the Google Business Profile. So kind of paying attention to that, understanding where those local packs show up, how you can get in them is really key. And we're seeing like a lot of testing that Google is doing there are as well where they are expanding it, making it bigger, like it covers the entire screen. So just kind of ties into my first one, always look at the search results, but understanding like where the look pack results are showing up and how you can get in there and how that differs from organic. That's what I would pay attention to.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant. I think that's what Omi was going to say if he had been here is look at the search results and use that as your research tool. It's your best SEO tool. That's what I remember vaguely from kind of the overall point. I hope he will join us so he can say it much better than I just did. And just one last, really quick point, what's your opinion or your take on the change of name from Google My Business to the Google Business Profile. I think that's intriguing.

Joyanne Hawkins

Yeah. Like it's really not a big deal. I know, like Omi was kind of talked about a lot, because it's like, Ooh news. I'm like really? They, they changed their name every like five years or so. So like if you've been in the space for a long time, you'll know like it used to be Google maps, then Google places, then Google plus local and then it went to GMB and now it's GBP, which is the horrible acronym. So yeah, like it's really, there's nothing different. Just Google thinks it's a better name. And now I have about 500 blog posts update. So that is annoying.

Jason Barnard

Very annoying. Yeah. I mean, so what you're telling me at least is I've been overthinking this and over educating myself and what no over intellectualizing about it. And I think that's certainly a failure that I have a lot is I overthink a probably isn't worth a lot of the effort I put into it. Thank you very much Joy. That was absolutely delightful as always incredibly informative. We're going to move on to Crystal who I have never met, I believe. And if I have, I apologize because that would be very rude. If you could unmute yourself, then we, you can introduce yourself because I can't shamefully.

Crystal Carter

I am so surprised that you don't remember that amazing weekend we had in Saint-Tropez. It was fantastic. And it meant a lot to me. And it seems like, no, I'm kidding. Yes. I'm Crystal. I am a Senior Digital Strategist at Optix Solutions. I've never been to Saint-Tropez. In my section I talked a lot about Schema markup because I love Schema markup. It's my favorite thing, which says a lot about my spare time. But there we go. And yeah, I really enjoyed speaking to David about all of it and, and about why it's important now and important in the future.

Jason Barnard

Right? So what was your tip in more detail? And that weekend in Saint-Tropez will probably never happen, but we might meet up someday in Saint-Trope for other reasons.

Crystal Carter

Okay. So, yeah. I think what I was talking about mostly was how investing in Schema markup gives you an opportunity to sort of build resilience for changes that happen in Google. So a lot of the changes to the search results in order to be more, more applicable for or more useful for mobile users. Are based or influenced or supported by Schema markup and structured data on websites. And so my tip is that it's worth if you have Schema markup or some structured data on your site, and I've been doing this for a few people who have a lot of micro data already in place for a lot of their elements on the site and a lot of their core pages is to go back in and double check them.

So one thing that happened, I think between the time that we filmed it and now, Google they refined a few of their definitions. So brand changed slightly. And for reviews, they changed it slightly from, from it being name to sort of being person. And there's a few different things that have been refined and tweaked. So things that were perfectly valid a few months ago are now things that are getting a little rewarding. And think so even if you have stuff already, it allows you to, to sort of get more ahead if you're, if you're keeping up to date with all of that stuff. Also, it's sometimes the case that existing Schema will suddenly become part of rich results. So to my mind it's worth investing, templatizing structured data Scheme markup into your pages where possible. And so that when those rich results show up on the search you're already ready and you don't have to catch up.

Jason Barnard

Right. And one thing that stands out from what you just said is that the rich results aren't the reason you do Schema markup. And yet a lot of people are saying, oh, I'm doing Schema markup because I want the rich results and that's my reward. But in fact, can you just really quickly go into more detail about the approach? Shouldn't so much be rich results, as I understand it should be more foundational.

Crystal Carter

I think it should be a bit of both. Is that I would say. So I think that I think rich results, I think can definitely drive the prioritization of Schema markup. So, so if there are certain verticals where you absolutely need to have, structured data in order to be in order to be visible. If you're in the recruitment sector and you don't have structured data built into your job templates, then you're just not going to show on Google for jobs and what are you doing? So there's a few verticals where you have to do that. And if you don't do that, then you won't show on page one or even page two, because page two's taken up with people also ask. So that's really important, but from a foundational point of view, I think that Schema markup and structured data, and the way that Schema.org structure data gives you a lot of good clues for ways that you should structure your website and the kind of information that you should have available.

So they've got lots of different types and lots of different properties that you should look at. And so for instance and I think... I mean, just talking about jobs, it says who is the employer? When was it posted? When does it expire? What is the salary? There's lots of information that is really useful. That's required for certain Schema and that's good practice on your website anyway. Its good practice to have an author for your blogs. Its good practice to have a description for your videos. These are all good things that, that can lead your SEO now and in the future.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant Stuff. Okay. And what was your favorite second tip that isn't yours in the book?

Crystal Carter

I mean I've just got the book last night. It just very exciting and I think that there's a lot of good tick tips across the board. So I'm quite keen to hear more from Luke on what he's been talking about with regards to taxonomy, because I'm a big fan of that. And I'm quite interested to hear, I was interested to hear more about what Barry was saying about User intent and User-focus and that sort of thing. But yeah, the book fantastic and I'm really looking forward to getting into it in a bit more detail.

Jason Barnard

Absolutely brilliant. So Luke gets the voting from what I understood there. And if you could have a second tip really quickly, what would your second tip be? Because, David only allowed us to have one each second tip outside Schema.

Crystal Carter

Oh, outside of schema. I would say like the dark horse that people tend to overlook is security. I'm talking about this in a talk coming forward. But a lot of times people think that security is just getting an SSL and we're done and that's good, but there's a lot of other things that you can do to sort of streamline their security and Google you know, that's an established ranking factor. That's not a sort of, oh is it is in it? Oh maybe. Oh, I'm not sure it absolutely is a ranking factor.

And also its speeds up your site. So having really good security also makes your site really, really fast because they don't have to check your... All the different servers have to sort of check their paperwork and who are you? And what's all this? You just go straight through. It's like the express pass at the border check in or whatever it is. And so I think that anyone who's overlooking that and isn't going back over, especially with things like HTTP/2 and that sort of thing. Being better crawled by Google within this sort of recent months and lots of other things about page speed. There is a load of core web vitals elements that you can, that you can address via updating your server security. So yeah.

Jason Barnard

So great security. Good for you. Good for your clients. Good for Google. A win all round. Everybody's happy. Thank you very much, Crystal. That was absolutely brilliant. I love Schema markup too. So I'm your number one new best fan of today. And let's move on to Olga. I thought you had horns on your head when I first looked at you, but it's not, is it? It's your chair?

Olga Zarzeczna

Yeah.

Jason Barnard

Right. Lovely chair.

Olga Zarzeczna

Thanks.

Jason Barnard

Oh, it's a throne. I'm sorry. Could you introduce yourself Olga? Lovely to meet you.

Olga Zarzeczna

Sure, lovely to meet you. So my name is Olga. I come from Poland. I have my own small SEO consulting agency called SEO Sly. In addition to that, I am an SEO director at Market JD a Chicago based company where we mostly work with lawyers in the US. So this is a very interesting piece of SEO cake. So my number one tip for 2022 was to always start any SEO analysis, any technical SEO audit with diving deep into what's in Google Search Console, analyzing all the reports you have there because sometimes what you find there will completely change the direction in which you want to kind of go what you want to do with the site. And with that information right away, your analysis and the things you can recommend doing will be way more powerful.

And I even have a recent example. For example, if you want to do a migration, you always have to find a site for access to GSC. Because for, for example, in the case of a very huge website store that has millions of pages or thousands of pages before you even start to create this migration kind of map, you may for example, discover that 50% of those pages aren't even indexed and which you can see exactly in GSC. And this will like totally change how you will go about the migration in that case, for example. So that's my tip.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant, wonderful stuff. That's amazing that's a really good tip. I think Search Console, like the SERP is overlooked as a SEO tool. I'm a big fan of search console. I'm a big fan of local business. I'm a big fan of Scheme markup. I'm a big fan of everything. So this is really easy. What was your favorite other tip in the book?

Olga Zarzeczna

:

So I got the book yesterday. I tried to kind of... I didn't manage to read all of it and it's really hard to say just one tip, which I like the most, but I would say what I liked a lot was that tip about rubbish in rubbish out from Philly. It was about paying attention to what you feed into Google algorithms. If you kind of want to care about the outcome, what Google will be showing your site. This is kind of a technical SEO tape. And I am biased here because I love technical SEO. So I like that one too, but I haven't read the entire book. So it's hard to say just that other tips, aren't that important? I think all of them are equally important and kind of my second tip. If, if I can share it here would be that everyone should make it their kind of target goal to read the entire book from cover to cover by end of 2021.

Jason Barnard

Right. And obviously we have the problem. Thank you. That's absolutely brilliant. Is that everybody got the book yesterday. So nobody's been able to read the whole thing because it's so packed with great information. You can't read it in just an evening, however much you might want to, unless you stay up all night, maybe which you didn't Olga. But from my perspective, that was absolutely brilliant. That was are great tips. And I do love the second one because it makes so much sense. That's why we're all here. Thank you Olga. Now to Luke.

Luke Carthy

All right, mate. Hows it going? Yeah, I'm good pal. I'm really good.

Jason Barnard

The E-commerce specialist. Super smart. Yeah. I've been on the show. I know more about you than perhaps. I thought I would, by this time of my life...

Luke Carthy

We have been to Saint-Tropez. I love that. Brilliant.

Jason Barnard

Can you share who you are and what your tip was.

Luke Carthy

Yes, I will. But before I do that secrets out clearly myself and Natalie, we share an office cause we live in exactly the same roof. Its uncanny, I've never seen anyone on the internet who occupies a space that looks quite similar to mine. And it's crazy. I keep like turning around and thinking where is Natalie? Anyway, my tip, you don't have where I, where I work year after the information I've put in the book. So for me, it was all about maximizing the opportunities through category pages or references PLPs going forward. Because, it's just easier to spit that out. But really, as we know, everything in the world of, of SEO normally starts with keyword research. If you're looking in, in analysis and it's really important to understand how people search and behave before you start to build your categories, your parent, your child, your taxonomy, whatever you want to call it.

And the way I like to address it is almost like walking into a supermarket. You know, if you had really convoluted and vague names down the aisles, one, it's going to really annoy you and two you've got a lot less chance of going down the aisle to find what you're looking for. So for example, rather than just saying eggs and baking supplies, you had something like, I don't know something completely vague that I'm not creative enough to think of on the spot. You'd be in a situation where people wouldn't go down that particular aisle. So it's all about maximizing your opportunities. Now, of course your category pages, typically in most cases, when it comes to E-commerce sites attracts the most amount of traffic with the exception of your homepage and maybe a handful of products, depending on how many products you have. So it's really important to maximize those opportunities.

Taking it a step further, it's also seasoning that if you like, because I've got something in the slow cooker and it smells incredible. So I just keep thinking about food. What I will say is seasoning that with faceted navigation. So if you are in an environment where you sell clothes in various colors, various cuts, so jeans with boot cut or skinny jeans, that sort of thing, having a fasted navigation that allows you to index and selectively index, should I say not to cause bloat certain additions to categories. You can really start to optimize for Long-tail keywords and anyone that's starting out in the world of E-commerce it's all about Long-tail or to be honest SEO in general, it's always about looking after the Long-tail keywords and as we know, which is the worst kept secret in the world of SEO. Long-tail converts better and never listen to zero queries that you find in your research, even queries with zero searches normally have traffic somewhere along the lines. So that was my tip, is really jumping into the meats of category restructure in E-Commerce and optimizing that experience.

Jason Barnard

Oh absolutely brilliant categorization and Ontologies that's delightful and wonderful and fits well into Schema market as well, because that's a great way to express the Ontologies and the categorization. So Luke, have you had time to read the book? I'm going to stop asking the question until somebody tells me I've read book analyzed it here's my best favorite second tip.

Luke Carthy

A bit. I have. But what I will say is my kids fan-girled a little bit. Cause I saw my name on the back of the book. I'm like, oh dad, look at you. You're famous. I'm like, hold on kids, queue up to get my signature in a minute. But it was, it was, it was great. I think for me the number one tip that I took away from it was Isabella's actually, I'm slightly biased, but she's a good friend of mine. We used to work together some years back, but it was all about the basics. And I think, we all go after the new and shiny, whether it's SEO, whether it's technology, whatever it is, relationships, whatever it is. We always think about the new and shiny stuff. But if you get your foundations wrong, just like if you're building something at Lego, it's going to be a problem.

You're going to, you got to come up against it at some point. So I think, whether we are talking about categories, whether we are talking about, Crystal and schema and what she's up to. GSC really is important to just focus on the core foundations, build it properly first time, if you can. And I understand it's very easy to say and you bringing context of platforms and CMSs and politics and bureaucracy and all that sort of good stuff. But really, if you focus on the basics, you'll be rewarded and it'll paint dividends later on down the line. And I think that's quite often missed. And really underappreciated. So I think Isabelle and nailed that. And I'm really happy you put that at the front of the book because it meant that was the first tip I read. And I think it's probably one of the most profound in the book. So yeah. I Love that.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant. Wonderful. And what would your second tip be? What was the tip you almost put in the book, but you didn't?

Luke Carthy

It's actually not really an SEO one to be honest, which probably would've meant I wouldn't have made the book anyway, to be honest. But what I will say is it's about payments and just making it as easy as possible for customers to pay whether it's E-commerce or not. So if you're a globally renowned brand who sells products or services or digital downloads all over the world, then surely offer their native payment options in their currencies. Not everyone pays around the world with visa of MasterCard, right? I mean, yes, they're massively popular in Europe and, and the Western world, but in China, other parts of the world in South Africa, there's many different ways to pay. So just make it easy.

Just imagine going to a supermarket again. I know I keep using that as an analogy, but I really do need to go shopping later on, but imagine a situation where he walked into a supermarket and the only thing you can do is pay by cash. It would be infuriating. You just wouldn't go. So sales checkout, I guess there's other ways in which you can pay there is till there's happy people, we're happy to serve you cash card, blah, blah, blah, Contactless, Apple pay. Make it as easy as possible for people to hand over their bloody money. And I'll be honest with you so many clients make that mistake. Goes back to fundamentals again, really. But yeah, that would've been my second tip, which isn't really SEO at all.

Jason Barnard

But it helps every business and businesses do SEOs to drive sales and that helps sales. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Luke. Helen, delightful to see you again.

Helen Pollitt

Hello.

Jason Barnard

I know you, but people in the audience don't can you introduce yourself?

Helen Pollitt

I can indeed. I just wanted to point out that my relationship with Jason actually crosses different countries. I think we met first in London and then again in Paris. So I think I'm winning so far. But other than that, my name is Helen. I'm an SEO manager at iTech Media.

Jason Barnard

Wonderful. And you love your job in SEO and you had a great tip and I read your tip. So I actually know what you're going to say.

Helen Pollitt

Oh good. Do you want to summarize it or should I?

Jason Barnard

It would be taking the glory away from you. Wouldn't it?

Helen Pollitt

Indeed, so my tip was all around intent mapping specifically about being really granular with your intent mapping for your core pages on your website. And by intent mapping I mean making sure you really understand what a user is looking to do when they land on your landing page. For me, the user journey starts at the search. So you want to make sure that you are understanding why someone is searching for something, what they intend to get as an output of that search and make making sure that when they land on your webpage, that's exactly what they get. And for me, I feel like as SEOs, we often do this the wrong way around. So we are looking very much for chasing the keyword and making sure that we are ranking. Whereas actually we want to make sure that we are fulfilling a user's needs and off the back of that because Google is getting ever so smart.

We should be ranking for those keywords anyway, but really we need to be focusing on how are we fulfilling a user's needs when they land on our landing pages. So that could be what type of content are we presenting them with? How is that content displayed? What else are we sign posting from the content they'll actually drive them deeper into the website and intent mapping really should dictate everything about a page. We need to stop trying to silo SEO offers this kind of traffic generating marketing channel only, and start looking at it as a more holistic piece of the user journey.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant. So kind of mapping into Luke as well, is that SEO plays into everything else and everything else presume plays into SEO. That's absolutely wonderful. Did you, did you have time to read the Book?

Helen Pollitt

I absolutely did. I read some of it. I promise. I read quite a bit.

Jason Barnard

You a very good liar. I actually thought you had.

Helen Pollitt

Sorry. No, I did read quite a bit of it. My favorite tip it's one that actually, I wish I'd have come up with, but it was aside from word remit, talking about training up the next generation. And I think that's really key because we need more people to, to understand what SEO is. We need more people to be coming through the ranks because we need fresh perspectives. I think as people that have been in the industry for quite a while, get a bit fixed in our ways and we stop looking at actually ways to innovate. So training of that next generation is really key. So I was really pleased to see that tip from Si in there.

Jason Barnard

That's absolutely brilliant. Yeah. Okay. And what was the secret tip you didn't put in that you can now share or perhaps it's not the secret.

Helen Pollitt

It's quite similar to Si's actually. It's not necessarily strictly about SEO, but it's more about making your life easier by training up other people. So for whatever type of organization that you are in or whether you are a, a consultant who actually goes into a different organizations, it's about training up people in SEO so that they understand more about what you are getting at or are getting at it. So if you need to be speaking to content writers about SEO so that they are writing content SEO first with that mindset, or you're talking to your product managers and making sure that they are really promoting their products with an SEO first mindset, train up your developers so that when you ask them about canonical tags, they know what you're talking about and you don't have to go through that every single time. It's about making sure that you are positioning SEO as being so crucial and so important to a company that everyone is asking you for an opinion on SEO so that they can get better at their jobs. So it's that training people up, making sure that you are an advocate and a champion of SEO and trying to get your business to think SEO first.

Jason Barnard

Oh, absolutely brilliant. That was genius Helen. Thank you very much. Now I'm going to be really rude, Natalie and Motoko, I'm going to cut in and give my parts of the book because it segues nicely from what Helen just said all about education, but I'm saying educate Google. Google is a child. It needs, it wants to understand the world. It doesn't have the information or at least it doesn't have the information in a way organized in a way that it can actually truly understand and be confident in that understanding. And our role as responsible adults in the room is to educate Google about who we are, what we do and who our audience is. Because once it's understood that it can start mapping its users' needs, its users' intent to what we actually have to offer genuinely have to offer. And then I can move into my favorite tip from the book of was Lily Ray, because she talks about E-A-T because from an E-A-T perspective, if Google cannot and who you are, it cannot start to apply the signals of E-A-T to you.

So you will not benefit from them. So you really need to educate Google and educating Google. Google has... It's a child, it's got a plate and it's a broken plate. And it's trying to put it all back together again, from the fragmented information, it finds around the web. Now what it does is it puts it together and it thinks, okay, that's probably true like a child, but it's not sure on your entity home, which is the about page on your own website. You provide it with the complete puzzle, with the plate, all put back together again, and then the child can compare its version to your version and say, yes, I was right. And I can be confident in that understanding because it's not just understand. It's confidence in that understanding for this child that is Google.

And the other aspect is sometimes the pieces of the plate don't fit in because they're the wrong shape. You need to go and fit them together, file them down to make them all fit together. So the child has the perfect plate, and that means correcting all the corroborative information about your entity, yourself, your company, whatever it might be all around the web. So that when Google does try to put that plate together, it all fits perfectly matches your plate. The Google child has understood confident in understanding, and it can start to use you to satisfy its users when they express a need a problem or a question. There go, that was really simple. Now on Natalie, who I haven't met either. I do love your rooftop room. I like it more than Luke's, even though they're exactly the same.

Natalie Arney

Thank you. Yeah, I'm not unfortunately, in the same room as Luke, I'm down here in stormy Brighton. I'm Natalie Arney or Nat as most people know me as. I am an SEO consultant. Yeah. Based here in Brighton, I work with a lot of kind of purpose driven brands and do a lot of interesting and fun things with them. My tip was to don't forget the basics, but also make sure that you are aware of the kind of the dangers, the lurking dangers of the growth of the passion of JavaScript, that more and more site owners, more and more developers get more and more excited about JavaScript as the years go on. And as SEOs, what we seem to find is that it builds more and more barriers.

And it's just making sure that we work together with developers so that they know and understand the implications that things like JavaScript can offer us. We don't need to obviously know how know and understand how to program it ourselves. But what we need to know is what is the impact of a certain piece of script? Is it blocking rendering is it's stopping a certain piece of content from actually being crawled, indexed, ranked. That's what we need to understand alongside obviously yeah. The basics. I think so many people kind of get tied in with lots of different trendy things. Whereas everyone here is kind of, we are all looking at those, the solid foundations of SEO and thinking about the future and always remembering that these certain things, these certain goal posts and fence, bring fencing. It can be, it can be free to think about all the new and exciting things that are coming up, but at the same time, it's, it's, it's thinking about those, those constant standards that are there in those quality rating scores and guides and everything else that are there year in year out, that we are so used to seeing.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant. That's a, a brilliant tip. And one thing I think we often fail to realize is pretty much every site in the world use is some amount of JavaScript. So it is everybody's problem isn't?

Natalie Arney

Definitely, definitely. And then obviously as you go further and further into a website and analyze it further, it starts popping up even more.

Jason Barnard

Ooh, JavaScript. We all have to learn it tomorrow. Could you give us what your favorite other tip in the book was?

Natalie Arney

Yeah, definitely. So my other favorite tip, I haven't read the whole book as most us haven't, there's so many after flipping through, but one of my favorites ones, and I think it's so important and it's going to be even more important, not just for SEOs, but also on a legal side is don't leave accessibility out of your SEO strategy. And that's from Billie Hyde. She was featured on Crawling Mondays, talking it in a lot more detail. So I really recommend watching that because it was brilliant.

But yeah, I think it's going to be more and more into the digital civil rights side of things. Obviously from a legal standpoint, have it, every country has, or most countries at least have the laws protecting disabled people. And as the internet becomes a more standard, if it's going to be more standard than what it is now, giving people global, giving people the access around the world to that information, to our clients and our own websites, rather than just taking them for granted. We need to know and understand that the way that we access that information, like how we access the information or user access is the information versus Google and other search engines. We need to have think about people that are using things like screen readers, those people who are using so many different tools to access that same content and that same information and those barriers that they're facing.

Jason Barnard

Right. Yeah. Alt tags, make me just think how frustrating it must be, if you're using a screen reader to hear that repetition of awful keywords stuffing that people think SEOs often think that people don't see or hear. But you have to listen to it worse than it, worse than anything else I can think of. What was your secret tip that you didn't give in the book that you've been holding back on as for, with, as it were?

Natalie Arney

I think it probably don't sweat the small stuff. I think again, a lot of people get caught up into little things. I think focus on what makes the impact and then work the way down. So don't be afraid of prioritizing your work and taking command with regards to prioritization. So whether you're working with the developer and you are explaining them why a certain element would take priority in a, say, a ticket queue, that's where you really need to be focusing rather than spending lots of time and effort on things that might not have that impact.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant. Wonderfully pragmatic. I love all the pragmatic stuff, that I never talk about it. But I love listening to people talking about it, reminding me how wrong I get it systematically. Lovely. Thank you very much, Natalie. And last but not least Motoko, lovely to meet you.

Motoko Hunt

Hi. How are you?

Jason Barnard

We didn't spend the weekend in Saint-Tropez as far as I remember.

Motoko Hunt

Maybe next time.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant. Could you introduce yourself and tell us what your Super-duper tip was in the wonderful book from Majestic and David Bain?

Motoko Hunt

Sure. My name is Motoko Hunt. I'm a president and founder of the company called AJPR. I started this company in 1998. And I've got into this business a couple years before that. So I'm one of those old ancient SEO pros still kicking around. Because my company or my SEO career is really focused on international SEO, we deal with global websites really on a daily basis. So my tip is in a user behavior point of view about the... To understand that... Making sure you understand that all the target market audience, what we've been seeing is a lot of the time the company creates the websites for... Based on the extensive research on the market, in the audience, on their home base country, right? So all the keywords, all the contents are really working for that your home base market.

But when you create the global sites, unfortunately nine out of 10 times, it's just a translation. They just localize it, but it's really the translation. They don't do the additional audience research or keywords or what topic people interested in that specific countries. So my tip is to really do that additional step to understand the local audience, to make sure your content is resonating with that, or local audience. So it's a global site, but when you...

Local audience doesn't care which companies you are in or what country you are in. They want what works for them in that market. So if you don't spend that money and a little bit of more money and resources, and then time to understand the local audience and then create the content that works for them. Or if you already have the bunch of the content, and then trying to prioritize which content you want to translate before the other one, because of the budget reason or resource reasons, you should prioritize, not based on what's performing for you now in your month home grant, but to understand and based on what the audience in each of those new market, you are trying to go after what they want, and in that way you can translate or localize the content that works for them, that people interested in that new market before the other ones that might not work for you.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant. Wonderful stuff. Thank you.

Motoko Hunt

MM-hm.

Jason Barnard

What about the tip in the book that you found the most helpful be other than yours of course?

Motoko Hunt

Yeah. So just like everybody else, I just got yesterday. So I haven't really read yet. But just by listening to the panels right now in these hours, I'm really learning a lot. So I can't wait to get into the book.

Jason Barnard

Right. Brilliant. Wonderful stuff. And what would the other tip be presumably on international SEO, but maybe not your second tip that you didn't share in the book that you would like to share today?

Motoko Hunt

So, the tip in the book is more on understanding the audience. But if you are going after, especially in that market, that people might be using something other than Google, like Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo! Japan, you need... You want to understand what those engines are, and how their algorithm works for your website in order to rank the content in their search engines.

So what we've been seeing is that sometimes that company optimize the website super, cater to Google's algorithm, and they do really well. But some of the things that do work for Google doesn't work for the other search engines. So by going after or optimizing way to finding, tuning for Google, your website doesn't rank at all in other search engines sometimes, especially in Baidu, we see a lot of the time you put the important contents in the JavaScripts because Google might see it but Baidu doesn't. So those are the things that you need to understand when you really want to go after those markets that people are using something other than Google, make sure that your website is optimized or at least includeable and indexable by those search changes too.

Jason Barnard

Wonderful. Yeah. And let's not forget about Bing. Bing is obviously smaller than Google, but sorry, I'm not criticizing what you just said.

Motoko Hunt

No.

Jason Barnard

I was just thinking, wow! Yeah. Bing. And that applies to all of us, even if we're not on the Chinese market, Bing is what? 10% of the market. I think they're vastly underestimated as a source of traffic for us all and their algorithm's obviously work in a similar manner to Google, but not exactly the same. So I would add to that if I may, let's all pay attention to Bing even if we are not particularly focusing on it, Bing, I like Bing. So that's absolutely brilliant. We've gone through this entire discussion. We manage to keep it well under the time I was planning for. So we have 10 minutes for a friendly chat. And the question now is, what topic should we chat about? Has anybody got an idea they want to throw into the ring that somebody who has just spoken, inspired them to think during this conversation, you really want to share it? Who's going for it? That was a very, very, very embarrassing silence. Crystal, off you go. You're going to save the day again.

Crystal Carter

Yeah. I think there's been a lot of discussion about making sure that people are looking after the fundamentals in lots of different ways. And I think that that is absolutely the case. I think sometimes clients get a little bit bored when you're going over, their index over and over and over again. And when you do them a new wizzy blog, or you add a new section to the website, that's lovely, but if Google can't see it, then what are we doing? And so, me going over, we got to sort out these links, we have to sort out this thing, we have to sort out this and the robots.txt or whatever it is. It's not always very exciting, but it's really important. And that's what they pay us for, is to do stuff that they're not that interested.

Jason Barnard

And the basics... One of the basics, I think, a lot of us forget is answering the simple questions our audience has. What I do is look at the brand search, see the people also ask and start researching from there. Because the questions that are closest to my brand are the ones that Google would put on a search on my brand name. And I actually had a client earlier on, I convinced him to build an FAQ section. And he was complaining that the... Not complaining, but obviously he was frustrated, excuse me, that we weren't making as much traffic progress that had wanted. And I isolated the FAQ. And in four months he's gone from zero to 250 visits a day. And-

Crystal Carter

It's not bad.

Jason Barnard

That's not bad.

Crystal Carter

That's not bad.

Jason Barnard

He's building a building. And all of a sudden he's really enthusiastic, but all he did was answer the questions about and around his brand. Sorry, Crystal, I interrupted.

Crystal Carter

Well, no, and you're right. And the other thing is, if you don't answer those questions yourself, other people will, and then you don't own the conversation. And I saw Natalie, I had just turned off from, to say something as well, but, I think it's really important. Especially to do what you say on the ten as well. There's so many clients who don't have an H1 on their homepage, or don't literally say what they do on their website. So I get clients sometimes and... I had a client and they were a solicitor and they had the word solicitor on their site two times. And they said, our, we, us a million times. And I'm like, "Some of those should be solicitor." Not every other word, but...

Jason Barnard

Some of them should be you as well. I Me Mine. It's a Beetle song, but I always think of that when people say I, me, mine, as we, I say to them, "That's an I me mine page. Let's go for you." Sorry, Natalie, you were going to say something, Crystal spotted it. I missed it. Please go ahead.

Natalie Arney

That was okay. I was just going to say, there's no point in building something if people don't come to it. So, the whole, if they build it... If you build it, they will come. If you build it and they can't find it, then they definitely won't. They'll go elsewhere. And you've spent so much time creating, planning, researching, creating the content, putting the content on a really well designed page, graphics, all of that. All of that time and effort that's being put there and only you and your mom can see it. Is there any point in actually spending all of that time doing it? That's from my point of view.

Jason Barnard

Yeah. Don't spend your whole life building a website just to impress your mom, and I'm quoting Natalie. Olga, have you got anything to add to that? You've been sitting quietly. You didn't say as much as perhaps everybody else in the other part. Have you got anything you'd love to add to this conversation?

Olga Zarzeczna

Yes. So what I really liked is Bing, and really that we should really focus on Bing as well. And especially I like the Bing Webmaster Tools. This is a very nice set of tools that can also show you... It can help you with any SEO audit as well. There's the site scan. Bing has this instant indexing protocol now, something that Google is testing. So it is really also nice to always see what's there in Bing Webmaster tools, even if your traffic from Bing is usually 10 times less than in Google. And one tip as well that just came to my mind, if for example, you are auditing the site in terms of traffic laws, it is always a nice thing to compare your traffic trajectory in Bing versus in Google. And usually you can see whether this is a Google thing or whether it is a technical thing on your site.

Jason Barnard

I thought you were going to say whether it's a Google thing or a Bing thing, because ’Bing Thing’ that would've been fun.

Olga Zarzeczna

Or a Bing thing or a technical issue on both.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant. Yeah. We were talking on a Duda webinar with Fabrice Canal about IndexNow. He's the guy who runs BingBot, and he's phenomenally helpful, phenomenally kind, phenomenally intelligent. And to talking to him and listening to, he's got to say about crawling and indexing or in fact discoverability, crawlability and indexability. Incredibly interesting. And he likes a lot of cats out of the bag because Bing have got nothing to lose, and he's incredibly open about what it is they're doing and how they're doing it. I love that stuff. So who else has got something to throw in the ring? So I stopped going on. Luke.

Luke Carthy

Join enough I've got one. So Olga's obviously spoken quite extensively about Google Search Console, which I think is really very much our control panel in the world of what we do. But one thing I guess I come across and constantly find myself going, "Yeah. I remember." Is that, NoIndex URLs do not appear in Google Search Console. They just don't.

So especially links. So if you've got links to NoIndex URLs, they don't appear there. And the amount of times of approach migrations thinking, "There're no links there." They can go to that, they still get migrated, but they can be deprioritized and what, then you go into a third party tool and find that actually we're completely wrong, Google's decided because the URLs no indexed, it doesn't report as in depth as it would do for URLs that are. It's a big omission.

And I think it's an important one to cover. I had a conversation, one of the lucky ones so to say with John Mueller about it. And it's one of those things. I don't think there's anything that's going to change, but it's something he's aware of. It's a blind spot, but it would be great if anyone in the Google sphere is watching to have a tab where there're links but for non-index pages or no index and, or no followed pages, I think it'd be really good to see, because sometimes Google Search Console has the most comprehensive directory if you like, or list of links that are required to a web property. So it'd be good to see those in there, but just something I thought I'd throw in there for a second.

Jason Barnard

Yeah. But the bit of a feature request from Luke there live on air. Thanks a lot, man. And Helen, what have you got to add to all of this?

Helen Pollitt

I was just going to add to what Luke you just said, actually that I think that's a really good example of why we need to be checking across different tools and not just relying on one tool set. I think we have all these awesome tools that at our disposal. Some of them extremely expensive, and so we like to just focus on those. But at actually we need to be looking across different tools to pick up those things that some of the larger tools may have missed and Search Console's a great example of that.

If you spent all your time in search console and search console alone, by the time you're getting to migrate a website, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. So I think it's a very wise point that Luke just raised. And I also like these using this platform is a bit of a petitioning tool for Google. So I don't know if we want to do a whip round and maybe work out what else we want from Google to put it all in here now. If they want to send me some Google Merch, I'm okay with that. Does anyone want anything done to the algorithm whilst we're here?

Jason Barnard

Yeah. That's a great question. And I wish, I dared even ask what I was looking for. Can we have one last comment from Joy who's been sitting there since the very beginning. What would your closing comments of all of this be? Can you wrap it up beautifully for us?

Joyanne Hawkins

Sure. Yeah. Since people are talking about tools outside of Search Console, I love the Bing idea. That's really, really good. I'll throw in there. This isn't actually my tip. I have to credit Andrew, shot one for this one. But looking at Google's Custom Search Engines, you're creating a custom search engine for your site. And then using that to basically find what other pages you have about that content. It can return totally different results than what you'd see using like a site search on Google or looking in Search Console. And we found it more accurately shows you the pages that are actually about that particular topic. So it's great for internal linking and stuff like that. So we use that religiously here in addition to Search Console.

Jason Barnard

Brilliant stuff. Well, thank you very much to everybody. That was the most delightful discussion and some amazing tips and lots of people who got the book yesterday, unfortunately, and I do apologize Joy for asking you to wrap it up because that's, that way, David's job.

David Bain

It was absolutely superb discussion. Really nice and natural, much fun and hilarity. And I appreciate you seeing the intro there, Jason, sorry for putting you in this spot a little bit there as well. I just wanted to highlight comment to the session. "Crystal needs her own show." So I have to make that happen. Maybe on Jason's show next or. Joy, Luke, Helen, Crystal, Olga, Natalie, Motoko, thank you so much for being part of it, and Jason, of course, for hosting the session as well. Much appreciated. Stick around, we're going to have session three in a second. Don't go anywhere at all. But that was session number two. Just to conclude this session, actually, I'm going to show you a clip of the interview, that record with Kristina Azarenko. So she was talking about the User Experience trend. So let's have a look at that video and then we'll begin session three.

Kristina Azarenko

So my number one actionable tip for 2022 is to think more about User Experience. Stop thinking about content as if we need to create SEO content. There is no SEO content. There is content that helps people and also optimized for search engines. So what I would say is that User Experience has been a trend, has been important for a long time, but now it's getting even more and more important, especially with introduction of core web vitals that in 2022... My God, 2022, it's already coming to desktop. It's also coming to desktop. So a strong influence of User Experience and SEO means that, first of all, you need to be useful. Not just create content for the sake of creating content, but be useful. Also answer the user's questions, matching the user intent. So if you see that your users are struggling to find the information about something which is related to your service, create a content about that, even though sometimes this content initially might not have a lot of search volume.

If this content is useful for your users, it means that, first of all, some tools will not show you search volume if it's not big enough to show. Let's say so. And secondly, there will still be users who will be searching for this. And trust me, I've seen in many situations where you would create content with zero search, but then you end up getting so many impressions and clicks and visits to your website through these keywords. So that's amazing, answer you these questions use user intent to do so. Also load fast and secure. These are parts of core web vitals. And be accessible and indexable. So meaning technical SEO should still be your priority if there is something going on with your website, especially if you're using some fancy JavaScript framework. And as I said, just stop thinking about content as SEO content. Just think about content as the way to help users and also drive users to your website, and to your products, to services that you provide through good User Experience and optimizing content.

David Bain

So how do search engines actually measure User Experience? It's one thing to deliver great User Experience, and you can understand from a usability perspective, why you want to ensure that your users are happy. But it must be quite tricky for search engines to determine what's a better User Experience than something else. So what are your thoughts on that?

Kristina Azarenko

Yeah. Exactly. I will take a holistic approach, holistic view of User Experience. So first of all, matching user intent with your content, in terms of SEO, for me, it's part of User Experience. User Experience in this case is not like a designer. A designer would think of it, right? Just like have the right colors, topography and all this kind of stuff, which is good. But the User Experience, what I'm talking about is more like is a more holistic view of it.

Then, User Experience is making sure that the quantity is accessible, is making sure that using your website is not hard. You don't have interstitial. So basically qualitative ways for Google to estimate how good your User Experience is, is through core web vitals and through looking at the content like those interstitial popups that can be sometimes annoying. That's something that Google looks at, and also obviously user intent. And plus, there is also semantic SEO layer where you don't want to do just... If you can answer a question in using 50 words, and this will be exact answer to the question, you don't need to go to beat around the bush and write, I don't know, 500 words to answer this question just to get optimized. So that's what I would consider as User Experience. And Google has direct an indirect ways to measure this.

David Bain

So that was Kristina sharing her thoughts there for the book, SEO 2022. You can see the whole video on the Majestic YouTube video channel. Listen to the podcast, of course, as well. Just go to seoin2020.com, if you want to get links to book, the podcast, the video, however you want to consume the content. So next up it's time for section three of the book, and that's deliver. And the host for this section is a gentleman, who's a majestic brand ambassador as well as CEO of InLinks. His tip in the book was not to ignore passage indexing. Welcome Dixon Jones.

Dixon Jones

Hi David. Thanks very much for... And this has been great. By the way, if you haven't got the book... So as you can see, I've prepared for this meeting here.

David Bain

Wow.

Dixon Jones

And all these sticky things where you guys are all in the book. So I thought what I'd do is-

David Bain

It feels like a pop concert, doesn't it? Everyone.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. I put myself in there. I did read and remind myself that I was talking about passage indexing. But if we get onto that then fine. But what I was going to do was going to go through the sections in order. So we go from the start of the book, right. We're not. We're well and truly into the book now anyway, through to, well, I think about page... It's 320 pages this book, it's incredible. But before I do that, hi to Bibi. Hi Paige. Hey Koray. Hi Roxana. Hi Gus. Hi Maria. Unfortunately, Dre can't make it. So he's not feeling well. Gus maybe you'll jump in on his one and I'll try and maybe bring you in twice so that Dre still gets his, say, his day on stage. And I think I'm the only one with one of these t-shirts as well.

So last year COVID, all the stuff from Majestic that was going to be on shows and things got lost. And I went out to the offices the other week and saw it and stole it. So I think I'm the only one with one of these t-shirts so guys. Okay. So anyway, thank you very much everyone for coming on.

Paige, you are the first one in my order, in the book. Just in case there's anyone out there that has got the book and has got the printed copy, the one thing I have noticed is, there is no index of where you are in the book, in the printed copy. So we're going to go. Paige is on 111, Bibi's on page 212, Paul is on 234, Koray's on 204, Roxana is on 251. Gus is on 225, Antonella is on 287 and Maria is on 248. So if you want to look up your favorite author there, then I'll throw it out the number. But Paige, you are on page 111. How are you? Just tell us a little bit about Paige and ROAST.

Paige Hobart

Well, great number to get, 111. All the ones. So I'm Paige. I am head of SEO and agency called ROAST based in London. And I am very excited to be here. The book looks amazing. It arrived in the post, just the end of last week. So I've been thumbing through. I particularly enjoyed a chapter that I'll talk about in a bit, but it's basically the opposite of what I said. So, SEO in a nutshell, I love it. But I'm good. How are you Dixon?

Dixon Jones

No. I'm very well. I'm very honestly. I've been watching the last couple of hours. I'm thinking, "I've got to stand up to the plate here." Because I think Alina and Jason did a brilliant job of hosting. But let's dive in anyway. Paige, you went into keyword research and said, so don't lose focus on keyword research. It's going to be as important as has ever been, and SEOs need to make sure they are not just automating it. I've got a four step process to ensure that your keyword research is kick ass. So I guess the obvious question is what's your four stage process?

Paige Hobart

It's super, super basic. It's just putting some process in place to make sure that you are not just relying on tools. So it's about collecting the data, getting metrics for all of your data, checking it, thematically grouping things, and then optimizing the hell out of that list. So it's just about giving yourself the steps to success when it comes to keywords, rather than just input keyword, get keywords out of tool. And that's my keyword research done.

Dixon Jones

So you are thematically grouping, how do you go about thematically grouping keywords? What your process?

Paige Hobart

I love categorization of keywords. I think there is an element that you can do through tools. So they're doing stuff like checking when it's the same URL that's ranking for certain keywords or your competitors all having the same URL ranking for keywords. But there's always a few that just like to throw in there. So I think it's really important to have the metrics for context as well, just to see what you need to have. But basically it's just grouping. Do you think that these three keywords are the same thing? Is it the same content that's going to rank? Because you want to have that tagged up as one page. So you can say this tag's doing well, then my performance is doing well, or my performance isn't doing well. And sometimes it is a bit of work in progress. So you might thematically group keywords together that you think you can target with just one URL, but actually you go through the process and you want two URLs. Actually you want an FAQ page spun off of your hub.

Dixon Jones

Awesome. Okay. So synonyms really is my one word there. Okay. And then you had this... You said there was another chapter that you really got into. But, well, firstly, thanks for reading the book in. Everybody's only just got the book. So I appreciate that Jason was asking everybody, and you can't have read all this book in 24 hours. But you said you had another chapter that stood out for you. So tell me about that.

Paige Hobart

Well, I had to laugh because obviously my chapter is called, how to do good keyword research and all about not losing focus. And then I scrolled through, and there was Eli Schwartz saying, "Stop focusing on keyword research." I was like, "No." But actually it was really interesting. And my favorite tip from him is that you should do qualitative research. You should be doing interviews with your customers, and finding that those things that you're not going to get from a tool, you're not going to get from a computer. Actually talk to your customers and uncover the solutions that they're finding with your products, or the issues that they're having. And I thought that was a really good additional thing to add into your keyword research is it's not just keywords. It's got to relay to what it is that you do as a business and what you are putting out there to the world.

Dixon Jones

Amazing. Well, I wouldn't worry too much about giving up on keyword research because there the whole... You were the start of chapter five on keyword research. There's the whole chapter on keywords research. So we haven't quite given up on it yet as an industry. So you're absolutely fine.

Paige Hobart

And I think we are getting at the same point which is, don't rely on tools to do it for you.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. Okay. There, which is absolutely a fair and great point to put in, which is probably why David put it at the top of the chapter. So thanks very much, Paige. I got to move on because I know that the time goes quick on these things. And my next one in the book is, Koray. So Koray thanks for coming in. And I love that chess set. You and I are going to have to have a game mate. Absolutely. But I love my chess, even though it's a glorified nos and crosses and not as clever as SEO. But I've got to have a game. How are you Koray?

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR

I'm actually fine. And everything is fine. And I try to educate my team. And I can tell that I start to think that actually learning Azure is not easy at all. Because since I learned it years ago, I forgot how I learned it. And it is not easy to repeat the same process for other people.

Dixon Jones

Well, I got to say, you've done some amazing posts over the course of the last year, 18 months. So thanks very much. There are number of people that say, I was listening to Koray, or what reading Koray or whatever.

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR

Thank you.

Dixon Jones

So you've done such a fantastic job. So tell us about your agency. And then just quickly tell us where you are based on your agency for those that don't know you.

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR

Okay, My agency name is Holistic SEO & Digital. And at the moment, usually I try to focus on the semantic as well, most of the time, because it saves time. And most of the time search engines try to focus on the relevance over the technical other things. And most of the time, training a developer is harder than training an outer. So that's why we usually try to focus on semantics a little bit more. It is more cost effective and creates more permanent results for me. And also the clients demand that too. Soon, I believe I will publish new SEO case studies again. And I guess they will be on a little bit in other places too.

Dixon Jones

So I'm going to jump in and quote a bit of you from the book. You say natural language generation is a new concept that basically means generating text through AI. And the next step of this will be natural language optimization.

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR

Yeah.

Dixon Jones

And then you go on and start talking about GPT-3, which I think a lot of SEOs have heard about and not yet jumped into, where some of us are worried about whether it's going to be good or bad for us as an industry or good or bad for us as society. What's your take on it, and how do you think natural language generation is going to progress? And just what is GPT-3 for anyone that doesn't know?

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR

Okay, first of all, GPT-3 is a kind of technology that generates the language based on our input. And you can configure or calibrate your language generator as well, according to the clusters or diverse or word types or phrase patterns that you choose, the AI will generate a different type of content. And these different types of content will be a topic for natural language optimization at the same time. Because lately, all of the SEOs, they started to use same type of AI technologies for answering similar types of questions. And it decreases the relevant threshold differences between different pages. So it might force search engine to the index some of the pages, or they can actually decrease the threshold for being content as a duplicate page as well. So that's why natural language optimization will be a kind of technical advantage, that's why I also try to learn transformers so that I can also generate more content in a cheaper way and also in a more unique way as well.

Dixon Jones

Do you think Google's going to try and fight natural language automation or do you think it's going to try and work with natural language automation?

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR

To be honest, fighting against it is like fighting against the crypto coins. So there is no victory or there, so in this context they will need to adapt it. And the other thing is that according to Sergey Brin, the Google, it is not created for websites, it is created for users and natural language generation, it is useful for users. So in this context, as long as the content is unique, beneficial, and also in a way as long as it is useful, the Google will adapt it. But web is bloating and it is increasing their costs, so because of that, they can improve some other signals weight on their algorithm to decrease this type of side effects of the NLP and NLG.

Dixon Jones

So, okay. I mean, I think this is all really fascinating, because I did speak to a Googler about that question and they put together an interesting point back to me, is Grammarly good or bad for SEO? And it's really in a way, there's an extension of this, Grammarly is already machine and it's checking our errors, it's finding our errors and most of us will use it or something like it or spell check at least, hopefully. Not me if you've seen me in type, but so it is going to be an interesting philosophical comment going down as this. Okay Koray, I've got to move on because I haven't got time to ask your other tip on the thing, but not least, because I've just seen what Bibi is wearing on her face. And I think it's brilliant. You're in the spirit of it. Christmas is here and new year is coming. Bibi, how are you?

Bibi Raven

I'm good. I got into a little bit of panic because I was like, oh no, I got to read the book. And I just got the book I think yesterday.

Dixon Jones

Don't worry. You're all good.

Bibi Raven

I felt like that kid that has to do a paper and they cram everything to the last minute. So I was frankly trying to go through the book and find some good quotes, but-

Dixon Jones

Yeah, and first you got to find yourself in the book because it's not in the index, is it? So, hence reading out the page number. So you Bibi, on page 212, focus on businesses not content creators when it comes to link building. So you're saying a lot of people focus on content creators, bloggers, and influencers, when they're creating prospect lists. These specific types of prospects have been outreached so much, it makes more sense to look at businesses that share a part of your audience and make a connection with them, reach out to them. So, explain why you think content creators have been over exploited? Is that what you're saying?

Bibi Raven

Well, I think they turned the table now. So they started exploiting back and some of the content creators are actually SEOs in sheep clothing. So they're building sites to attract link builders and sell links to them. And I don't think it's having links from content creators is bad, but everybody's already going there. So it's better now to focus on actual businesses, so anybody selling a product or service, and collaborate with them.

Dixon Jones

I mean that makes huge sense because it would've made sense before the internet came along. Wouldn't it? I mean, as long as that business has a relationship with you or a logic with you so, and it's been happening say in the supermarket industry, of course, Procter & Gamble will then share advertising with Tesco or whatever it may be. And they'll sort of use some communication together and try and use each other's channels or build off the back of each channel's channels. Is that what you're kind of saying for content writing?

Bibi Raven

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's very common sense, but for some reason 90% of link builders just forget about it. So they just start scraping the web for link prospects based on keywords. And then you find all those sites that are actually targeting those keywords because they're trying to sell links. Yeah, so it's just a little reminder for 2022.

Dixon Jones

Do you think that's because link builders are sort of out... They're not in the organization that they're working for at that particular point. So they don't know the relationships with other businesses in there and perhaps they should get off their backside and go in and talk to the people in those, in the customers that they're working for, find out who those friends are.

Bibi Raven

Yeah. I think it would be really good starting point. So when I start new projects, I always send people, I think it's a 30 question list. And then I learn everything that there is to know about their business, because I think the knowledge that you need for link building is already in the business, but the business owners don't know it themselves, right? So you got to uncover that and then use it for your link building. So I think that would be really good way to go.

Dixon Jones

Brilliant. And you just panicked before you got in, so you've had a look at a few bits on the tape, I mean, are there second points or something else in the book that you've noticed that you think is worth talking about?

Bibi Raven

Well, David did send an email with a recap of everyone in this group right now, who did their quotes. And one thing that really stood out to me was the image search thing because I'm obsessed with images. I'm a very visual person, which is funny because all the work I do is-

Dixon Jones

I can see by the glasses. Yeah.

Bibi Raven

Yeah. My house is full of images, but when I do shopping, the images often break my shopping experience. Right, so I see skirts and I don't know what fabric it is because it's just like a black thing. And I think there's so much room to grow in terms of CRO, but maybe also in SEO, if you use your images better on E-commerce sites.

Dixon Jones

Okay. Amazing. Right, okay. I'm going to jump on. And if we get a chance to come back to everyone, then we will. Now Dre's not here, but Gus, you work with Dre a lot. Tell us a little bit about Dre, would you? You're going to get two bites of cherry here by the way, because I've got those as well.

Gus Pelogia

I actually don't work with him, so you might be mixing up the people, so...

Dixon Jones

Okay. No, I thought you were working on the same... you work together, so okay. Right. We're going to just going to jump in then and we can all comment on Dre's one. So Dre just for everyone out there, he runs the SEO video show, I think he calls the webinar. It's great fun. It's a really lively webinar that he runs and he jumps in and out and makes it, you can tell, it's not written by an old guard like me. He's got a lot of really interesting things to say. And he jumps in and says, "Create semantic content, it's really easy. You can just use Google SERPs to figure it out." And I wanted to kind of dive into that, but of course he's not here. So, I think what he is suggesting is that, take your headline term and then have a look at the people who also ask dancers and then right at the bottom, there's all the related searches as well. And he was suggesting to use that to try and build up your content plan if you like.

And if I'm misquoting him, I really apologize, but is that something that anyone out there in the team have used, have tried, have worked with? Paige you, yeah. Tell us, you find that useful?

Paige Hobart

Yeah, absolutely. SERPs are a hugely enriching place to find additional content ideas, keyword ideas, all sorts of stuff. I think, I don't know if I mentioned it in the book, but Googling it is probably one of my best tips for anyone, any SEO ever. It's because they're always getting even richer every day as well. All these new SERP features are so exciting.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. I think so. And I think, the rich snippets also brings out yeah, a huge amount of extra opportunities for SEOs to engage with Google. The challenge of course, is getting the Google user into your own world not just leaving them out on the field for Google. I think that's always my biggest challenge with all of these rich snippet stuff. Okay, Gus, why don't I jump on with you? You're on page 225. Tell us about yourself and where do you come from since I completely misread you there?

Gus Pelogia

Yep. No problem. Hi everybody. I'm Gus from Teamwork. We are a project management software and I'm based in Ireland, I'm from Brazil, but I'm based in Ireland. And I do have a point about Dre though because I was reading his chapter and something very simple that he talks about is just using the people also ask as your headings on certain pages, if you're answering the question and you know, it's kind of obvious but I don't think I ever did that. And I spend a lot of time in the SERPs and you look at what is the intent of that page, would Google understand as an answer for that question? And I've built pages or let's say, okay, we have to answer those questions, but I probably did much longer cured research to put all of those pieces together when Google's actually already geeking that answer for us straight away. So, there's definitely something to learn from his points there.

Dixon Jones

I love that phrase. Google was geeking the answer that's...

Gus Pelogia

Yeah. I mean brilliant, right?

Dixon Jones

Yeah, absolutely. Let's get on your tip then. So brand is going to become more important, you think? So Gus Pelogia says "It's getting more complicated to rank on Google. There are more ads and fewer opportunities to get the click. That is why it's so important to focus on your brand. Even if you are not the number one rank, the more people that recognize you, the more clicks you're going to go and get. So do you want to fill out that a little bit?

Gus Pelogia

Yeah, absolutely.

Dixon Jones

And tell me what you mean by that?

Gus Pelogia

Sure. So first thanks for saying my last name right. A lot of people just say it wrong. And you were spot on, so that feels good.

Dixon Jones

Complete bloody fluke mate, complete fluke.

Gus Pelogia

You did it right. You get the points. I think my tip is a lot about, how you can protect your brand and how you can make sure that you're explaining yourself really well. You know, we are all used to the ads on the top, but over the last year, lots of new ad extensions and it's just getting more cramped and more difficult and you're organic side as well, lots of new feature, so it's difficult to get a space. So, if you have a chance to have your knowledge panel there, protect that panel and make sure that you have all the information that you can, if you can claim a GMB, be there as well. So I think we often think SEO with our SEO minds, but when I'm looking to buy something or I'm looking for a service, my behavior is quite different.

So I'm not just, okay, I'm going to click in the first results because you know, first results is the best. I look at the titles, I open the website. Does it look real? Does it look nice once you get in there? This guys look really, looks a bit dodgy. I'm going to go to the second one or I'm going to redo that search. So, if you protect how people search for you, and if you make sure that you give all the answers, and I think a lot of that is outside of the SEO mindset with, I need to answer those questions here because there are a lot of people searching for those, but more on, okay, there's some search around this, but am I giving a good experience as well? Do people get connected to you, to my brand or to what I'm offering? Because often it's just about a nice website and the feeling that you get from it. That's what makes you take the decision to buy from someone.

Dixon Jones

So I think there's two ways of looking at brand from an SEO perspective. Isn't there? Because there's Jason, Jason sort of looks at brand... Jason Barnard who was on the show the last hour, running the show the last hour, he calls himself brand SERPs guy. And he's all about, when somebody types in your brand, how much do you own that space? And do you own that space? And I think it's an interesting approach. And the other approach though is aligning your brand with your vertical really clearly. And I think that this is something that's easier for smaller businesses than it is for large businesses. Rather, it's hard for a business who starts to lack focus.

So I feel, I apologize to Keith, who's going to come on next round. He was on IBM, but a behemoth like IBM has so many different angle. General Motors has so many different things from credit cards to cars to all sorts of machinery and stuff like that, that it becomes very difficult for GM to be aligned with an individual sort of a set topic. So I think there's a real advantage possibly for us, as for smaller businesses or for niche businesses to get this semantic alignment, if you, as long as we don't try and do too many things at one time, I think if we're trying to go to two products to do two different markets, that's going to make things four times as difficult for SEO. I mean, would you say that's fair Gus?

Gus Pelogia

Yeah. I think that's fair. I think we need to find how people are searching for you and which are the places that you want to tackle. Maybe some of your divisions are not really searched too much. So maybe you don't need to put all that attention on that or maybe you can look for a view that covers a bit of everything. I really love all the stuff that Jason talks about. I do spend time on Wikipedia, even just to make sure that the information has to be factual, but at least this is explaining what my business does on a fair way. I know Google takes a lot of information from there. I spent quite a bit of time over the last months playing with data. I don't see a lot of people talking about it.

I think it might be one of the things that Jason works on and it takes a while to work, but I got myself a knowledge panel just by doing, following some of those steps, filling my profile and creating those connections as well. I don't see a lot of people talking about it. I don't know if it's a place that I should share.

Dixon Jones

I'm just getting myself deleted off of Wiki data just as we speak. So, once again my world goes wrong, but I think you're right. Wiki data is a pretty valuable source, but one that you could... SEOs enter with, or manipulate with at their own peril, because it's going to come back and haunt them. Which is-

Gus Pelogia

Yeah. I think you need to be... it's difficult because SEOs, we, a lot of people tend to spam things. If they find the thing, they were going to use to exhaustion, but my rule was, take it low, build the little things, don't touch your competitors, if they want to do it.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. Okay. I got to move on because we are running through the air rapidly and I've got I'm now on page. Where am I? 248, I think it is Maria. Maria Amelie White, how are you? Would you tell us a little bit about yourself before I jump into your quotes?

Maria White

I'm good. Thank you. Can you hear me?

Dixon Jones

Yes, we can.

Maria White

Brilliant. Well, hi everyone. Thank you so much Majestic for having me. My name is Maria Amelie White and I work as a head of a SEO at Kurt Geiger. I started just a few weeks ago, so I'm fairly new. So yeah, but before... My tips included in the book are on the back of my previous job, which was with small businesses and with eCommerce SEO. So yeah, my background is on all kind of SEO, I've been on SEO for 12 years.

Dixon Jones

And I have to say, I don't know whether there was some quick editing before the book went to press, but it's all, it talks about Google Business Profile instead of Google My Business, which is great. You got a little one. Do you want me to jump back with a chart of another one?

Maria White

Come here baby

Dixon Jones

You know what Maria, we're running about 200 people on the call, not a worry it's okay. Do you want me to jump back in 10 minutes?

Maria White

No, it's fine. She just always comes like that. Ah, I just came, but it's all right.

Dixon Jones

Sorry. Excellent. Oh, brilliant. Okay, so Maria, you said, so anyway, I was just saying that, the book seemed to manage to talk about Google business profile instead of Google my business. So someone's done a great job.

Maria White

Exactly. When the interview was made, it was just about a week or so before the change. So yeah, that is that mistake.

Dixon Jones

Well, no, notes will be updated for you. So you say include alternative content strategies in your SEO. That can be Google business profile, formally GMB, SERP features, image optimization, feature snippets are much more, it's not possible to wear them all into an SEO search strategy, but try to include the SERP features that are aligned with the search intent for your users. So I guess my question there is, how do you see the search intent of your users and choose what kind of rich snippets or what kind of stuff to start putting into your site?

Maria White

Well, all of these ideas came on the back of having worked with small businesses and working on what it was with conventional or traditional SEO strategies like link building, not saying anything against link building, working with influencers, content, heavily obsessing over technical SEO. And when clients realize, yeah, I have good visibility, but my clients are not buying. So then after a lot of trial and error and testing, one of the things that has worked for me so far very well is getting to know your audience and understand your consumers, understand how they show, how they behave. How, where the shopping journey start for your consumers? How is the shopping journey starting? Is it on kind of Amazon, then maybe emulated results or your content strategy, according to that kind of result. Is it on Google my business? Google my business works a great deal because it kind of aligns with the search intent of my consumers, of the consumers of my clients at the time.

So it was getting to know your consumer via keyword research, via the intent of your keyword research, via data and all the things and find out what is number one for the consumers of your clients? So, for example, for my Florist, number one could be local pack. So that means my priority and my SEO strategy is perhaps Google my business and adding products, adding posts, adding an optimized business description, making sure that everything is in place for my clients or my consumers, when they're looking for any specific product, service or location, then maybe images, maybe videos. So it's understanding where your consumers are coming from, how they behave on your website. What type of content is the one that is generating more sales and leads and then work around that.

Dixon Jones

So you're saying, similar to a little earlier on, you are playing Google against itself. So you're sitting there finding out what kind of results local pack or images or videos or whatever it may be that's coming back and then play, build content to feed that user need that Google's already defined, which is a great tip. I think that's really good.

Maria White

Yeah. So one thing as well I learned is that I'm a big nerd. I read a lot. And one thing is that I've noticed that the search with sold lists are evolving according to how people prefer to consume content. So for example, so let's say yeah... basically the search results are evolving to present results that are just there straight aligning to the search intent rather than just to make it easier and more efficient, the search experience to our consumer, rather than having to explore content on a brand or having to explore a blog post. So how basically, how are people, what influences people to shop? Is it a review? Is it a social media post? What is it that makes, influences your consumers to shop and based on that is how I believe. I believe based on what I've seen this year, that search results are moving and therefore-

Dixon Jones

So, that actually leads us nicely on to Roxana. Sorry, I've got to move on. So, Roxana let's dive into one of those kind of elements of search and focused on images. But Roxana, before we go into that, tell us about yourself and where do you come from?

Roxana Stingu

Yeah, hi everybody. So I'm Head of Search and SEO at Alamy, which pretty much means I get to play with the 300 million pages website and also it's internal search engine. So it's pretty fun if you don't know Alamy, we're the most diverse library of stock photography and videos and anything you'd want, so heavy around image as images are our product. And I've noticed a lot of SEOs in today's broadcast have mentioned that image search is being overlooked. And that makes me so happy because I've been complaining about it for the past three years. So if any of you-

Dixon Jones

Then again, if you are the one that is concentrating on it, you're winning hands down Roxana.

Roxana Stingu

But you know, if any of the tool makers out there are listening, focus on image search, please just build us more tools if possible.

Dixon Jones

Good. Cool. Okay. So Roxana, obviously you're in image in search and you say that images, you are on page 251 of the book by the way, image is now playing a bigger role in product search. If you go onto Google and search one of your best selling non branded product search, you might see some of the bigger brands competing against you. If you go to the same search on image search, you might be to surprised to see some of the names appearing are not the big brands you're expecting. Some of the big brands are not optimizing their images as well as they could. So I guess that's an opportunity for the rest of us I suppose, if we are not sort of big brand co. limited Or PLC, so what are the tips then for optimizing image search?

Roxana Stingu

So that's the thing, it's not even a secret or anything. It's all common sense. You build a fast website, you focus on images, so they do load fast. You focus on page speed everywhere and on UX and you make a mobile friendly website and everything also benefits an image search as well. And then you do have image specific optimizations from file name to out attributes and what values you use for them. But again, it's common sense because that text is going to be picked up by, let's say screen readers for accessibility. So you want to put in something descriptive that actually talks about the image itself. So, I wouldn't call it necessarily SEO. I would just call it common sense around image optimization.

Dixon Jones

Can I ask a, I don't know, you may not know the answer to this question. I'm please don't feel the need to answer if I'm and you may know the answer and think I'm really stupid for asking, but if somebody uses alt text and caption underneath the image that are contradictory, which one do you think Google is likely to pay more attention to?

Roxana Stingu

I like this question. I think the caption, because that would be visible text on the page. So it becomes part of the context around the image. So I think that would get a greater waiting in this case. And Google is smart enough to know that SEOs have been messing around with alt texts since the internet was born pretty much. So I would think you would care more about what we're showing users and trust that more than what we're hiding in the code just for search engines.

Dixon Jones

Cool. And just cause we've got time, I don't know if you had a chance to have a look at any of the rest of the book, is there another tip that you saw that's worth talking about or is there something else that you'd have as a second tip?

Roxana Stingu

Yeah, I did manage just to kind of skim, but there was something that caught my eye and then I felt the need to read the entire chapter on the spot. So that was Kevin Gibbons tip and sorry, I wrote it down somewhere, because it's a bit of a long name. So his tip was forecast your projected SEO success based upon business metrics. And I think it's such an important one because SEOs traditionally, we use traffic and keyword ranking as KPIs, but these don't always revolt around a business' goals, which is usually revenue.

Dixon Jones

I think that's an amazingly logical tip for SEOs, not just doing the business, but also getting the business in the first place, trying to get the budgets that we would want. I think SEOs have been the underdog on budgets and business owners are happy to throw the money at Google ads and not so happy to throw the money at SEO. And probably it's because we are bad at framing our mission in terms of business metrics. Would you agree?

Roxana Stingu

Yeah because Google ads comes back with ROI as a KPI, right? They say, this is how much money you put in, this is how much we get out which is perfect for a business. That's exactly what they want to see. With SEO, we say, this is how much money you put in, this is how many people we bring to the website, but what happens then, usually not our business.

Dixon Jones

So we should start with, well, how much Google not provided traffic, have we converted? And that should be starting point for our budgets and then let the PPC people try and claw it back rather than the other way around, which is, seems to have been what's happened and Roxana thanks very much of for coming in and last but not the least, I hope I've got everybody. Antonella is way down there on the back of the book. So you're obviously getting into some real nitty gritty on page 287 and Antonella how are you and who are you? Where do you come from?

Antonella Villani

Yeah, I'm well, good to see everyone. First of all to say something a little bit unrelated, but I'm very happy to see, this sort of panels being way different from when I started in SEO is back, so thanks everyone for organizing this. I think it's very important to see different voices within SEO. So very well recognized. So yeah, I'm Antonella I work in SEO, been working SEO for about 10 years. I am an associate director of organic performance at Assembly, ex ForwardPMX and yeah, love SEO.

Dixon Jones

And so you've been talking about measuring beyond the click. So just so you're on page 287 and here's a quote from you, "In the past few years, we've seen Google giving more and more space to paid features and all sorts of other features in the SERPs. Even if you're in position one, it probably means your click through rate will be much lower than it used to be. And this means it's very important that you talk about the other work that you do that might not be so visible. So talk about that a little bit because that may be to a lot of SEOs may take a little bit of getting the head around.

Antonella Villani

No, yeah, sure. I think it's way simpler than it sounds, but basically like connecting a bit as well from what Roxana was saying from the other quotes as well, basically measuring our success just by looking at clicks might not be the right thing to do. There is much more that we do as SEOs and connecting the dots between various parts of the businesses, moving, making change happen in businesses that we work for, are all very important things that we might not always on. So I think it's very important to look at other things that are not your clicks for your keywords in position one.

Dixon Jones

So I guess part of that goes back to some, a lot of this stuff that people were talking about earlier with analyzing Google profiles and well image search and other types of search and seeing how your brand aligns with those kinds of indexes within Google. But a lot of that is going to mean that increasingly there will be no click, I guess. So, how does an SEO get credit for aligning a brand with a rich snippet that doesn't have a click? How does that happen?

Antonella Villani

Yeah, so that's a slightly different point from sort of my point, but so yeah. What that means by sort of, I suppose, I don't know the answer to how to take credit for the visualization of your... Maybe that's one for Gus, but we can ask him after. But what my point is, I don't know, you work on speed improvements to your client's website or to your website. So you need to look at things like conversation rates improvements as well, as well as for instance, decreases in CPCs because you got better quality scores and things like that.

Dixon Jones

Then I apologize for getting your point wrong and seeing that you're talking about the technical side of core web vitals and these kinds of areas, which yeah, I can imagine that plenty of bosses just don't even know where you're going. So I guess I'm going to ask the same question, but for that. So how does an SEO make the point that there is real important work to do that the end user doesn't see, you know the speeds issue, the UX issue, the conversion rate issues, are there any good tips for or metrics or KPIs that we can start to highlight to the people that give the budget to help them realize that they need to focus on these things or need to let SEOs focus on these things.

Antonella Villani

Yes, absolutely. I think there is sort of lots of reporting that you can do, for instance, on conversion rates where we're talking, specifically, about speeds. You can have overlay your landing pages to start with sessions, but also your load times, as well as your conversion rates in this specific case. But also you might be looking at the other type of work that you do as SEO, for instance, I don't know, content optimization and overlay that with PPC, I don't know, quality scores and CPCs as well. Basically my tip is, look at other things that you influence as an SEO that you can report on to show your value within the business.

Dixon Jones

Brilliant. Antonella, thank you very much. Was there anything else in the book that you saw or a second tip that you'd like to throw into the mix?

Antonella Villani

No. I think I've been a bad student at the back of the book, and I'm going to read it during the Christmas Holidays, been quite busy periods end of year.

Dixon Jones

You're not alone, there's a lot in there, there is. But what about everybody else? We've got to have another 10 minutes or so to throw in some other ideas. Is there anything in there that somebody would like to bring out, point out that they've seen, one of the other authors in the book or participants in the book put out? Anyone want to share something? Gus.

Gus Pelogia

Sure. I think, Orit Mutznik, not sure if I pronounce her name correctly, but she talks about keyword clusters, and that's something that I thought about covering as well. But then I thought everybody's going to talk about this, I'm going to talk about something else. I find it just fascinating that seeing the evolution of search and SEOs, just thinking that way, looking at all the ways that someone is searching for something and you give the value based on the topic, not on a key word anymore, so her topic, the way she presented was very interesting and the topic itself I think is going to be very hot next year.

Dixon Jones

Sort of. Yeah, I also forgot to talk about mine a little bit, which was passage indexing. Which is something that I thought Google was talking about quite a bit about a year ago and then they went really quiet, but it certainly hasn't gone away. The reason I kind of think it's interesting... One of the reasons I think it's interesting is because if you structure your paragraphs as properly as we should have done when we were taught at school, then we are going to have nicely rounded paragraphs that make sense from start to end, and then it means that a search engine, Google or any other, can go through and start to see concepts within a page rather than suggesting that this page is all about this one thing.

And I think what's interesting about the idea of building up things in topics, sort of, is that if you are going to write a story, whether it's a business story or whether it's a fictional story, you're going to talk about different things, so my local village may have a wood, it may have a lake, it may have a few shops, and will be talking about different ideas within there, and that fingerprint is what makes it unique and authoritative about the topic that I'm talking about. But within there, it's going to be talking about different topics and entities. And I think that we've kind of lost that along the way, maybe because we haven't got that many tools, but one thing that I think is interesting is that Majestic has got a tool, because it divides every single one of the pages that it looks at into 40 different chunks, I think. And so all the... I mean, of course it's link-focused on Majestic but all the different sections then show the links independently around... And show all the snippets around the side.

But have you seen much from Google lately on what we can do about passage indexing, anyone want to jump in there and... Seen some articles? Is there something on Google tools that I should have picked up on over the year? We've got the silence, no. Okay. Well, they were talking about it and they ain't now so that's always a good sign for SEOs to start investigating. What about anybody else? Anyone else got any other ideas in the last couple of minutes before we move on to the next hour of things that they think were important in the book that we should jump on? Or anyone to give another tip that they haven't got there? Paige, you've kind of... looking like you are ready.

Paige Hobart

I've just got a fun fact.

Dixon Jones

Go for it.

Paige Hobart

The phrase "It depends" appears 31 times. That's not even one per person.

Dixon Jones

That's one in every two of the SEO gurus. I'm sorry, that's not acceptable. I hope mine doesn't say it depends, it's my pet hate phrase, but it is the biggest phrase SEOs have.

Bibi Raven

I also saw that linkable doesn't exist anywhere in a book.

Dixon Jones

Interesting.

Bibi Raven

I don't know if linkable assets are out of style or something, but they shouldn't be.

Dixon Jones

Well, okay. Yeah, I don't use the word linkable, I don't think so. It's not a phrase I use that much, I kind of.... But I understand-

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR

Maybe we can perform a TF-IDF analysis for the book, and we can try to predict the topical model of the book together. And we can copy paste from it, and it can extract all of the entities and we can try to choose a central entity for all of the book.

Dixon Jones

Koray, then it's a PDF, so you should be able to sit there and say, "Right, exactly what phrases is it going to rank for as a PDF?" The only challenge with that is, I don't know if Google will read 320 pages of PDF, it may decide that that's beyond its job description, I don't know.

Bibi Raven

Well, then you break it up in passages.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. Which is exactly what I think David has done. David, I don't know if you want to come back in, he may still be on coffee, but he's got to take over from me in a little bit anyway, but... I think he's done because he's got all of these in a podcast, it's not in text, but pretty much for all of us, he got most of us on individual webinars as well, which is why I think this is such a... I'll just show it for everybody here as well, if you've got a copy put it up, but why I think it's such a big piece of work and so much of a jump along from most of what's happening in SEO one year from now, I think you've got into so much depth that I think... Yeah, well, I'll do it then David, I think you deserve a little round of applause for that.

David Bain

Okay. Thank you.

Dixon Jones

So David, what was your best tip?

David Bain

Ooh, I'm going to pick someone here.

Bibi Raven

Say Dixon's. Say Dixon's.

Dixon Jones

No, don't say mine. No.

David Bain

I was surprised that only Si Shangase talked about the importance of passing on what you know to the next generation. And that there's certainly a next generation, a wonderful next generation of SEOs coming along. So I started about 18 years ago, Dixon, you started further ago than that.

Dixon Jones

Not a lot further.

David Bain

We had Motoko that started in 1998 as well. And it's important that, even though SEO's changed, obviously some of the knowledge gets shared on as well. So the baton needs to be passed on. And I thought that was a wonderful way to the finish it, it wasn't necessarily a strategic SEO tip for the coming year, but I think that was a wonderful thought to finish the book with.

Dixon Jones

And thank you Antonella for saying... Sorry Bibi, I'll let you in. Thank you Antonella for saying that we've hopefully moved on from just having the old... I know I'm the old guard here, but I think it is really important... Every time I do the Old Guard, New Blood, which is Majestic's sort of monthly podcast, there is so much new stuff coming down that the old guards just don't see it anymore. And so we need that diversity in the industry, not just to for woke reasons, but for practical reasons or of being able to understand all this stuff and enhancing it. Sorry Bibi, I jumped in on you, like an old man.

Bibi Raven

Oh, yeah. Well, it wasn't a mind blowing thing, but I actually got offered services by a kid from my kid's class, and he's 12, he offered to build my website on WordPress, so I was "Oh, wow, it's already starting" right? And then I asked him for his prices and then he ghosted me, so typical gen z.

Dixon Jones

Just wait until he asks "So what bank account should I put it into." that will hardly go right. Okay, David, I think I've come to the end of my hour, or pretty close to the end of my hour, and so I'll pass back to you, but just before I do, Maria, Gus, Koray, Roxana, Paige, Antonella and Bibi, thank you ever so much for coming in. And sorry to Dre for you not being able to be here, you're a star man and I love your podcast. But David, back to you, and thanks for the book.

David Bain

Absolutely. And thank you so much Dixon as well, another wonderful hour of hosting. Alina did a wonderful job in the first hour, Jason took it on, Dixon took the baton, I'm just about to pass the baton over to Pam, actually. Pam Aungst Cronin, she'll be on with section four, the final section, stick around for that, that's just going to be beginning the next couple of minutes or so. But just before we begin with that, I'd like to share one more tip with you, I couldn't attend this live one, but recorded a tip for the project, Greg Gifford. Now, of course the project, it's available as a podcast, a video series and the book, so go to seoin2022.com just to grab the links to wherever you want to consume it, in whatever format you want to consume it. But here's Greg with his tip.

Greg Gifford

An SEO tip for 2022 is to optimize the heck out of your Google My Business listing. So many people ignore it or put minimal effort into it, and at this point is probably the most important thing you can do to get found in search if you do face to face business with customers.

David Bain

So Google My Business has been around for a few years now, what does an SEO need to do to optimize the heck out of Google My Business in 2022?

Greg Gifford

So basically, you've got to get into the Google My Business dashboard and fill out everything that you possibly can. You'd be surprised how many people will choose a single category, and it's probably not even the best category to choose. They'll drop their phone number in, they'll drop their website in, and boom, they're done, and they move on, and they never come back and touch it again. But there are so many fields that are there, you need to fill out all the appropriate categories, there's a really cool interactive category list at PLEPA which will show you... If you select a category, it will show you all of the similar categories that you should also choose. You should put in your phone number, you got to put in your website address and make sure that you've got UTM tracking on that website link because mobile traffic doesn't get attributed correctly in analytics, and so it gets sent over as direct traffic, and you want to make sure you're getting credit for all the organic visibility that you're getting as a boost, so you got to do that.

You got to put in photos, and change your photos that often, and have awesome photos of your business. You've got to preload questions into the Q & A section, and that part's not in the Google My Business dashboard because it's actually a community discussion feature of Google Maps, so a lot of people don't realize that the Q & A is there, so you've got to go in and just interact with it on your profile. Preload your questions, monitor it, and answer new questions that come in, upvote all your questions so the business owner answers are the primary upvoted answer. You've got to have Google Posts going, because Google posts are basically free advertising. There's so much to it that so many people don't do and it makes a massive difference in a, how well you show up in searches and b, how well you convert people that see you when you show up in searches.

David Bain

So many things to do. And I'm sure that an SEO whose done all of those things, then their profile, the SERP is just going to be so much better than any other competing business in their niche. Something else so I've noticed, by the way, I love your UTM tracking URL advice there, great tip there just for tracking the success of the traffic directly from the listing. But I've also seen that you can be a service area business, which means you don't actually need to have a physical address anymore, so that's something relatively new, so what does that really mean for businesses?

Greg Gifford

So it's actually been around for a while. So Google Search and Google My Business, it used to be called Google Places, has been around for a long time, it's just that Local was always this kind of niche thing, we say niche in the States, niche thing that not a lot of people knew about, but in reality it's what most businesses need. So anybody that does face to face business with customers, so if that's at a brick and mortar location, then you're going to have your address shown and everything is standard.

But if you're a service business like a plumber or an electrician, where you still do face to face business, but not at your location but at the customer's location, then that's a service area business. And typically you're going to tick the little box that says hide your address, so you still have to have the address in there to get verified, it's just not going to display your address and search results. Because if you're a plumber or an electrician or a massage therapist or whatever it might be, where you're going out to people, you probably don't want your home address displayed as your location on Google and have random people showing up at your house in the middle of the day when you're not there. Who knows?

So when you're the service area business, you tick the little box that says "hide my address" and then you can enter in service areas. Now, entering the service areas, a lot of people think that's going to affect how you show up. I've seen stuff where service businesses in the UK have set the entire area of the island, and you actually go out... And they'll even include Ireland, and just go way outwards out in the ocean, that doesn't mean you're going to rank everywhere, it's still going to be based on the address and where you are. But what it does is it draws that little line around your service area. So, if you're in the suburbs of London and you serve the entire metro area and surrounding areas of London, you see that little red line around that shows this is the area that you serve. So if somebody's way up north, they know, "Okay, cool. These guys don't serve me. I don't need to call them. I'll find something local.". So it's important to understand that distinction that filling out as much as you can there doesn't necessarily mean you're going to rank in those places, it's more about conversion and letting people know where you actually serve customers.

David Bain

And we go, that was Greg Gifford there sharing his tip there. You can listen to the tip, watch the whole tip, read the whole tip, just go to seoin2022.com, consume the content, as your preferred medium. We've got some wonderful more SEOs just arriving in here for session four, the final session, by no means least, this is going to be the best ever session. I'm sure the previous sessions were wonderful. We've got some great names arriving here as well. Now the host for this section is a lady who's recently celebrated 10 years of running her own agency, Pam Ann Marketing. Her tip in the book was that "The debate is over, mobile UX is now officially part of SEO.". Welcome Pam Aungst Cronin.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Hi, thanks for having me.

David Bain

Well, thanks so much for joining us, Pam. Yeah. Just say a couple of more things before handing the baton properly over to you as well.

Pam Aungst Cronin

I was just going to say, am I supposed to give my tip now? Or are you still...

David Bain

Well, you do whatever you like, but I'll baton just before you do that, it's yours to decide what to do, but... I'll just say quickly, actually, Pam will be joined this session by Amel, Bastian, Chris, Keith, Lazarina, LuKasz, Martha, Nik. And just before I do that handing over, I just wanted to give a special shout out to Nik actually, because Nik wins the award for joining us at the most horrible time possible. Nik's joining us from Melbourne, Australia and it's just turned 3:00 AM there. So special thanks to Nik for joining us. Thank you, Nik. If you want to unmute us. Hopefully Nik can hear us okay there, or if not, we can get the audio working at her end in a bit. Tell you, I'll work... Hopefully helping Nik to hear us if she can't hear us, in the background. But in the meantime, I'll hand over to Pam to begin the discussion. Nik, can you hear us okay? Hello. Hello Nik. Okay, we'll get there. Over to you, Pam.

Pam Aungst Cronin

All right. Well, thank you so much for having me, and I'm excited to dive into talking about all these tips, nerding out about SEO even further, I was watching before there's some good stuff that's been said already. So we're just going to add to it. I think I'm going to pick on people in order of their page order in the book, so starting with page 46, let's go to Amel first. And Amel tell us about your number one tip for SEO in 2022.

Amel Mehenaoui

Hi everybody. Can you hear me well?

Pam Aungst Cronin

Yes.

Amel Mehenaoui

I think it’s about accessibility and how I feel that it's really important for-

David Bain

Amel, are you able to get just slightly closer to the microphone maybe?

Amel Mehenaoui

Sorry. Yeah.

David Bain

That's brilliant, thank you.

Amel Mehenaoui

Can you hear me better?

David Bain

Yeah, that's better.

Pam Aungst Cronin

That's good.

Amel Mehenaoui

All right. Okay, good. Sorry about that. Yeah. So, I was saying my tip was really about accessibility and how it's important to start thinking about optimizing for it. There's a lot of people who are disabled and they still use the web, but they have their own way of using it, and we need to think more about them and make sure that they can navigate the website the right way, they can access the pages easily, they can find the information they're looking for and so on. So that's really about that. And my thinking is Google is focusing more on UX, on user experience, making it better for them. So, you know that this year 2021 was really big with Google, a lot of updates, and then one of the most important one was the page experience and all the color vitals, they are all around UX. So I think and I feel that the way Google is going, at some point they will start looking at how your website is accessible to everybody and not just people in specific segments, so that's why I think optimizing for accessibility should be something that everybody needs to start talking about.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Well, I would certainly agree with that. My tip was about UX as well, from a slightly different angle, but I would certainly agree with everything you just said. And also, I think that when it comes to accessibility, even if the algorithms don't officially incorporate it using those terms, if you think about it, when people are visually disabled, they use screen reader software to read the content to them, which is a software bot essentially. What is also a software bot? Google bot. I recently actually got inquiry for potential business from a prospect who was blind, and I had never personally used a screen reader before, but in order to make sure he could read our proposal, I used one and had it read it to me, and oh man, it was not a good experience. And so not only that, but if you... I think a good exercise to understand the, kind of, Venn diagram that is two circles that intersect. The Venn diagram that is accessibility and SEO is to install a screen reader software yourself and use it on your website. I mean, that's basically how Google bot is understanding your website, right?

Amel Mehenaoui

Yeah. That's true. And it's interesting when you look at it from their side, you see that it... Oh my God, there are so many things that you can optimize, you can improve to make it easier for them to access the website. And at the same time, when we make it more accessible for disabled people, it's actually accessible for everybody, you know what I mean? It's because we're going to improve even the user experience for everyone. So it's a win-win also for Google.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Yes, exactly. Yes. So when you make your website accessible for everyone, everyone includes Google bot and everyone else, I mean, ultimately we want humans to the website, right? We use the robots to get the humans to us. So where does your tip fit in with other tips in the book? I did see another one, I think it was Alina, that was talked about accessibility or... What other tip do you think yours resonates with the most?

Amel Mehenaoui

For me, it's really related, like you said, to UX, it's part of it. Honestly, I think the magic and the beauty of SEO is we touch all aspect of the web, it's not just the technical SEO, it's not just content. With all the improvements and upgrade of Google algorithm, now we are becoming more knowledgeable about UX, about design, about even development, like with core web vitals, we're looking at JavaScript and we're learning how this script they are firing up, and how the page is rendering, I mean, a few years ago we wouldn't think about that. So that's actually a great thing for SEO profession and this accessibility tip is really related to how an SEO professional or how an SEO agency or consultant can work with the design team, with the UX team to help them optimize for accessibility from the start, not adding maybe an app quickly for a quick fix, no, why not build it from the start, instead of just adding layers of other third party script that they may make your website test may be accessible, but it may affect your site performance and so on and so on. So I really think it's related to UX.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Yep. Absolutely. There is a lot of talk about UX in all of the other tips. So two more quick questions for you, what is your favorite other tip? So something other than what we've talked about already, if possible. And what would be your number two tip had been if you had a chance to give a number two?

Amel Mehenaoui

Oh, okay. That's interesting. I didn't think about that. Well, I'd say really the fact that, I mean, the digital marketing, we tend to separate SEO from content. And I really think that we can separate them. They're one thing. It's like if we say content marketing, it's really based on SEO. So I think that if I had to kind of give a second tip, it would be really to approach content marketing from an SEO perspective, of user intent, understanding the users, what type of content they are consuming, what are their interests. Actually, if you think about it, SEO is really more than what... It's also related to psychology, to understanding users, how they use the web, how they behave on the web, it's... And I think that's what makes us all so passionate about SEO itself. So, yes, it would be really understanding that we can separate them, they're really... I see it like the SEO is the foundation of content and SEO is the foundation of the web, so we need to stop thinking about it as the back of their head.

For example, if you have a digital marketing team, SEO will come last, instead of from the start and instead of being the foundation. So, yeah, that would be that, and be thinking of SEO as linked to content, and content linked to SEO, they are one thing. And then we need to have that perspective of user intent, understanding the users.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Absolutely. Yeah. SEO touches so many different things. And again, we use the robots to lure in the humans and so it has become all about what the humans want, so UX and intent, both absolutely coming to play with that. Well, thank you very much for joining us and tell everyone where they can find you.

Amel Mehenaoui

Where you can find me, on Twitter, that's where I'm mostly active, my handle is A-M-E-L-M, so you find me there, and also LinkedIn.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Okay, great.

Amel Mehenaoui

Thank you much.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Well, thank you very much. All right. So next up, I'm going to pick on... Let's see what page number is next in order, that would be... I should have put these in order, I think page 63, Lukasz, let's go to you. Hi Lukasz.

Lukasz Zelezny

Lukasz. Nice to be here. Thank you for having me and yeah.

Pam Aungst Cronin

So summarize your tip for us.

Lukasz Zelezny

So I was talking a little bit about content and analyzing your competitors regarding to what would be the hot topic. I call this gap. And to some point it's very easy to do through the Semrush, this module is built in. But obviously I'm going a bit deeper and I'm clusterizing and sub-clusterizing keywords using Unigrams, so the one words that are the most relevant to the industry, the most relevant to the competitors, and thanks to that, for example, let's say if we are talking about holidays in Egypt, then words like pyramids, Giza, Cairo, sea, holiday would be there. And if we would talk about maybe email deliverability, bounced, spam, inbox, these Unigrams would be in our interest.

So then looking on the... You said, Pam, about Venn diagram, that's a beautiful about looking on these areas where these three, four competitors intersect and we as a customer website responsible people are not ranking there yet, but we would like to. And digging very deep there, there can be lots of interesting areas. Then I also started doing something what I call antigap, which is show me these keywords that only one out of four competitors are ranking, and I am also not ranking. Recently I found... This is very tricky area, like for mortgage for example, I found that there is a keyword people are searching in UK, "What consequence I may have for lying on my mortgage application?" for example, and it's very good to have an article about this because maybe somehow someone have, on the back of their head, to lie and you can save from serious consequences, and that person can become your customer, if you are obviously one of the website operating in a mortgage industry.

So that is my super killer tactic to go with a new content. And then looking at the intersection of multiple of competitors keywords, which are triggering all of them, but also that are triggering the same URL with the same page, that is beautiful, when you have a very big website, you can analyze 100,000 keywords, that's why I have my iMac with multi number of CPUs, just to make sure that I can really, really deal with very heavy spreadsheets.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Wow, multiple CPU-powered spreadsheets. The first thing I thought of when I looked at your tip in the book I was "Wow, that's a lot of work." And ironically, in my tip when David asked, "What's one thing that SEOs can spend a little less time on in order to spend more time on your tip?", I actually mentioned keyword research because the algorithms have gotten so much smarter and we no longer have to agonize over, like do we pick the term red sneakers or sneakers that are red? We can kind of rely on the intelligence of the algorithms at this point, but so it's kind of ironic that you're kind of emphasizing spending more time and computing power on keyword research when I mentioned that might be an area to shape some time from, so how much time does that take you or have you automated it with computing power to a point where it doesn't take extra time?

Lukasz Zelezny

I'm doing this in, kind of, like almost autopilot. I've been doing this so many times that it takes me a very short period of time, at the end you're getting very beautiful, colorful pivot table. And I love when I can hear on the back of my iMac, the sound of the fan, I know that I'm giving the hard time to the guy, and I can see CPU number seven, 100 degrees, CPU number 5, 100 degree. I can see that the guy is now feeling that is working properly. This is the same when I'm sometimes opening multiple number of tabs on my Chrome, I have couple of plugins, I'm just highlighting them, and I'm opening 50 tabs, and I'm opening them and then there is like three seconds and the fan is starting to spin, and I was like, "Uh-huh okay." so it doesn't take that long.

But it's like a massive piler of my audits that I'm preparing for my customers. And this is beautiful to explain to customer and 99% understand and agree. I'm like, "Guys, this is the moment that I can be as close as possible to the knowledge that you have in organization.". I can bring something and say "This is how I see these things from SEO perspective." Now they are showing me what they seeing, how they looking on my spreadsheets with the keyword research, from their perspective, as someone who have lots of inside knowledge, and we can blend together and we can cook something really, really amazing. Because they can say...Oh, like for example, I done gap analysis of 35 golf manufacturers, I don't play golf, I know nothing about golf. But there was for example, SkyTrak or Golf Simulator, I know now that these words are super important if you are operating in this industry. And I don't need to be an expert... This is so educational. Another thing is I don't adapt analysis like that for a serial leak, for a Russian language, I understand Russian quite okay, but I don't speak Russian.

And then finally, last time I done keyword research in Arabic. And my spreadsheet looks like... Right now, I don't understand a single word, and I'm like, "Should I do Unigrams from left side, or from the right side?" because... Even today I just received option to do something like that for Georgian market, and this is because Georgia have also own alphabet. And I think this is another dimension, of SEO... Doing keyword research in Spanish, Italian, fun, when you don't understand language sometimes you may find something funny, but it's all Latin alphabet. Going into Arabic, when you don't speak Arabic, you don't read Arabic, and you're bringing these keywords, and then you hear the feedback, first feedback is, the first sign you've done a good job is like "Hold on, are we ranking on this?" "No we don't." "Oh my gosh. How did you know that we need to rank on this keywords?" I was like, you see, you're striping all the emotion and you put just the numbers, that's it.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Wow. That is impressive. I was about to say, so really all you're doing here is trying to heat your house with keyword research, right?

Lukasz Zelezny

Yeah.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Just like me with my mining rigs. But no, you're obviously bringing a lot of value to clients you probably wouldn't otherwise be able to work with. Right? With the-

Lukasz Zelezny

Yeah, they really like this, especially these heavy clients. I don't think that this is maybe the tactic you would suggest to Local Locksmith because they don't need this, might be relying on Google, Local would be better, but for this heavy publishing websites, inventory oriented websites, properties, geo-location is brilliant.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Yeah, absolutely. So what is one of your other favorite tips in the book about something else?

Lukasz Zelezny

I don't know if I mentioned this in the book, but this is something completely new. I become a big fan of trying to find own little paths. And I just recommend aside of everything what we're doing about the CO, try to verify your website with this seals like McAfee seals or Norton seal and so on and so on. I'd done this for my SCL London, even I am not an eCommerce, even if you don't have payment gate, even if I'm not processing payments, I just wanted to show my potential customers I have that seal. I spent time efforts and money to get that seal. And maybe even I don't have this, I cannot prove it. But some, I believe that maybe that is also a small tiny factor that Google may think that, "Okay. This guy is having the seals. So I have one McAfee and one ex-Norton, which is now called DigiCert. That would be mine.

Pam Aungst Cronin

That's interesting. Yeah, that's something that we focus on, on the PPC side of things we have for a long time, on landing page optimization for paid search, we always tell clients, especially eCommerce clients, we always tell clients to have trust signals on their website on their landing page, which can be testimonials or badges like that. But yeah, I mean, it makes all the sense in the world that if the Google ad bot can interpret those as trust factors, why wouldn't the Google bot on the organic side be able to do so?

Lukasz Zelezny

Yeah.

Pam Aungst Cronin

So that's very interesting. Well, thank you for sharing all of that with us. Tell everyone where they can find you.

Lukasz Zelezny

I am available on seo.london, not seo.london.com, not seo.london.net, just seo.london because London have their own domain or just, if you really like difficult names and surname, go on LinkedIn and try to type Lukasz Zelezny and you will also find me there.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Okay. I will take up that challenge. Thank you very much for your time.

Lukasz Zelezny

Thank you for having me.

Pam Aungst Cronin

All right. Let's go too. Let's see. Who is next up? I think that would be Keith. Keith, I'm going to pick on you to tell us about your number one tip for SEO in 2022. Sorry. I didn't give you very much time to prepare to unmute.

Keith Goode

There we go. All right. So, I was double muted.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Double muted. Okay.

Keith Goode

Yeah, I have this and then I have what was on the screen there. So, hey, everyone. It's good to see you. I think what I get into mostly with my recommendation for SEO in 2022 is a lot more of the political aspects of what we do as SEOs, which is making sure that you not only prioritize your work and lay everything out into a digestible format, but you use that to help sell what you're trying to change with your stakeholder. So I'm here at Cox Headquarters here in Atlanta, Georgia, this week, which is why I'm in this weird room. I think this is where they fire people, maybe. I don't know. Because there's not a usable desk in here. And so I'm using this weird sort of coffee table type thing to-

Pam Aungst Cronin

You're like that guy in the office space movie where they put them in the basement and they take him off payroll, but they don't tell him.

Keith Goode

Milton Adams. Yes, Milton Adams.

Pam Aungst Cronin

No, that's him.

Keith Goode

Yeah, a lot of what I see coming out of agencies, for example, who try to reach out to Cox directly or when I worked at IBM and try to reach out to IBM directly, they would send this 50 page list of problems that they discovered on the site. And of course, generally speaking, if you do not prioritize a list that you hand over to your stakeholders or potential stakeholders, they're simply going to toss it because they don't know where to start. It's the paradox of choice all over again. You give them too many things to focus on, they're not going to focus on anything. So a lot of what I talk about in my recommendations is to use the LOE LOI matrix, the level of effort, level of impact matrix. And what you do with this is sort of, you take all of the problems you've discovered either in your content audit or your technical audit or otherwise, plot it out based on how much impact it's actually going to have.

So really honestly, is just changing a page title going to have that big of an impact compared to fixing all the canonicals across your site or compared to having actually a decent IA or navigation experience on your site? And then juxtapose that with the level of effort it would take to do that, because there are costs always associated with any change we're recommending to these sites. And so ideally, what you do with this is out of the matrix, you have a quadrant that is easy to implement, high and impact. These are your quick wins. You have these tough to implement, but high and impact, which are probably going to be your roadmap items, things that you can work on and incrementally improve. You're going to have your high impact, low effort... No. I'm sorry. That would be your low impact, your high effort, which you just throw those away if you can. Because if you're not going to have any reasonable impact coming out of what you're doing, try handing that over to a developer, telling them it's important.

And then what you're going to get is, you're going to have the developer going, "Okay. What did we improve after they implement it?" If you say, "Nothing," You're going to have a hard time selling them in the future for anything else you want to change. So these LOE LOI matrix is, I think, essential for selling your services to people. And for example, I work in-house, but if you're an agency.. And I apologize about the lighting here. Let me see if I can move this. You can see Atlanta in the background there. Again, the other chair with better lighting has a weird liquid on it that I can't quite identify so I didn't want to sit there.

Pam Aungst Cronin

No. No. Let's not do that. No.

Keith Goode

Yeah, so I'm not going to sit there. So, we'll just deal with the bad lighting. But I'm in-house. Again, I work for Cox, but if I was an agency, if you're doing an audit for a client, prioritize. Let them know, "Hey, listen. This is what's going to have the real impact on your site." Don't put your low impact elements at the top of the list, and tell them how work through that. This is going to not only help them, which is your ultimate job, but it's also going to build your credibility as an agency. So, that's my big tip for 2022.

Pam Aungst Cronin

That's a really good one. That definitely jumped out at me. When I first looked at it, I was like, "Wow. I think we certainly do this." When we are prioritizing things on an audit for a client, we'd certainly just kind of naturally take into account the effort versus the impact when making a list of priorities. But to put it in a matrix like that and to put such like an official analysis of the relationship between the two is something I think would be amazing if we like put it in front of the clients that way. Like do you actually like draw it out in a box somehow?

Keith Goode

I do. I put a score with each element. And keep in mind, when I'm talking about level of effort, I'm not making that up in my mind. I'm talking to the developer who has to implement this and I'm asking them, "How long do you think it would take to get this fixed?"

Pam Aungst Cronin

Okay.

Keith Goode

Because that's disingenuous otherwise, right? You're not being true to whoever you're reporting this to. So, certainly ask the people who were involved in that effort to ask them how long it's going to take them to do. And you can estimate your impact. I think a lot of us, especially seasoned SEOs have a really good sense of what would actually drive results in the end. Especially when it comes to technical SEO, we know what's going to be sort of removing your no ODP, no wide DIR directives, probably not going to have a tremendous impact on whether or not you're ranking at this point.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Yeah.

Keith Goode

But, again, fixing your canonicals or fixing your HF Lang might actually have a much bigger impact. So yeah, I do plot that out with pretty much everything I do. And I assign a score with everything in order to, in my own mind, get a sense of what I can change and what is going to be easy to do.

Pam Aungst Cronin

That is very cool. I think that one thing we don't talk about enough in SEO is communication with clients.

Keith Goode

Yeah.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Being able to clearly and effectively communicate what we feel is best for them is sometimes hard for us. We're too close to it. We're talking these technical terms, canonical and schema and blah, blah, blah. And then, we get on a call with a client, we start doing blah, blah, blah, spewing that at them. And they're like, "What?" Like is something to focus on for sure. Especially now that it's so complex.

Keith Goode

It is. And keep in mind, a lot of these executives, they just don't know. I was on a flight yesterday. I sat next to an executive, a guy that owned a company and he was asking about why his traffic isn't converting. And I was like, "Well, here's some ideas." And because I'm so close to it, they just immediately popped into my mind because we lived this stuff, right? He thought I had just started a new revolution and I had just saved his business, just five minutes of conversation with this guy. So keep in mind that, we can help these businesses, but we have to learn how to communicate in their language.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Absolutely. That's huge. I love that. All right. So I'm going to give you a choice between two questions for your last question either-

Keith Goode

Oh, no.

Pam Aungst Cronin

... and or the answer might be the same, what's one of your other favorite tips, that's about something else and or what would your number two tip had been if you had a chance to give a number tip? It might be the same answer.

Keith Goode

Yeah, that's really tough. I tend to push the concept of having a framework in mind when you're dealing with all of your issues across the site. So I have what's known as the URA SEO Framework, which is usability, relevance, authority. At IBM, we called it the 3Cs of SEO, which is crawlability, content and credibility. It's in the shape of a pyramid, which basically puts all of your technical stuff on the foundation of the pyramid.

You can have the greatest content on the planet, and if it's on a sucky platform, good luck ranking, right? And good luck engaging your clients, even if you do rank, right? Because they're just going to bail after 10 minutes of waiting for your stupid pages to load. So, having that pyramidal, is that a right word? The pyramid shaped framework of URA SEO, 3Cs of SEO, whatever you want to call it, Elena, I think calls it something like technical, content and authority or something like that. That is really important for establishing how you view each of your problems. Is it a technical problem? Is it a content problem? Is it an authority problem? And you can use that to help sort of frame your discussions and with whom you have those discussions.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Yeah, absolutely. Freedom within a framework is what I usually say. But the framework is so important. I say that to my team, like I want you to be creative and think out outside the box, but still inside the other box.

Keith Goode

Yeah.

Pam Aungst Cronin

So that we can communicate it to the clients in the way that we always do. We always say technical content, off page, similar to all the things, the structures that you just said. You have to break it down for the clients. It's too complex, it's hundreds and thousands of things we have to address. Now, you have to break it down into some kind of easy to understand categorization. So, it's another great tip. Thank you.

Keith Goode

Right. You're more than welcome. I'll give you my stapler back if it's quickly.

Pam Aungst Cronin

You're not getting that red stapler today. Sorry. All right. So tell everyone how or where to find you.

Keith Goode

You can find me at @KeithGoode, that's K-E-I-T-H-G-O-O-D-E on Twitter. I also have a website that I rarely update, but you're welcome to go out to it, if you want to, Keithgoode.com. And then Jesse McDonald and I, another SEO, have a podcast called the Austin Otaku Podcast where we talk with our search industry friends, and talk about what nerdy hobbies they're into. You'll learn nothing about SEO there though. So feel free to go out there.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Cool. Sounds great. All right. Thank you so much, Keith.

Keith Goode

Yeah.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Okay. Next I'm going to pick on and order page 97. Martha, tell us about your tip for 2022.

Martha van Berkel

Awesome. Thanks so much guys. It's such a blast seeing everyone. I was saying we should do this more often. There's so many connections between what Amel was saying and Keith was saying collaboration, communication, like it's all connected. Right? So I spoke up about structured data and I have to say, like to find a book where there's multiple pages talking about schematic and structured data. This may be a first, right? This may be a first. I have company in my nerdism around structured data. So I talk specifically about specificity and the need to actually think about how your content should be really specific and then how you structure the data to really illustrate its schematic connections and sort of how it relates to the business. And so that's what I sort of go through lots of different angles talking about and how that sort of plays a role with natural English processing that we're seeing as a trend from Google.

Pam Aungst Cronin

I love that. I like to be specific about specificity. Is that what that was?

Martha van Berkel

It may have been. Yeah, it may have been.

Pam Aungst Cronin

It's like a commercial that's running here in the states about like, "This is so new. We made a new commercial about its newness." I love it. But I nerd out about schema all the time too and structured data. And people, they obviously.... If you're not from this world, don't even know what the heck we're talking about. So if anyone's not familiar, can you give a quick breakdown on what is schema AKA structured data?

Martha van Berkel

Sure. And I always like to say like what the result is, because when we talk about...

Pam Aungst Cronin

Yeah.

Martha van Berkel

Keith talking about communicating to these businesses about what the impact is like, the outcome is actually the most exciting and important thing. And so when you see extra information in search, whether it be stars or FAQ or questions and answers, that really enrich your experience, usually answer your questions or get you more intrigued with the content, that is powered by code that we're putting on the website that basically translates the content on the website into the language of search engines known as schema.org referenced as schema markup or structured data.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Excellent explanation. That's-

Martha van Berkel

That's how I explain what I do to my mother. So, that's how I keep it real.

Pam Aungst Cronin

That's a good tip in hiding of itself for what we were just talking about with communication with clients is, we tend to assume that our clients know this stuff. We tend to assume that people that are outside of our work world don't know this stuff. See, this is the fine line though, without talking down to them and without sounding condescending, simplify it as best you can. And I think the way you just did is like the perfect example of that. So, kudos to you. So tell us about how your tip relates to another tip in the book if you've had a chance to find one. I think I saw at least one.

Martha van Berkel

Sure. Well, there's a couple, but I think it was Johnny who also talks a little bit structured data kind of specific calls out, make it about the business. And Crystal Carter also talks a little bit about that like, what to optimize should relate specifically to where you're trying to make money, where you're trying to attract clients and how you're trying to like impact them in that customer journey. And then the other one, the chapter I really like is from Paul Andre de Vera from Workday, where he talks about sematic topics. These things all come together, right? So I talk a lot about how you prioritize, where you want to do structured data and where you want to take control of where you're showing up in the search engine result page. And the specificity also plays to what Lucas was talking about, like topics and keywords and what Paul really digs into around like the semantics of topics.

And what that means is like, as you're prioritizing things about your business or as your business is saying, we really want to grow our business in this product area or this a vertical, then the content on your site should really be specifically to what they're looking for, the questions they're answering, the interest areas. And then it's not about sort of spreading that across like lots of different pages, but like really being thoughtful about how you're connecting those topics together in the content. And this is why...

And then when you're talking about accessibility, another passionate area of mind, I was like, yes, yes, yes. Because it's really that collaboration between all these teams that then really makes you get the click, get that conversion that you're trying to get for your customer. And, to me, like with structured data, once you identify the areas of the business and what you want to optimize and how you want to control the SAP, it's about working cross functionally with the content team, helping them understand how to architect their content so that right from the get-go, it's optimized and being found.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Absolutely. Yes, so a lot of more soft skills being mentioned again, communication and collaboration.

Martha van Berkel

Right.

Pam Aungst Cronin

It reminds me actually of the last part of the book or the very last tip, I should say, which I did want to touch upon in this last session about the last section in the book. The past, the Baton thing, at can we do to help new SEOs, younger SEOs that are joining the industry succeed?

Martha van Berkel

Yeah.

Pam Aungst Cronin

And I'm feeling like after this conversation, one of the most important things should be these soft skills. Like it's crucial to succeed. I mean, you need all the technical knowledge and savviness in that area, but I mean, it just keeps coming up like you. So, is there anything you would add to that or say that also the next generation should focus on?

Martha van Berkel

I think that the key thing, and what Keith mentioned and Amel mentioned which is, is like, the communication and collaboration, and then making sure that we're really talking about the impact to the business. Because whether I'm an expert in structured data and whether like you call me and I like go on and on about how you're going to do connected schema and properties and link everything, you're going to have this beautiful knowledge graph for your business, they're like, "That's great, Martha." But the way that they're going to get buy-in and they're going to be valued within their organization is if they can also connect that back to the business result, what is it that we're trying to achieve as a business together? And if technical SEOs specifically can start connecting those dots, and then here's the beauty part, is we have data, right?

We have data to then show that piece. That's how I get deals, right? Because I can connect those dots and we can articulate the value to the business. And guess what, their leaders want them to collaborate with each other and work cross functionally to achieve the business goals together. Like that's what we do as leaders in business. Right? That's the ultimate outcome. So to me, that's the aha. And I love because we do that with structured data at Schema App. Like we empower those team members to be able to drive results, cross functionally and deliver it on the business. Right? So that's at the core of like how we work and it's at the core, I think, of how tech SEOs can really be successful.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Absolutely. There's another great C-word, cross-functional. So communication, collaboration, cross-functional, these are all words and concepts that I think should be put in front of the next generation. Because I don't think that, out of the box, they're going to be thinking about focusing on honing those skills to become an SEO, but it's absolutely crucial, another C-word.

Martha van Berkel

Yeah, I love it. Now, we're like, a drink everyone. And I think the other piece is like we talk about... I don't know. That's funny. The C words is that it's all those things together, right? And it's not just in your organization, it's with your agencies, it's with your vendors, et cetera. Right. And we all win together.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Absolutely, love it. Well, thank you so much for adding such value to our core chat today. You're right. I think we should all do this more often, so we'll have to connect afterwards and think of other nerd out sessions we can we get connect, that's another one. All about to see what-

Martha van Berkel

Sorry. I'm just having too much fun.

Pam Aungst Cronin

No. That's great. All right. So tell everyone where they can find you.

Martha van Berkel

Sure. So I'm Martha van Berkel. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Schema App. You can find out more about what we do at www.schemaapp.com. And you can find me on LinkedIn, Martha van Berkel or on Twitter also Martha van Berkel.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us. All right. So next step. Let's see. Page order. So Martha was page 97. We've got a lot to get through still. So we're going to go a little bit faster. Let's see. And the screen is really small for me. Do we have Chris Green? We have Chris Green. There you are.

Chris Green

Yes.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Chris, tell us about your number one tip for 2022.

Chris Green

So, my number one tip is applying an intent first lens on the SEO that you do. And it's overlapping a lot with what's been said. So I guess it's good I get to speed through this a little bit quicker, because we've covered a lot of the reasoning behind this. But what I'm proposing is kind of almost like a solve. So, one should been burnt off the back of Lukasz mark after it's been processing all these spreadsheets. The sell for that is actually the step back from the technology part. Because whilst there's definitely a time and a place to really kind of crunch those numbers in and kind of do things in scale, I think actually there's a lot people could learn from just looking at the search and kind of actually understanding what is this app telling you when you search it. So, for any of your kind of key searches or anything, if you're really unsure about what might the user be expecting from this result. Well, actually Google's getting far better at telling you through those search results.

And I think there's many ways you could focus on this, but actually just having a look. And it's not always been the case, and Google still gets it wrong. But I would say now probably better than ever, you can have a look at that page one and say, "Well, based on this page, I have one, maybe two, maybe three intent, clear defined intents." And then when you are playing this back against your marketing efforts, I'm thinking, "Okay. I'm mapping this keyword to one of my core landing pages. Am I satisfying any of those intents? Doesn't matter if that keyword sounds interesting or it's within the space that I'm working and is this page going to satisfy that answer?"

Because if the answer's no, the chance of you ranking for it, even if you are the most authoritative page within that kind of section, is low. And that's a big shift. And I mean, for anyone that's not in SEO, this may feel almost a little bit plain and too simplistic. Because, of course, we want the intent to match, right? But if you've spent the last 5, 10, 15 years in interfaces, different tools and juggling spreadsheets and playing with pivot tables as I have and so many others here, it's easy to forget that. But one of the other things that we've seen a lot more this year is actually a lot of the tour vendors have been starting to bring intent in to this kind of keyword research layer. And obviously, you still need to get up and close and personal with the serps to really understand what's there.

But, you can scale this approach. And actually, when you are reporting on the different metrics in your business, you report on it in the different intent stages, have your keywords in the different intent stages, you might have lost one of your top funnel keywords. That's not going to impact the bottom funnel revenue yet. And it's just understanding that relationship too.

Then, one of the other things we discussed in the book is kind of the metrics and how do you measure that? And it's not to say that we're doing away with keywords or ranking or traffic, but it's a case of, share a voice is probably a really good metric for top funnel where actually just the chance of someone seeing you is the most important, whereas bottom of the funnel, ready to convert where there actually that's dollar signs that you want to be kind of measuring really kind of clearly there.

And it's just understanding, you pick the right metrics because otherwise intent won't work. Because the part of the intent analysis that always wins is the buy, the purchase part. If you're not using the right metrics appropriately at the right points, you only ever optimize at one point in the funnel, in which case you get crowded out by everybody else that's doing exactly the same thing. So, yeah, applying that intent filter, that's my kind of key for 2022.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Absolutely. It kind of falls in line with some other things we were talking about that are just not technical. Like it's strategic, it's cross-functional, it's all about understanding the buyer's journey for each client, which is so far beyond what we used to deal with an SEO keywords, matter tags and links. It's so much more than that now. It really does. It just blossomed and kind of all over every department. It really is. It's just holistic marketing. So another thing that comes to mind when I think about intent is context. And you touched upon this context of really of the SAP results search engine results, page results, for a certain term. That, throws us off more than anything. Like we found the perfect semantically related term. We have found that it's in the right intent for the user, for this business and their buying journey. And then we throw it into Google to double check the context of the SAPs and the SAPs end up being about like something else entirely from some other industry. And then we're like, well, this is perfect, but you're not going to... Like Google obviously thinks that this is that. And you're not that. So you're not going to be able rank for that.

Chris Green

Well, this is it. I've had a fantastic example recently, someone wanting to sell face masks is for moisturizing or treatment for the face. You said for face masks anywhere at the moment. You're only getting one thing and that's for COVID.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Wow. That's perfect. Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Chris Green

Perfect query. And so the client said, "Well, how do we rank for that?" I said, "Well, you don't." Like if you run the search for face mask and you see that you're not trying to buy an N95 mask, then, how do you modify that query?

Pam Aungst Cronin

Right. Exactly.

Chris Green

And, actually, there might be two or three different ways that you might modify that, but that's the keywords that you get in there. You don't abandon face mask because that is still the essence of what it is. And hopefully God willing, we will have less need face masks in the future. But until that point we have and it is the key part. It don't transmit upstream. Even if it feels intuitive, Google isn't showing it. You're not going to see it unless-

Pam Aungst Cronin

Yes, exactly. You got to always, always do that last double check and that face mask is the perfect example where you might need to pivot to facial mask if those results are more in line with facial treatments. Yeah. So, wow. That's a perfect example. I'm going to use that one. Thank you. All right. Real quick, if you had a number two, if you had a chance to talk about something else entirely, what would've been?

Chris Green

Okay. So, I've changed my mind actually listen to everyone talk. So that shows how good the discussion's been. But I think it's coming back to soft skills and obviously we talked about soft skills for people getting in to SEO and actually communication telling a story, making a business case. I think that's kind of a given and you covered that well.

I think actually for me, it's more of, the people that have been doing this for longer and it's this whole kind of concept of the unconscious incompetence and actually, how do you keep in check that your knowledge and skills aren't slipping without you realizing it? And I think in this industry, that's a particularly key one. And actually I think from that, without going off on a massive discussion about it, what I'd say is fundamentally being curious. I mean, actually being really close to measure everything you do, does it actually work?

There's so many things that we are going off that are three or four years old pieces of advice potentially even longer that may or may not be correct. And it's just check yourself at every occasion. I think nobody is immune to that. I still remember when Google said, "Our pagination, documentation's been out of date for a little while." I hate to think how many hundreds of thousands of dollars were wasted on people getting that implemented just because of an error, but we're all susceptible. So it's just checking yourself.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Wow. That's really good. Even Google themselves are susceptible to it for the example you just pointed out. Excellent. Another excellent tip to keep ourselves in check in order to properly bring in the next generation as a good example of how flexible you have to stay in this industry. Awesome stuff. Tell us where we can find you.

Chris Green

Cool. Mostly on @ChrisGreenSEO. Yeah., best place to find me. Keep it simple. I'm available like all the time DMs open. Drop me a message.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Excellent. Thank you so much. All right. I'm going to abandon the page order thing because I realize we have Nik who is in a time zone where it's 3:00 AM her time. And I feel like we should let her get this over with so she can go back to bed. So Nik, tell us about your tip.

Nik Ranger

Thanks so much. It's actually 3:50 AM now.

Pam Aungst Cronin

3:50. Whoof?

Nik Ranger

But honestly, it's an absolute pleasure to be here and...

Pam Aungst Cronin

I think you hit the mute button by accident. We lost you for a sec.

Nik Ranger

No. Like if I hit it then I'm going back to sleep. No, it's an absolute pleasure to be here and to be here with a wonderful panel of experts. I look up to each and every one of you. Yeah, it's really, really great to be here. My tip was around JavaScript rendering mainly because like for the last two years, we've just hit like the acceleration towards a lot of site migrations and a lot of looking at different technology stacks. And I'm also seeing people come off the back of site migrations and finding that basically the whole thing is client-side rendered and they're like, "We launched it." And then it was an absolute annihilation, we've got all the bells and whistles here, why isn't it working?

Quite simply, if you are utilizing JavaScript, it's not a bad thing. And don't think about it as a bad thing. But if you're using that JavaScript framework, the default will be quiet side renderings. So that means like the bare bands over the piece of that, it's just not going to always be able to find it. So there's two main downsides with that. It's going to have a poor user experience. And the other one being that it's effect on this air change bot, like it's got multiple waves of indexing.

And if it isn't being able to go through that full render process and be able to see it, it's just not going to index what it cannot see. So it's going to have a lot of trouble finding new pages. It's going to have a lot of trouble indexing content that you're really wanting to have there for consideration. So, how do we as SEOs approach this stuff? Well, I kind of like a nine step kind of methodology here. So, one, know what's been served as client side and what's been served as service side rendered content. There's all kinds of things you can do to be able to you check this, turn your JavaScript off, reload the page, be able to see how it goes and be able to do a Fetch & Render with your Search Console and just be able to see how it's being perceived to the bot. And at the same time, if it's partially rendered, just keep in mind that server side rendering can be expensive and intensely resource intensive. So this is now thinking like, "Okay, step two. Skip that rendering queue, deliver critical content in the server response."

So JavaScript has to be executed either on the server or on the user browser. So when you actually do execute that server side, you will be able to shift the results or the render content into user, into the initial HTML. Many frameworks, really common ones, Angular or React, have these functions either natively available or there's other things you can do with CloudFlare workers, with orange to orange if you are using Shopify, or with Lambda and AWS and all kinds of other stuff like printrender.io are other common good ones.

Prioritize the scripts that you need. Honestly, look at how they've been downloaded, how they've been parsed, compiled, executed, and regardless of whether or not it contributes to the content of the page, consider what are the things that are a priority. So development tools are absolutely awesome for this. Just go through that, click the three dots in the upper right hand corner, search more tools or coverage, reload the page, and then you will be able to see that. And as a bit of a thing to look up, an effective page should be around or less than one megabyte. So you can through that, look at things that are loading on the that and think, "Okay, these are necessary, these aren't necessary."

And how to assess that? Four. Prioritize user experience, or maybe your bulky third-party scripts. Third-party scripts can be awesome, but again the bells and whistles, you need every single little element of that. Do you need to be able to see everything? They can negatively impact the performance. So again, just take those things into consideration and prioritize things that you need to, and deprioritize things that you don't. Five. What to prioritize. Five. You can lazy load images and scripts and things like that without blocking the renderer experience. So I think images are generally the most commonly requested assets and things like that. So lazy loading is something is really, really great, and it's also natively supported as of Chrome 76.

So simply add an attribute to be able to deliver the best value with the smallest dev time needed. So it's one that if you are working with devs and they're like, "Oh God, we're going to go through this experience," it can be a nice one just to be like, "Guys, let's help each other here." Or even be able to look at this stuff, and asynchronous. I can't say this.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Too much coffee. Blame the coffee.

Nik Ranger

Oh, man.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Oh, no, we got you muted again. Your mute button must be within the firing range of your talking with your hands.

Nik Ranger

Yeah. I'm trying to keep them up here.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Okay, you're back. We are running a little short on time and I'm dying to hear the rest of this. Can you fly through it, and then of course everyone should go to a page in the book, page 296 to read this in full?

Nik Ranger

100%. Six, keep your script on small. Seven, case your stuff. Eight, I guess performance and rendering are directly related to one another. So it's really good to be able to look at this. Look at the Time To First Bytes, Time To First Interactive, really, really great ones. And number nine, JavaScript isn't the devil in the shadows. It can be really, really awesome. Just smart about how you use it. And that's pretty much the wrap up of everything that I can say right now in this short time.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Awesome. Awesome. I love it. I love it. Like I said, I want to dig into this more. I nerd out about this kind of stuff so much. So I'm definitely going to read more about your tips in the book on page 296. Tell everyone where else they can find you other than page 296.

Nik Ranger

Yeah. Find me on Twitter. I think my username is my Twitter handle, @nikrangerseo. Or just email me directly, I don't mind. nik[ at ]studiohawk.com today. But yeah, I'm not going to buy any links. Cheers, guys.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Very cool. Well, thank you very much for joining us at such an obscene hour. And next up, real rapid fire, we're going to have to speed it up, unfortunately, but I think that I'm going to pick the related thing. I think most closely related to what she just talked about is Bastian's tip about platformless serverless SEO. Tell us about that.

Bastian Grimm

You just did that on purpose because you know I speak fast, huh? So I figured that might happen.

Pam Aungst Cronin

I left you for last on purpose, absolutely.

Bastian Grimm

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Go figure. I'm not sending links, so don't worry. No. It was an interesting topic in a way, because I think Nick Wilsdon also talked about it in some more details or just maybe I keep it brief. So what I addressed was just the need. It is a fairly technical topic, but I think you can use serverless or Edge SEO also for just for example, getting together business cases in a very simplistic manner because what we all face, I guess, is the problem that there is a shortage of either development resources or project management resources or just generally resources in a way, but yet stakeholders for a reason want to see, let's say a business case first, before they commit to any resource, really, especially on the development front. So if you have something that you can't prove and you just come with an SEO crystal ball, in a way that makes it relatively hard, I would say.

So I think one of the reasons that I'm a huge fan of the Edge environment in general is because you can with fairly limited effort. And it's quite funny because it ties in also quite nicely with what Nick was saying, because essentially it's also JavaScript. Workers, especially the Cloudflare Workers are very simplistic JavaScript files in a way. So it's fairly easy to do, and with fairly limited amount you can prove things in a way. I would use those for building business cases or just testing implementations without actually having to touch the origin server, so essentially your server, which would normally require dev resource, right?

So the way we go about it oftentimes, especially from an agency perspective if we have to prove if something actually works or is worth committing the effort on is that we do that on the Edge in a way, and then say, "Look, there's a business case for this." And after that, we get the resources and then move it over into the actual environment, because there's also a bit of the danger. And I think this is also a part that I addressed very briefly. Working on the Edge is fairly powerful, you can literally do a lot of things. But on the other hand, it can also open the doors to really break things in a way, because if you change code on the Edge without actually reaching the origin server, then its extremely hard for the developers to figure out why things potentially are going wrong.

So it's a bit of both, right? It's great, it's fast, it's powerful. But on the other end it bears the risk of you messing things up, maybe even not on purpose. So it's a bit of both, but I think it's a great tool to just get things done and show impact of the things where you normally would have to go with the queue, get the project management done, get into development queue, get it rolled out. In larger organizations for those that deal with the more enterprisey clientele that usually takes half a year, worst case a year. And then there's even situations where you have clients that can't even touch some of their servers anymore because all the developers actually have left the company and no one is like, "Nah, we're not going to touch this because that might just break and we have no idea what's going to happen." So for that, it's also really cool to use stuff on the Edge to do quick fixes until maybe those platforms actually get suspended. So I think there's various different use cases to benefit from this new tech in a way, yeah?

Pam Aungst Cronin

Absolutely, yeah. Thank you for packing so much value into a really fast spoken tip there. It's really complex stuff though.

Bastian Grimm

It is, yeah.

Pam Aungst Cronin

I know what you're talking about. Some of the audience may not be so sure what you're talking about. How would you give us a more simplified analogy of what we're talking about here? I'm thinking it's like making a photocopy of a page of a book and then writing your own notes on it. It's making changes to a website, sort of like that. How would you simplify it?

Bastian Grimm

So essentially the way it works is if you're using any type of content delivery network, the request comes through this CDN and then goes to what we call the origin server, which is your web server. And that thing sends it back to the CDN and the CDN sends it back to your browser, right on the phone or on the desktop. And with Edge SEO or service SEO, what you're basically going to do is you go at the first layer. So you do the modification on the CDN level. That means that the request will never really reach the origin, so your website. And the benefit of that is that you can do very quick things on the Edge with predefined, let's say functionality and code. And due to that, you don't have to involve a huge tech chain of things that are probably going to have to happen. You don't need to attach your templates. You don't need to work with the CMS. You don't need to do XYZ, you just go in the platform that could be a CloudFlare, for example.

There's others as well, but you go to CloudFlare, they have an administration panel. There's a section that's called Workers. You have predefined functionality, you said, "I want to have this worker that runs on URL XYZ, and it does ABC." That's for example, I want to read the meta description, and I want to change my culture action from click here to visit now. So very simple stuff you can do with literally 10 lines of code. And the cool thing is really, you can do it yourself in a way. Again, make sure you involve your stakeholders, but you could potentially do it yourself. And that's, I think, the beauty of it, because you don't have to wait for whatever needs to happen in your organization to actually happen, you're just faster.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Absolutely. Yeah. So CloudFlare Workers would be one of the most common ways to do that. So if anyone wants to learn more, basically look into how that works. Would that be accurate?

Bastian Grimm

Yeah, that's the go-to place. There's others that have similar, I would say, implementations, but they are by far A, the most widely used CDN provider right now, and B, I would say also technically the most advanced one right now. They do a lot of things really well. So if I would start out with that, that would be my go-to. It's got very good documentation also. And you can test it for free, which is really great. So there's a $0 account that's absolutely good enough to just build your own first worker and see what it actually does and figure out if that's for you, in a way. So that's also a very low barrier to entry.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Yes, definitely. All right. So I know we're short on time, but I'm dying to ask you if you can quickly give me a little insight on the difference between this, that we're talking about, this Edge SEO with CloudFlare Workers and static sites.

Bastian Grimm

Yeah. I think the fundamental difference is that you can essentially react on the fly to things with Workers, which if you generate something as a static, you have a build process in the background, so it takes the data from any type of CDN in a certain interval, like every X minutes, then it creates a static HTML copy, puts it on the server, again, very simply speaking. And then you serve this HTML. The beauty of that obviously is if it's static, it's extremely fast. Of course, if the static file calls a million JavaScript files, then it's not fast, but generally speaking the static files are extremely fast. And on the other hand, the dynamic ones are not, but what you can do, and this is why I think in my mind Edge is the better option, you can do all the performance optimization on the Edge as well.

So you can do caching, what Nick mentioned. You can do all of that stuff on the Edge in a worker as well. So essentially it combines in my mind the best of two worlds. You A, have the dynamic aspects of modifying things on the fly with the worker and with the whatever logic you come up with. Plus, you can then combine it and use it for, which is originally where it comes from, any type of performance optimization work. But yeah, static is certainly if you don't want to go on the CDN for cost or other reasons, static is certainly a good option to just at least preserve or even optimize performance. For sure. Yeah.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Interesting. Awesome. Thank you so much for nerding out with us about that. Tell people where they can find you other than page 305 in the book.

Bastian Grimm

I think LinkedIn. Just my name Bastian Grimm is probably the easiest. I'm usually the first. Otherwise, on Twitter also works. B-A-S-G-R is the handle there.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Excellent. Thank you so much. All right. So last, but certainly not least. And forgive me if I don't pronounce your name correctly. It's a beautiful name. Lazarina?

Lazarina Stoy

That's perfect, thank you.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Okay, great. Beautiful name. Thank you. What is your number one tip for 2022?

Lazarina Stoy

So my tip is about being lazy, essentially with some of the boring stuff that all of us have to do that we know won't get us very far ahead, but we still do them. So try to embed machine learning into processes and then focus your efforts into building systems that essentially scale performance. And I'm saying this because I can see right now that there's so much opportunity to get started with scripts, python, machine learning, and they're so beginner friendly. You have stuff like Colab notebooks and Jupyter notebooks being shared around in the industry. And from some of the people that I know that have been longer in the industry, that has not always been the case. So we are very, very lucky in that regard, and the barrier to entry essentially has decreased quite a lot.

And also our knowledge about the processes that might not be as impactful for our clients has also improved. So having this in mind, there's a lot of opportunity for us to not only increase our value when we are delivering audits. Like for instance, we know we don't have captions to our images. We don't have all text. Well, we can generate this with a script that uses machine learning like Microsoft Vision API, for instance. We know that we don't have meta descriptions and we can quickly generate this using bat for instance. So there is so much opportunity to embed machine learning into processes. And by doing this, we will not only be challenging ourselves to focus our efforts on something that will be a lot more impactful, but we will also be providing a lot more value to our clients by shifting their attention to things that are a lot more impactful for their revenue and their important metrics as well.

So this is my tip in a nutshell. Just be lazy, use the scripts and tools that other people provide and just don't get intimidated by the fact that it's code, that it's Python, or that it's JavaScript. It does not matter. There are so many low code or no code alternatives out there, you just have to Google it essentially. So, that's the tip.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Very cool. I like it, be lazy. And side benefit, if you do enough of this computing power with machine learning, you can heat your house with it too.

Lazarina Stoy

Yeah, absolutely.

Pam Aungst Cronin

So what is one other thing that you saw as a tip in the book that you loved, or just one other thing you would've given if you had been given a chance which you're now been being given a chance to say a number two.

Lazarina Stoy

Well, thank you for the chance. I loved Orit's tip. Actually, she talks a lot about clustering keywords and internal linking, and how to approach this from a more holistic perspective in order to not only give value for users, but also to increase the understanding of bots when they're crawling your site, and this is something that I've been talking a lot about as well. And it's also a great opportunity to embed machine learning into this because there are so many clustering algorithms and topic modeling algorithms that can actually help you to understand the content on the site, and especially if it's a large site.

And also we are seeing all of these tools being implemented for clustering keywords as well. So these are very good opportunities to actually break down the process that is typically quite complex, and for bigger sites it can be very, very time intensive as well, and just use machine learning as an ally. And also again, as many people have said and earlier on throughout the day as well, just put user intent first and try to enhance the user journey using internal linking. So I love that tip and I absolutely support it.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Very cool. I love how there hasn't been much debate in this conversation. Everyone's just ferociously agreeing with each other, but it's awesome. I love it. Keep touching upon the same things. So in the spirit of the last chapter of the book, the CANEI, what is it? Continuous And Never Ending Improvement. And that last tip, which I love about passing the baton onto the next generation of SEOs, how do you think we can continue to improve ourselves as SEOs as has been talked about a little bit, but in your opinion, what's one thing we can do to be a good example for the next generation.

Lazarina Stoy

I think it's been said a lot and it's just so simple, but it has to be said again, and let's just keep learning. That's it. Every day, even if it's just the smallest thing, what have you learned today? I see this all the time on Twitter, people just sharing, "I just learned a new sheet formula today," or "I just learned how to do this new thing today." I tested this, I tested that. So I think this is super, super important. And I think for new people coming into the industry that are very curious and that have a very fast-paced mind, this is something that is very appealing to them because they can see that there are people that have been in the industry for 20 plus years and what they say is we learn every day, and it keeps changing. So this is amazing to me personally, because I'm quite new in the industry as well. So I can absolutely say that the newer people coming in, they would love this as well.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Very cool. So learning can help you be lazy, especially when it comes to machine learning, right? Just to be silly about some of that. Yeah. Yeah, no, that was excellent tips though. Thank you so much for joining us. Tell people where they can find you other than page... Where's your page number? 287 in the book. Where else can they find you?

Lazarina Stoy

Twitter, LinkedIn, and if you want to read any of my posts or dashboards or anything on my site, everywhere is Lazarina Stoy.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Very cool. Well, thank you very much for your time.

Lazarina Stoy

Thank you.

Pam Aungst Cronin

I assume David's going to pop back in with us in a moment there. Wow, he's fast. There he is.

David Bain

That was an absolutely incredible session. That was so full of additional information. I think this session could be a book by itself. I'm not going to produce a book out of it, but it could be in theory.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Why not?

David Bain

Actually, I'll tell you what, Majestic are actually producing a full transcript of everything that's gone on during this we four hour plus session. And I'm very conscious whenever I mention things like that. I'm just conscious of the person typing out, whatever is actually going to be shared that a transcript is going to be created. It becomes a bit surreal thinking about it. But anyway, it was a lot of incredible, wonderful content. I just want to thank first of all, Chris who had to head off there a second ago. Amel, Lazarina, Nick, Bastian, Keith, Martha, Pam, such an absolutely wonderful session. Really, really appreciate you being part of this.

I think this session just rung home to me, how it really was a wonderful mix of people who are maybe traditional old guard SEO and come from a long lived traditional SEO with a lot of newer minds and newer ways of doing SEO and progressive thinking as well. And I think this whole project has just been a tremendous mix of those two different thought processes, and I really appreciate everyone being involved. So thank you again.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Thank you. It's an awesome opportunity to be involved in this. So thank you to you and Majestic, and like was said, I think a bunch of us should get together more often. We ferociously agree with each so well.

David Bain

Indeed, indeed. Just before we head off, I'm just going to remind the viewer that obviously this project is part of SEO in 2022. That's available as a book. It has received one more positive rating on Amazon as we've been live, which is wonderful. It's still number one in search engines, certainly in the UK, which is just phenomenal. If you don't want to get the book of you, if you're not an avid reader, feel free to consume the videos. So obviously that was the live preview of all these recordings here. You can get all the actual recordings of the interviews on Majestic YouTube channel. You can also listen to an Apple podcast and Spotify there as well.

And someone asked in the chat about 20 minutes ago, "When's Aleyda on?" Aleyda's not part of the live stream, but she's just tweeted actually. "Just got my SEO in 2022 book right now." So there we go. She's got the book, she's exploring it herself there as well. And I'll tell you what I'm just going to do to finish off. I'm going to play a little segment of Aleyda's tip. So there's just about three or four minutes of Aleyda's tip for this particular project.

Aleyda Solis

I believe that we have already reached a point in SEO maturity that we are able to stop focusing so much on avoiding SEO issues and errors and trying to lift the base of the websites that we work on from accountability and indexability perspective in the best shape, and start focusing much more on how and where we can build up in order to grow our results and take the results into the next level and become much more competitive. Building new initiative or developing new initiative that really, really, really can connect in a much better way with our search audience. And for that, I do think that using new SEO testing platforms will become much more of a norm, and I highly, highly recommend that if you haven't yet started to use many of the very, I will say, easier to use and cheaper testing platforms, you can start doing it so right away to not get behind this trend.

David Bain

So as SEO testing, what are we talking about here? Are we talking about split testing or something else?

Aleyda Solis

Indeed. AB testing, for example. Doing experiment, developing even I will say, a little bit sometimes we are asked to prove to decision makers, what will be the potential, what can be expected of certain efforts, especially when these are non-trivial efforts that require not only technical, but also content and even product changes. And for that, I believe that we have now these tools that can be easily implemented through JavaScript, for example, Semrush, Split IO can be implemented via JavaScript. SEOtesting.com is another tool that can easily connect with the Google Search Console. Same with CB, the new CyberChef tool. And then we have all the tools like RankSense, for example, that we leverage CDNs, we leverage Cloudflare Workers in order to be able to run this test that can become also pilot projects for our bigger efforts and can help us to show the impact without having to wait for ages.

And also to make sure that we do it with a good testing framework. To establish contract groups, to develop these experiments in a way that actually makes sense, and we can prove that before implementing something in millions of URLs, it actually makes sense for this groups of different areas where we have already been able to check and validate that it's good for our own specific context. And I think that that also solved a lot of these it-depends issues and challenges that we have in SEO. Like we can validate with these pilot projects and testing projects that the context is aligned in this case to what we are recommending and is beyond generic best practices that sometimes will work, sometimes they won't.

David Bain

So that was just a brief summary of Aleyda's tip there as well. The last four hours and 20 minutes was a brief introduction to SEO in 2022. Now it's time for the main course now, which is the book. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today, please grab a copy of the book if you can, or watch the video series, subscribe to the podcast. But I think the main thing is if you can, keep the conversation going. What your opinion is, is just as important. So what is your number one SEO tip for 2022? @majestic #SEOin2022.

It'd be great to hear from you. Pam has been our wonderful host for the fourth session there as well. Thanks again, Pam, for being a part of this. You're always an exquisite host, so it was great to have you on.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Thank you so much. I'm glad my voice hung in. I have got a little bit of a cold going on, so I hope it wasn't sounding too horrible, but I got through it.

David Bain

It was perfect. It was perfect. I can relate with that. I've got a bit of a cold as well, and I was thinking, "I don't know if I could do four hours by myself." I've done these kind of things for four hours by myself before, and you've got to be in top health to be able to do that sort of thing because I think they really exercise, was the best thing.

Pam Aungst Cronin

Absolutely.

David Bain

But absolutely superb. Thanks again to Alina for the first session, Jason for the second session, Dixon for the third session, and Pam for the fourth session there. I've been your host David Bain. You can find me over at castingcred.com. I also just want to take a second just to thank everyone who contributed to this massive project. Thanks to Majestic for entrusting me to bring it together. If you haven't tried Majestic, you need to check out their link intelligence data in the platform. So sign up for free at majestic.com to try that out.

And of course, thanks to the 66 people, the 66 world leading SEOs who took part in this project and a special thanks to the 35, I believe, contributors who took part today. Absolutely superb stuff. So I think the last thing is, thanks you for watching. If you've been watching for the full four hours, I I've seen a couple of you, I think, at least for the full four hours. I think Simon Cox probably wins the gong for comments absolutely throughout the whole thing. So interaction is very much appreciated. So we appreciate-

Pam Aungst Cronin

I think Bibi deserves an honorable mention in that regard too. She's been cheering on for a long time.

David Bain

Bibi as well. Absolutely, yes. And me for screening her comments to make sure that only the correct ones were displayed publicly. Yeah. So yeah, Bibi absolutely deserves that. There we go. And Simon Cox saying, "I have dipped here tonight." Well, it certainly seems that you've been here most of the time. I just want to say until we meet again, have a wonderful Christmas, have a great new year if you can. Stay safe, and as I always say, stay hungry, stay foolish, and stay subscribed. Aloha.