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Speaker 1

00:00

All right, Eli, let's jump right into it. So first question, does SEO still matter in 2018, or can companies ignore it and focus on other channels?

Speaker 2

00:09

So this is a question I get asked a lot, and I've been asked this question many years past. And sometimes the answer could have been maybe. But now I definitively think that SEO absolutely matters and will matter even more.

Speaker 2

00:21

And the primary reason is companies were using other channels to drive acquisition. Startups could start their company and think of, say, PR or paid media. They've raised some money. They can use paid media to generate buzz and generate new clients.

Speaker 2

00:36

But those channels have now gotten significantly more expensive. Brand CPCs on AdWords have gone up. Facebook has made it a lot harder to get an organic reach, and now you're paying for traffic on Facebook. PR in our world where we want to measure everything, it's not as measurable.

Speaker 2

00:53

And then what happens is companies do spend a bunch of money on those different channels. They're maximizing their paid budgets on Google. They're maximizing their paid budgets on Facebook. They may even go into Bing and say, hey, maybe I have some potential market opportunity on Bing, and then they're like, what's next?

Speaker 2

01:11

And what they do is they look in their analytics tools, they're like, all right, we've got breakdown on the channels, we've got all this direct traffic, Don't know anything about that, don't know what to do to get more. We have referral traffic, those are outbound deals. Some of those people linked to us, some of those things we did intentionally. We have our paid channel.

Speaker 2

01:27

Great, we know what we're doing there, organic. So this is an untapped channel, We don't know what we did. We followed some best practices. We read SEO for dummies.

Speaker 2

01:35

We did what we thought was right. It's driving business. Very, very little investment. And then they think, maybe if we invest in it, now we'll get so much more and we'll intentionally be working on this channel.

Speaker 2

01:46

So I think that's where we are in 2018, where this is the untapped channel. This is the channel which has been driving business for free, and now if companies put effort in it, it'll actually generate significant returns.

Speaker 1

01:57

Edith Warren And where should they get started? Say they're at just the bare minimum, they have a little bit of content, maybe a blog or something, but where should they really focus their energy

Speaker 2

02:09

in the beginning?

Speaker 1

02:09

Brian W. Young It

Speaker 2

02:09

really depends on the kind of company. So if it's an e-commerce company, they want to think about architecture. And any e-commerce company thinking about SEO, they should have thought about SEO before they chose their e-commerce platform.

Speaker 2

02:21

They want to make sure the site is structured properly to scale. What do you do if you get a new distributor and now you're ready to add 10,000 products and your website can't handle 10,000 products and now you're going to load it up and each URL's going to be 1234567. Next one's 1234568. So that's not going to scale for SEO.

Speaker 2

02:40

You're not going to have any way of putting in your right product descriptions and optimizing against likely competitors that are selling the same products. So that's e-commerce. They should focus on good architecture, or should have focused on good architecture long before. Media, that's kind of different.

Speaker 2

02:56

That's where they can look at what has worked for them in the past. And My favorite search tool is Google Search Console because it's from Google. It may or may not be as accurate as can be, but it's probably more accurate than other tools which are sort of projecting what the actual truth

Speaker 1

03:12

is.

Speaker 2

03:13

Using that tool, they can see what's working. Here's what we're getting traffic on, then marry that data with analytics. Here's what's actually performing and converting for us.

Speaker 2

03:21

That's where they should double down. Build more content there, build more conversion elements on that, and expand.

Speaker 1

03:31

Who's doing it really well?

Speaker 2

03:33

I think media companies have actually gotten around to doing this really well. The way they cross-link and just have every sort of page possible, so you take an item in the news today, they've got all these cross-links to things they've written in the past, which suddenly can become relevant to the searcher. It's not newsworthy anymore, but if someone searches it like, hey, maybe they want to hear about a cow that got struck by lightning 4 years ago, and there's a display ad.

Speaker 2

03:58

So I think media has gotten around to really maximizing the value of their content. When it comes to e-commerce, it's really only Amazon that's doing it amazing. Amazon has built a structure where every single product, and they have billions of SKUs, somehow is discovered by the search engines. And if you manage to put in the right keywords that match that right product, you will find it.

Speaker 1

04:19

And what are the, okay, so let's like be a little bit more specific. So what are the exact mechanisms they're using to be discoverable?

Speaker 2

04:27

So for the most important thing when it comes to SEO and making sure that your site is somewhat optimized for SEO, is that the site is fully crawlable. So no orphan pages. So Amazon has built this structure where no matter what the product is, it may be something that there's only 2 customers in the world.

Speaker 2

04:47

That product is somehow cross-linked. If Google drops their bot anywhere within the site, it will crawl through the whole site. It may take a long time, but it will find that page. That's where anybody that wants to do this right has to think about, like, what is this thing that I'm putting on, whether it's an article or a product, what is it related to to make sure that there's a path for that page to be found by a bot?

Speaker 2

05:11

And that's where Amazon's doing an amazing job of making sure There is a taxonomy for every single page. Every page is discovered, and every page can be ranked with the right queries.

Speaker 1

05:22

So in the context of a company that's not an e-commerce company, would you recommend using plugins to display relevant content to link to other pages or building your own? How would you actually set up that architecture? Paul

Speaker 2

05:34

Matzkoff So for media, you can use a plugin because all you're trying to do is create relevance

Speaker 1

05:42

and

Speaker 2

05:42

get links. If users click it, great. If they don't click it, okay.

Speaker 2

05:47

But things should be built for users. When it comes to e-commerce, there has to be a good plugin or something built internally because you're not going to want to have, say, a red sweater cross-linked over to a dog leash. So that's where a plugin that correlates between, hey, red, and here's a red dog leash, that's not going to work, so you might want to build something internally. Again, media, what a lot of media companies do is they're just looking for relationships.

Speaker 2

06:18

1 thing I found to be very effective for cross-linking is just randomization. So if you randomize your URLs, you make sure that provided your randomization algorithm is correct, every single URL ends up being cross-linked. So if users click it, great. If they don't end up clicking, you still have achieved that level of cross-linking that Google can discover.

Speaker 1

06:38

So just literally random pieces of content or products added in there?

Speaker 2

06:43

Products, not so much, because there is a user experience to that. When it comes to articles, it will work. Really?

Speaker 2

06:50

Because again, someone's reading some article. They're reading about something that President Trump said today, and there's an article about somebody getting struck by lightning. They may click it, and it could be relevant. And who's to say that that's not another article that might be interesting?

Speaker 1

07:07

Peter T. Leeson Yeah, well I think that will always be interesting. What about paying for links on other sites?

Speaker 2

07:12

That's an absolute no-no according to Google. However, people still do it. And they're doing it through a business development relationship.

Speaker 2

07:20

If it's done purely just to get the SEO link, then it's not advisable because someone could report that to Google and you don't want to go down that path of buying links.

Speaker 1

07:31

It seems like there are so many of these don't dos, these no-nos. What are the other things people should absolutely watch out for?

Speaker 2

07:38

The big 1 is anything that you're not comfortable talking about maybe to your mother. So like, you know, hiding text at the bottom of the page so you're building a bunch of content. If it's not something you're going to be proud of, that's probably something you shouldn't do.

Speaker 2

07:54

The way Google really puts it, if you're doing it explicitly to rank for SEO, then that's probably something you shouldn't do. They have a bunch of rules around that, but really there's nothing you should be doing that's just for crawlers.

Speaker 1

08:07

It

Speaker 2

08:07

should all be for users. Maybe if there's some relevance for hidden text on a page for users, you might have an explanation. Brian.

Speaker 1

08:14

Right, okay. And then are there things that were maybe quite useful in the past that are no longer relevant? Like meta keywords, stuff like that.

Speaker 1

08:25

Are there things that are kind of just no longer useful?

Speaker 2

08:28

So meta keywords is a great example of something that's no longer useful. And the reason meta keywords existed is because Google and other search engines actually were relevant at the time, didn't have a really good way of understanding text. So now we're in the stage of development around search, where Google announced today that Google Home understands Spanish.

Speaker 2

08:48

So the understanding of spoken words, and their understanding of spoken words is not even in English, so they don't need you to put meta keywords on a page to say what you're trying to rank for. But back then when search was early, They kind of did. Google was more advanced than other search engines as they were able to determine what the page was about. However, meta keywords was still a signal of maybe what's on the page.

Speaker 2

09:11

Of course, marketers spam that by putting what they thought would be the most relevant words, which are usually porn, because

Speaker 1

09:18

that's what people were searching for. And what about actually, so we obviously, this is on YouTube. When YouTube asks for keywords, do you recommend people use those?

Speaker 1

09:29

I mean, like we use them, but to a limited extent.

Speaker 2

09:32

So YouTube's different because Google's not great at really understanding what the video is about. Yeah. So by giving more information and it could be a transcription it's those keywords that you put in you're giving a better indication of what the video is about.

Speaker 2

09:47

With YouTube though, it's really hard to guarantee a ranking. So the more information you can give, the more likely you have a chance at playing that game. 1 other place where keywords are really important and they're hidden is when you're trying to rank an app on the App Store. So on Google, the way they rank an app is based on all the visible text.

Speaker 2

10:05

So it's the name of the app, which is sort of like the title, the short description, which is forget how many characters, but a shorter description of the app, which you see right above the fold, And then the long description, which is thousands of characters where you just fill in whatever you want. So all of that goes into what Google's going to rank the app on Google Play. On iOS, there are keywords, and I think you have 100 characters hidden. So if you're trying to rank an app on, let's say, selling something random, but you think that people are going to search porn keywords, that's where you would hide it.

Speaker 2

10:39

No 1 would even know that's what you're trying to rank

Speaker 1

10:41

on. Oh, man. Okay, gotcha. And so when it comes to actually like, building out your SEO, like, What is the kind of content that's important?

Speaker 1

10:49

Because we talk about content marketing, we've talked about it in podcasts before, we've talked about it in the context of YC and other companies, and oftentimes people just kind of copy what other companies are doing, And that's not always the most effective strategy. So how do you frame, what's the most important content to be actually working on for your company, whatever that might be?

Speaker 2

11:12

So content's something that people have talked about forever and they had this thing, content is king, and they used it for, like you said, content marketing. But really, it's something that we always need to underscore when it comes to SEO, is because people stop using content. If you fill up a page with images or video or JavaScript, you no longer have content.

Speaker 2

11:33

So Google, as much as they say they're really good at understanding and ranking JavaScript, they're not. Because in real time, when they're looking for your content, you are handicapping yourself by not having just raw text words on the page.

Speaker 1

11:46

So when

Speaker 2

11:46

it comes to SEO content, raw text words on a page. And it's not really a truism that more is better, but it is sort of. Because if you have a product description and you only have 100 words and then somebody else has the same product but they have 1,000 words in different ways of describing the product, more than likely, they will get more search traffic because as people search different keywords related to it, they become relevant because they've used the words, and you are not relevant because you have not used the words.

Speaker 2

12:15

So in that sense, more keywords are better. More keywords, or more words are better. More words are not better if all you're doing is filling up that words with emptiness. Like if you're describing a mug, and you describe it many different ways, like this is a mug, that is a cup that you can drink, or you can pour things in, and there's all these irrelevant keywords, that's sort of a waste of time.

Speaker 2

12:34

And it won't convert for you, because users are going to read that. They're just going to be super confused. But that's

Speaker 1

12:40

where people add in reviews and that sort of thing for e-commerce.

Speaker 2

12:44

So reviews can be tough too, because Google can understand that it's user generated reviews and it may not be as high quality. But that's something where like I don't know. Those are 1 of those things where you have to take that question and test it from SEO standpoint.

Speaker 2

12:58

Like if I had reviews on this, am I going to rank more on different keywords and get more traffic? Or is Google going to look at that and say it's user generated and not send more traffic for the content that's in the review?

Speaker 1

13:09

Scottie Pitt Got you. So then what about your consumer company, it's not an e-commerce company, and you want to get into generating content that will generate traffic for you. Where do you start?

Speaker 1

13:20

And then let's go through the actual workflow.

Speaker 2

13:23

So let's think of an example company. They're selling a service. So you want to come up with anything related to that service.

Speaker 2

13:33

And the first kind of content you're going to need is the closest to that service. Let's say the service is plumbing. You just go old-fashioned, you're a plumber. So you offer different services that people need, like unclogging drains.

Speaker 2

13:45

So you want to have a piece of content that talks about unclogging drains. Now, when people search, and this is something where you don't really need to rank on unclogged drains anymore, because Google's very local. So if you're in San Francisco and you're a plumber and someone searches unclogged drains, you now have a much higher chance of ranking on unclogged drains than Roto-Rooter, which is national.

Speaker 1

14:08

Brian. By adding your address to- Paul.

Speaker 2

14:12

Your address should be there. You need to have some sort of local signal. But Google's going to show, for unclogged drains, that's a need.

Speaker 2

14:19

Plumbing need right now. Doesn't help to even show someone not in your area. So you want to have that piece of content. Now, as you build out that content, you can move further up the buying funnel, which is, all right, now I have an immediate problem, unclogged drains.

Speaker 2

14:32

But how do I make sure I never have a clogged drain? Now you can have best practices on how to maintain your plumbing. So as you build out this fuller site, it can even go into how do you hire someone to renovate your house and make sure you have quality plumbing and what's the kind of piping you should choose. And let's say you're going to buy it yourself.

Speaker 2

14:51

Where should you buy it? So there's many, many different avenues of content, all related to original service, which can help you establish yourself as an expert in plumbing and pipes and clogged drains.

Speaker 1

15:02

But how are you actually, so if the angle is like, it's just taste, like it's just opinion, and you figure out if you really understand your customer, you can know all of these things. But is there a more programmatic way to be like, okay, Customers that end up on our site are looking for XYZ thing. How do you find out those terms, those queries?

Speaker 2

15:21

So you won't know until you start. So the best way is you're using Google Search Console. You can see the kinds of things people are looking for.

Speaker 2

15:28

If you don't have that content, so say you had a great piece of content on unclogged drains, but everyone's searching about unclogged bathroom sink. That's the specific thing they're looking for. And you don't have a piece of content on unclogged bathroom sink. Time to write that piece of content.

Speaker 2

15:42

Now, before you start, what you can do is you can go to the Google Keyword Tool. I think that it's called Google Keyword Planner now. They keep changing the name. So you go to the Google Keyword Planner and you're searching for keywords related to what you need.

Speaker 2

15:58

So you're looking for drains, you're looking for clogs, you're looking for unclog. And that should give you a bunch of ideas, along with search volume about what people are looking for. You can also use my favorite paid SEO tool, which is called Ahrefs. They also have a keyword tool.

Speaker 2

16:11

So you're getting ideas, and from there you want to sort of battle test those ideas by launching them, seeing what kind of traffic comes in and seeing how it performs. Maybe you have this great page on unclogging drains and all people do is learn and never fill out a lead or never call your phone

Speaker 1

16:24

number. Brian. And are you tracking that through Google Analytics or using other tools? What do you recommend?

Speaker 2

16:30

Analytics would be my favorite tool for tracking how their performance is going on, as far as traffic coming in. Even though you can't see the keywords people are searching on Analytics, you can see the URLs. You look at the URL that's generating traffic, you see the conversions, Hopefully you've tagged your goals in analytics.

Speaker 2

16:48

And you see the conversions that come through. And you know what's your best performing content. Now you can take that same URL, put it into the Google Search Console, and then see the kinds of keywords you're even getting impressions on. If there are keywords you're getting impressions on, but people aren't clicking, that's an area of optimization.

Speaker 2

17:04

If your keywords that you're getting impressions on, people are clicking but not converting, another area of optimization. So it's very iterative. You're starting with getting ideas, Maybe starting with keywords, building it, and then learning from what you're getting.

Speaker 1

17:20

So you said that it's important to have raw text on the page. That's the easiest to parse for Google and other things that are crawling your site. How do images affect all this?

Speaker 1

17:31

And are they important at all?

Speaker 2

17:33

So the most important thing to consider within all SEO is that you're doing this for users. You're doing this because users are going to use Google and then find your website on Google and then click through into your website, and then hopefully experience your website and do whatever you want them to do. If you're generating revenue from ad impressions, you want them to click another page.

Speaker 2

17:55

If you're generating leads, you want them to fill out the lead form. If you are selling a product, you want them to buy it, or whatever that is. So images help with that user experience. So if all you're doing is putting text on the page, none of us like to look at raw walls of text.

Speaker 2

18:11

So the images, in that sense, should fit in with their user experience. But there is an SEO aspect to that. And that is, Google Images is 1 of the largest, if you want to think about it as a separate search engine, it's 1 of the largest search engines

Speaker 1

18:25

after Google.

Speaker 2

18:27

I think YouTube is number 2, but Google Images is definitely up there. So if you put images on the page, 1 thing you can do is make sure the images are titled so the actual JPEG file or PNG file are tagged with the keyword. So say you're selling Coffee mugs, you want to call it like coffeemug.jpeg, and not just some random file name that came from the camera.

Speaker 1

18:52

You

Speaker 2

18:52

also want to put alt tags or alt text around the actual image, which is still needed in today's day. But Google eventually will figure out what images are, and they're getting closer to figuring out what images are. Alt text is the version of meta keywords, like meta keywords used to be.

Speaker 2

19:10

So Google didn't know or doesn't know what images are, so you're saying what the image is, and that helps your rank. The actual ranking formula for Google images is really really hard to discern. But if you follow best practices like you have this chance of you know people searching and then there's this additional avenue of people finding content.

Speaker 1

19:27

Yeah. Well it seems like Pinterest has been the 1 who unlocked that right. Like if many things I search for and I click through, I end up on Pinterest and I'm forced to log in.

Speaker 2

19:36

So that's essentially them doing a great job of SEO around the images and then they have these unique images and they show up on Google. However, there is something interesting about your Pinterest question, which is, Google specifically does not like search within search. Google would much prefer that you don't go to Pinterest, that you go directly to where that image was, but maybe that site didn't do a great job of optimizing the image, but Pinterest did.

Speaker 2

20:01

So now Pinterest is that layer in between.

Speaker 1

20:04

So

Speaker 2

20:04

if you just sort of follow best practices like Pinterest does, now you're skipping that middleman and they're coming directly to you.

Speaker 1

20:10

Brian. And are there best practices around technical aspects, like literal resolution of the image, anything like that?

Speaker 2

20:17

Not as far as I know. It's really raw and sort of like, put your alt text in, you can put a title in around the image, you can caption it. There's also relevancy, so like the kind of page that the image is on sort of gives more signals.

Speaker 2

20:30

But for now, I don't know that Google is really looking into the quality of the image. And they're not yet, I don't think, they're at a place where they're understanding what the image is and then choosing to rank it.

Speaker 1

20:41

Got you. OK. And so say, all right, so now we've built out our content site.

Speaker 1

20:46

We're keep with San Francisco plumbing. And we've made 20 blog posts about whatever we think someone might be searching for. When it comes to distribution, are there any like non intuitive pro tips that you would recommend? Are you suggesting people start getting paid traffic through their sites, or do they just leave them up and hope for organic?

Speaker 2

21:10

You can't hope for organic. You could wait years for the organic traffic to show up. You need to be proactive about that.

Speaker 2

21:17

However, in the meantime, and actually, your organic strategy should start when you put up the website. So in the meantime, you can be generating paid traffic. And then organic has time to grow until organic becomes an important channel for you. The way sharing things on Facebook or sharing things even with friends and family helps is that if you've created great content, let's say, again, on the San Francisco Plumbing, you've created the best guide in the world about how to unclog your drains,

Speaker 1

21:46

and

Speaker 2

21:46

you share that on Facebook. Now, other people may share that to their friends, and people see that. And then someone out there is going to decide that they're writing a blog about Do It Yourself, and they just have to link and recommend this blog post that you've written or article that you've written about on Cloud and trains.

Speaker 2

22:04

And that's how you're getting links. And you're starting the distribution of that for organic and from there Google discovers it. You can also go and like, you know, as you build your website, so if you know it's a service website, get yourself listed on all the directories. So, you know, Chamber of Commerce and other directories for your neighborhood.

Speaker 2

22:20

So the directories don't really give links, but they give avenues for discovery. And then as you get discovery, you can generate links. Peter Collins

Speaker 1

22:27

So a pretty common question and word around SEO is links, link building, all that kind of stuff. Is it important? And if so, how would you go about doing it?

Speaker 2

22:38

Brian Wilkerson So links are what differentiated Google when Google first came out. So at the time, there was Yahoo and a bunch of other crawlers and indexers and search engines, if you want to call them that. And what Google did differently is they ranked a site based on the quality of the links.

Speaker 2

22:54

And it was sort of academic. If you're an academic and you've come out with something interesting, other academics are going to cite you. So Google determined that if you were, and they had this page rank patent and algorithm, that if you were quality, other websites would link to you. So that was how Google sort of grew into that.

Speaker 2

23:12

And then of course, people spammed it. They bought links and they did a bunch of spammy things to get links and traded links and all that. Links are still very important, but they're not important in the sense that they used to be, where people measure them by quantity. Like, my competitor has 100 links to this page, I need 101 links, and if I get 101 links, then I will guarantee rank ahead of them.

Speaker 2

23:32

So that doesn't work anymore. What you need are quality and relevant links. And it could only be a handful of links, and that's all you need. And what Google's doing is, this is the algorithm, borrowing a sort of link equity from the pages that link to you to make your page more valuable and relevant for all the other queries that people might find you for.

Speaker 2

23:50

So it doesn't have to be like, this page, say at Stanford, is talking about metaphysics and you're talking about plumbing. Therefore, you can only rank on metaphysics because metaphysics is linking to you. But that link value is helping you rank better on plumbing, because if Stanford thinks you're a good plumber, you might be a good plumber. Now, where I like to do link building and where it's the most effective is to create interesting content.

Speaker 2

24:13

This is sort of where SEO goes hand in hand with PR.

Speaker 1

24:17

So

Speaker 2

24:17

you're creating interesting content that people might want to talk about, and then from there, people might also want to link to it. And 1 good metric of measuring if you're on par is do people share about it on Facebook? Do they like it?

Speaker 2

24:30

Because the motivation to like something is the same as the motivation to link in something if you have a website. So the most successful link building campaign I ever did wasn't even really an intentional link building campaign. When I was living in Singapore, I did a survey with a company or an agency that measured the cleanliness and satisfaction of people around bathrooms. We're called the Restroom Association of Singapore.

Speaker 2

24:57

And we created this survey and I created a bunch of interesting questions around people's bathroom habits, which is something people are always interested in. And from that survey, I turned it into an infographic and a blog post, and then just kind of put it out there. And I basically got links from every single media site within, English media site within Southeast Asia, and it even got translated into other languages. That was links, but they were mentioning it and they were just providing due credit back to the original source with a link.

Speaker 2

25:26

So if you're doing creative things and you're doing good PR, that's sort of like a good SEO effort because you're getting that link to that content. How many links you need, still we wouldn't know. Where do those links need to come from? You can't know.

Speaker 2

25:42

But if you're working on these processes and making sure each page is linked, you're doing what's necessary to get that link value into each page. Peter.

Speaker 1

25:50

And are you spending time and energy and money on PR itself, or do you just mean hopefully organic traffic? Guy.

Speaker 2

25:58

Yeah, so I'm thinking of this as PR-mindedness rather than actual PR. From my experience, the PR people I've worked with, they don't necessarily do things for SEO. So I've even worked with a PR agency where they were proud of an article that showed up or an article that was in print, and they gave me the PDF.

Speaker 2

26:17

That did nothing for SEO, obviously. I mean, they just

Speaker 1

26:20

used PDF.

Speaker 2

26:21

But if they're doing something where it's an actual link or a mention with here's a credit back to the source, that would be a link and that would be valuable for SEO. Paul

Speaker 1

26:30

Matzkoff Okay. And then as an individual thought leader-y type person thinking about link building, do you recommend people go out and blog on other sites? Is that still an effective strategy?

Speaker 2

26:41

It is an effective strategy as long as it's not spammy. I got an accidental sort of link, probably the best link I ever got to my blog. I was working with a professor at Stanford.

Speaker 2

26:53

He invited me to his class, an interesting seminar. I was passionate about things related to Asia. It was an interesting seminar. He asked me to do him a favor and take notes.

Speaker 2

27:02

I got this idea that if I took notes, maybe I could turn it into a blog post. And if I turn it into a blog post, maybe he'll publish it. I asked him if that was something he'd be interested in doing, and he did. Now I have a blog post on Stanford's website linking back to my personal blog.

Speaker 2

27:19

So that is a guest post, but there's nothing spammy about that. This was content the professor needed, and that's something that can be repeated anywhere. Professors are like anybody. They can be baited by their egos, and you can write content about them and they're very likely would link from their classroom web pages.

Speaker 1

27:35

Well, also if you just make something good. Like this is something that is overlooked time and time and time again. It's like, make something good.

Speaker 2

27:42

Yeah, that is the underlying ingredient for anything related to SEO. Good content will get good links. Paul Wiltz

Speaker 1

27:49

Yeah, perfect. And so how much time do you give yourself to really test an idea and test to see that something's working? Gareth Neville

Speaker 2

27:57

It depends on the scale of the idea. So when it comes to a piece of content, and the website's brand new, it could take a really, really long time to know if that content's resonating to get ideas around it. Brian.

Speaker 1

28:09

Does that mean a year? What does that mean?

Speaker 2

28:11

It could be a year. But if it's a going concern, say it's Y Combinator, You've already got a ton of traffic. You know that you put something up.

Speaker 2

28:20

It's instantly going to get found. People are going to search for it. That could happen in a matter of weeks.

Speaker 1

28:25

OK. And what about all of this in the context of mobile? Like, I know the habits are very different.

Speaker 2

28:32

So there's a lot of talk about mobile first and Google moving to mobile first. And within that, what people forget is that there's still only 24 hours in a day. So yes, we're on our mobile devices all of our waking hours, but 8 of those waking hours or more of those, more than 8 of those waking hours were actually at a desktop or a laptop.

Speaker 2

28:53

So we're on a larger device. So it's not that we shouldn't optimize for the desktop anymore. It's just that you need to consider mobile and you need to consider user behavior. There are many, many products that are probably never going to be bought on mobile.

Speaker 2

29:06

Like probably no one's going to buy enterprise software on a mobile device. And I highly doubt, at least in our first world economy, people are going to book their entire vacation on a mobile device. You'll probably do a little searching while you're sitting on the train. Where should I go?

Speaker 2

29:21

What should I see? But before you shell out thousands of dollars, there's a desktop involved. Or if you're doing, let's say, Black Friday shopping, You may read some emails around Black Friday deals. You may do some searching on your phone.

Speaker 2

29:36

But before you go and buy a brand new TV, you're going to go to a desktop site, look at it as many images as you can, read reviews, possibly even purchase it on the desktop. So yes, mobile is growing. We need to consider mobile users, but not at the expense of desktop users.

Speaker 1

29:56

So with that in mind, what are the best practices to account for both?

Speaker 2

30:01

When it comes to SEO, not much. It's really taking into account that there's a smaller screen and people are clicking through on search from a smaller screen.

Speaker 1

30:08

And

Speaker 2

30:08

then the biggest thing that you really need to keep in mind is that it's not about ranking in the top 10 results. You actually have to rank in the top 3 results. And they just try harder, because a mobile device is, there's just less results.

Speaker 1

30:20

Yeah, I mean, that does seem to be the perma challenge, right? Like, getting from the second page to the first page and then to the top of the page. Do you have any, I mean, obviously, you've written about this pretty extensively online, but what are your pro tips?

Speaker 2

30:34

So it's really matching user intent. So as we discussed, the user is the most important. So understanding the user and getting in the user's head, and finding the queries that the user will search for to find your content.

Speaker 2

30:48

So it's not about like, what do I need to do to be in the first page? Because that's like a very vague goal. You want to be in the first page for what your specialty is. So our plumber's specialty is unclogging drains that are very old.

Speaker 2

31:03

So that only matters, and they can chart, let's say that plumber can charge a lot of money for their specialty. So that's what they want to be on the first page for. Write a lot of content for that specialty.

Speaker 1

31:11

Make

Speaker 2

31:11

sure they're found on mobile devices in the first couple results, on the desktop, and for sure the first couple results, but just generally ranking for like this broad term, that's very hard to do. And if you're not a big brand, may even be impossible. Right.

Speaker 2

31:25

And if

Speaker 1

31:25

you can't spend against it, like a lot of cash. Yes. And in the international context, how do you think about getting to that?

Speaker 1

31:33

Assuming that you have a clear intent, say you're going to franchise, your San Francisco plumbing business is going to open up in Beijing, what should you be thinking about?

Speaker 2

31:43

International is the untapped opportunity in SEO, But it will probably remain untapped for a long time, because the products and services most American-centric or English-centric websites offer aren't necessarily relevant for a global audience. You can take a couple steps into becoming relevant. So say you're e-commerce, if you partner with a company that can enable shipping to other countries.

Speaker 2

32:08

So you don't actually need to do the shipping yourself. You just need to get yourself listed or make whatever integration you need necessary in order to get things out to other countries. If customers want to buy, at least you've enabled that. You can also take other sort of payment, like work with a payment provider that may be able to take other currencies.

Speaker 2

32:27

It may come into you as dollars, but you just want to work with that gateway that can take the pound or take the euro. Because if you're just working with a standard payment gateway, like if someone doesn't have a US credit card, they can't buy

Speaker 1

32:38

from you. They bounce.

Speaker 2

32:38

Right. So that's an opportunity to just expand a little bit. Maybe if you have an audience in another country, that's where you can take 1 step forward into SEO, where say you have that audience in Beijing. You might want to create 1 page about your product in Chinese, and then people will discover it, click through, and that's an experiment I've tried in the past where, like, you localize a page, you have your CTAs in that local language, click the CTA, and then bang, you have English.

Speaker 2

33:05

So you're obviously going to filter out a lot of people, but you're also going to get people through that, where if they may be a potential customer of your product, they would still go through that funnel. So you've broadened your appeal, you've broadened your potential base by having your content translated, and you can potentially get more customers at the bottom of the funnel. In general, international, huge opportunity, but probably not relevant for most companies.

Speaker 1

33:30

Paul Matzkoff Okay. And so let's use YC as an example, right? All of our content is in English.

Speaker 1

33:36

It's at ycombinator.com, right? Do you build another website with a separate top-level domain or do you add, you know, Chinese translated content to your main blog? What do you do?

Speaker 2

33:49

So used to be best practices where you would build another website for customers in another country. I no longer think that's the best practice. And I've tested this a few times, And the reason behind that best practice is that users trust something local more.

Speaker 2

34:05

So a UK user is going to trust a .co.uk. Google actually hides URLs in search to begin with. And you can't test it. Sometimes it comes in.

Speaker 2

34:13

Sometimes it comes out. On mobile, you don't see the URL at all. So that doesn't matter. Users don't even know that you're .com versus .co.uk.