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This is Grumpy SEO Guy, episode 97, back to basics. What is SEO and how do you rank? You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the grumpy SEO Guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because a lot of the things that people think about SEO are not really going to do anything for you. So we're gonna clarify some of that today, and I think this will be a very bright, beneficial episode. So in this episode, we're going to talk about what SEO is, how it's different from some other things, and how to do it.
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And we're going to explain why these things are the case. Hopefully, that's the goal. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started. Everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience, this podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. Before we get started, if you're listening to this episode and you're using YouTube, please subscribe to my podcast. Thank you. Okay, let's get started. And if you would like to help keep the podcast free, you can consider becoming a supporter@patreon.com Grumpy SEOguy so I was on an SEO advisory call on Zoom not too long ago, and the person with whom I was talking had a couple questions, and I thought that maybe if this person has these questions, maybe I should do an episode about them, because they're pretty good questions. So we're going to begin by talking about some of those things. Look, I don't really advertise it, but sometimes people contact me and they say, hey, Grumpy SEO Guy, do you do Zoom calls? Do you do Zoom advisory calls? Yes, we do. You can email me at hello, grumpy SEO guy.com and we can talk about setting that up if you have any questions. So the first thing that I want to talk about is what is SEO? SEO is the process of ranking your website in the search engine results.
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Getting your website to rank higher in the search engine results.
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The goal of SEO is so that if somebody searches for your keywords, you're going to be at the top of page one, they're going to, and they're going to click on your website.
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Okay, that's.
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That's pretty straightforward, I think so, because we understand this, we can say that SEO is not something that does not contribute to getting to the top of the results.
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So if there's anything you can do that does not contribute cause your webpage to rank higher, then it is not SEO. That's just a different way of thinking about it. So, okay, here's a question that I got asked recently and I thought this was a good question. What is the difference between SEO and conversion optimization? Great question. Because they can kind of both benefit your website. So SEO is the process of having your webpage rank higher in the search engine results.
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Conversion optimization is the process of getting more people to convert on. On your website. So what is a conversion? A conversion can be anything that you would like the person to perform on your website. So that can be buying something, that can be signing up for a list, that can be taking part in a group, whatever the behavior is that you are trying to get people to do on your website, that is a conversion. Okay, so what would bad conversion optimization look like? It would look like nobody ever buys anything from your website. Okay, what would good conversion optimization look like? It would look like numerous people buy things from your website.
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So SEO is the process of ranking better in the search engine, and conversion optimization is the process of having more people do what you want them to do on your website.
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So here's a way of thinking about it. SEO stops once the person clicks onto your webpage and is viewing your webpage, okay. Once they have found you in the search engine results and clicked on it, nothing else that you're doing is SEO. So any changes that you're making to your webpage to get people to buy more things or whatever, that is not SEO, that is conversion optimization. But they're different because SEO is about how people find your website and conversion optimization is about whether or not they convert once they are on your website. So here's an example of good SEO and Bad conversion optimization. That would be your website that ranks maybe in the first position, but. But nobody ever buys anything from it because it has bad conversion optimization. Okay, you could have a website that has bad SEO and bad conversion optimization. That would be a website that doesn't appear in the search results. And also nobody ever buys anything from. Okay, you could have bad SEO and good conversion optimization. That would be a website that does not appear very high in the search results, but everybody who goes to it purchases something from it.
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Or you could have a website with good SEO and good conversion optimization. That would be a website that ranks at the top of the search engine and has a lot of people buying stuff from it. So that maybe will clarify them. Okay, there's another thing that I want to talk about, and that is traffic.
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The number of viewers that your website gets. Traffic is not an SEO metric. A lot of online marketers think that traffic is somehow a measure of SEO success. It is not. This is a very big topic, so I'm going to try and keep it kind of like abbreviated here. But look, there are many things that can result in traffic to your website. SEO is one of them.
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There is also visitors from other sites, okay? There is word of mouth or other forms of marketing. There is paid search, like paid ads, like pay per click, okay? And there's SEO. Those things can all raise or lower your traffic. So the reason I'm even sharing this is because a lot of people will post on SEO forums and they will post traffic charts and they will say, my traffic dropped. What's wrong with my SEO? Looking at a decrease in traffic does not necessarily mean you have an SEO problem, okay? Because there are many things other than SEO that cause traffic. This is maybe a better way of saying it. When it comes to SEO, traffic is a function of two things. It is a function of where you rank.
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What number are you? And monthly searches. Okay, so let's talk about the first thing first. So during any talk about SEO, you're probably going to talk about rank or position.
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This is sometimes Referred to AS SERPs. S E R P S. It stands for search engine result page. It means what is your rank? Like, where are you in the search results?
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Like where are you? That's. That's all it means. The answer is a number, right? Are you number four? Are you number seven? What? What position are you? That's all SERPS means.
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Traffic is a function of serps, your position and monthly searches. So look at it like this. Let's say there is A keyword that gets 1,000 monthly searches. Okay, now this is how it works. Let's say there's a keyword with 1,000 monthly searches. Okay? So let's say there's a keyword and every month 1000 people search for it.
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If you are in the top position in the search results, you will get approximately 30% of that traffic. So if there are 1,000 searches, you will get about 300 visitors for that keyword.
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If you are in the next position under that, you will get approximately 20% of the visitors. So if there are a thousand searches, you will get 200 views to your website.
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That is how it works. Like, and it. It. The numbers continue until you get to the bottom of the first page. But it doesn't matter because we're only using the top two for right now. So if your traffic goes down, maybe it's because your position dropped, but there are other things that can cause it too. A better way to ask this is to post what is called a SERP chart.
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Serp. Remember, it's what's your rank?
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A chart, meaning, like a chart. Okay, So a SERP chart is a tool that tracks your position on a daily basis. So you can look at a chart and see is your rank improving or decreasing? Okay, Are you ranking better or worse? Are you ranking? Are you going up or are you going down? Okay, so there are different SERP tracking tools out there. There are quite a few.
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Okay.
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We use one called SERP Fox.
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Okay.
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We've used it for many years. It's great. S E R P f o x serp fox.com I think it's great. You don't have to use it. I don't get any kind of commission for sending people to it. Okay. I just tell people to use it because we've been using it for a long time. You can use whatever SERP tracking tool you want. Just make sure that it tracks keywords every day and not every week.
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Okay?
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You need daily positions, not weekly positions. Anyway, it produces a chart, so it's super easy. You enter your URL, okay. You enter your keywords, and then every day it checks your keywords and it sees what position you're in and it makes a chart. And then you can look at the chart and see if you're increasing or decreasing over time. I think they have a trial version where you get 10 keywords for free. So try and find that on their website. I think you have to go to plans or something and then like scroll to the left. But you can even track your first 10 keywords for free. Okay, that's awesome. It is the number one thing that you need to do for SEO, because if you're not monitoring your position, you can't tell if your SEO is good or not.
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Because why, what is the purpose of SEO? To rank higher in the SERPs. To rank higher in the search engine results. A SERP chart is the manner by which you check your progress. So if anybody's just talking about traffic or whatever, no, they're not doing SEO because traffic is not an SEO metric. Traffic is a function of SERPs of your position in the search engine results and monthly search volume. But traffic is not something that you can use to evaluate the efficiency of SEO, because it's not.
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So if you understand that, congratulations, because this topic seems to bewilder a lot of people legitimately. So now that we know what SEO is and we know how to determine if it's, if it's helping or not, how do we do it? Okay, there are four things that you need to do to rank. I'm going to tell you what they are, but before we do that, I want to tell you what is not a ranking factor.
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There is a good chance you have heard somebody say content is king.
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Content is not king. All right, just let's, let's, let's talk a little bit about that. Because anytime you talk about SEO, somebody's going to go, just write good content. No, quality of content is not a ranking factor. Let me try to explain where the saying comes from. And like, and, and how come it doesn't work that way. Okay, so there was probably a statement somewhere that said something along the lines of, you should always write good quality content because doing so will increase the chances that other websites will link to you.
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That statement, by the way, is true. Alright? If you write good content, there is a better chance that people will link to you.
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Because people link to good quality content.
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The reason your ranking is benefiting is because of the links, not because of the content.
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Now you have search engine optimization companies and consultants that are coming in here and kind of like modifying this system and artificially inflating the results. So just, just to be clear, but like all else being equal, good content tends to get better backlinks than low quality content. And that is the reason it ranks. It ranks because it has better backlinks, not because it's better quality content. Okay, so why do people say that content is king? Well, first of all, this kind of advice is Everywhere on the Internet. It's not your mistake for believing that. Because most SEO advice is similar to we'll just write good content, but that's not how you rank. You should write good content, but that's not the reason you rank.
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Furthermore, a lot of people saying content is king are just trying to get you to purchase content from them that they will tell you is good and will make you rank better. Let me give you an example. So this myth that content is king is so trendy on the Internet, it's very hard to find good information about, like, about why it's not true and to find information for how to rank. Anyway, look, so here's an example. There has never been a website on the Internet with bad content that somehow modified its content so it was good and then started to rank at the top of the search engine.
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That's because that's. The quality of content is not a ranking factor.
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So that situation that I just said doesn't happen. If content was a ranking factor, then that would be. That. That would happen. And changing your content would resolve your problems of not ranking. But changing your content does not resolve your problem of not ranking, because that's not. That's not how you have to rank. I'm not sure, like, how else to say it. There are many people online who will say that they can rank just with writing good content. Not a single person will ever show you an example of this because it doesn't happen. They are lying to you to either make themselves feel awesome or sell you something.
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If anybody claims that they can write content that ranks at the top of the search engines for a medium to difficult keyword because the content is so good, ask them for an example, see if they have backlinks, and I guarantee you, they have backlinks. So anyway, let's talk now about how to rank. Okay, so we've said how not to rank. Let's talk about how to rank. There are four points that you need to consider to rank.
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You need to do these, okay? In order. Number one, do not have a penalty.
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Maybe you've heard of SEO penalties. All right, we're not going to go into detail about them right now. There's another episode. Episode two. If you want to learn more about penalties, it's called SEO penalties. What they are, how to recover from them and how to avoid them. But look, do not have penalties. You could have great SEO, okay? You could have great SEO, but if you have a penalty, it doesn't matter. You're not going to rank, period. Not having a penalty is the main priority, okay? It is the most important thing. That's why it's the top of the list. If you have a penalty, it does not matter what else you do. Your website is not going to rank. Do not have a penalty. Let me give you an example of one kind of penalty.
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So there's something called keyword stuffing. Maybe you've heard of this. Keyword stuffing is when you put your keywords in the webpage too much.
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So let's say, for example, your website is about blue widgets. So keyword stuffing would be like if you had stuff on your page that sounds like this. Blue widgets are really fun. If you want blue widgets, you should buy blue widgets from this blue widget website. If you buy blue widgets, you can feel happy with all the blue widgets you purchased. Like, that has the keywords blue widgets way more often than you should, right? So a long time ago, and I mean a long time ago, that actually made your website rank higher. Right? For reasons that we're not gonna get into now. But then people were doing it more than they should. But now you can't do it anymore because it seems like you're trying to affect the results.
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So avoid writing like that, okay? That's called keyword stuffing. It's going to get you. Well, not going to. It might get you a penalty.
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And the main priority in SEO is not having a penalty. Okay? Number two, you need content. But I just said that content is not a ranking factor, so why would content be number two? Nice question. Here we go. Let's talk about that. Content does two things from an SEO perspective. Number one, you need content on your site because you can't rank an empty page. Maybe previously you could. And I know somebody's going to give an example of some page they ranked that didn't have any content on it. But, like, mostly you're not going to rank a page with no content because what would you be ranking exactly? The second thing that content does is it provides relevancy. What is relevancy? Relevancy means what is the topic of your website? Okay, if your website is about blue widgets, your content should be about blue widgets. If your content is about blue widgets, then a search engine knows that your website is about blue widgets, and you might appear in the results for blue widgets.
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Now think about this. Relevancy is a very important ranking factor, because if somebody searches for a search phrase, they only want to see Web pages that cover that topic.
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If you search for washing machines and you see websites that are about blue widgets, there will be no help from that.
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So relevancy is important. When you search for something, the search engines are going to return websites that they believe are relevant for those keywords. So content creates relevancy.
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Now just to be clear, it is not about if your content is correct or incorrect. It is not about if your content is good or bad. And it is not about if your content is helpful or unhelpful. It is only about if your content is relevant.
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Now number three, relevancy. I know we just kind of talked about it a little bit, but let's say them again. Number one, no penalties. Number two, content. Number three, relevancy. What is relevancy? Relevancy is the topic of your website. Is your website about washing machines? Is it about refrigerators? Is it about blue widgets? Okay, Your website needs to be about a topic. That's how the search engine knows if it should appear in the search results.
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Because if it is relevant for that topic, then it might appear in the search results. Now, there are two main ways to get relevancy. The first is content. We just talked about that. If you're writing articles about blue widgets, the search engines are going to know that your website is relevant when it comes to blue widgets.
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The second way to get relevancy is with anchor text. Let's talk about anchor text when another website links to you. If that is a text link, okay? Anchor text is the words that are the link. So if they say you can buy blue widgets here, and blue widgets is the link that you can click on, that is the anchor text, okay? That is the anchor text is simply the text in a link that you can click on, okay? It's whatever the link says. Anchor text offers relevancy. But don't do it too much, okay? That's a different topic. But you do not want to have too many of your backlinks using the same anchor text. Okay, that's a different topic. Just understand that anchor text provides relevancy.
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So we should review these things again really quickly. So, one, no penalty. Two, content. Three, relevancy. Number four, authority. You may have heard the concept of authority before. Authority means how much power does your website have? How much trust does your website have? How much clout does your website have?
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That is what authority means. So authority, once you have the first three things handled, okay, Once you have no penalties and content and Relevancy, you need to have authority. Authority comes from backlinks from other websites. Anytime a website links to your website, that website shares with you some authority.
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Does that make sense? Authority does not come from anything other than backlinks. So you may have heard people talk about getting backlinks before. This is the reason backlinks share authority. Now, let me try to keep this quick because this is a very complicated topic. I'm going to try and make it understandable right now. Every website on the Internet has a different level of authority. The more authority a website has, the higher level of authority it will share with a backlink.
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So if you get a backlink from a high authority website, it's going to share with you a lot of authority. If you get a backlink from a low authority website, it's going to share with you a low amount of authority. That doesn't mean it's bad, it just means you're not getting as much.
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Many low authority backlinks might be the same as one high authority backlink, okay? Just understand that it is not about how many backlinks you have, and it is about how good the backlinks you have are.
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You need to understand that distinction. So here's another way of thinking about it. If you're, if you're still like, maybe a little bit confused about authority. Actually, let me, let me, let me, let me give you another, let me give you another definition first, because I want you to understand the difference between relevancy and authority. Okay? So relevancy answers the question, will my website rank?
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Will my website rank if somebody searches for, if somebody searches for blue widgets. If your website is relevant for blue widgets, it might rank, okay, because it has relevancy for that search term.
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So that's what relevancy is. Authority answers the question, what position will my website rank in? Okay, so if you have relevancy, you will probably appear in the search results. Maybe not at the top, but somewhere, maybe, right? Or you're at least in the results somewhere. You might not be, you know, in the first 50 pages or something, but you're still considered relevant.
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Authority answers the question, what position will my website rank?
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Okay.
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Or in what position will my website rank? So, like, if you are relevant, then you can think. And this is kind of making this a little bit too general, but just, just go with me on this one. If you are relevant, you can think of all of the relevant websites being ranked based on authority, okay? And I can, I know people are Going to have a problem with me describing it this way. But the real answer is a little bit more complicated. So for now, let's just keep it like this. So somebody searches for blue widgets. Your website is relevant for blue widgets. So you will be in the results somewhere. If you are very authoritative, you might be at the top. If you are moderately authoritative, you might be somewhere in the middle. And if you are low authority, you will be somewhere at the bottom, probably.
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That's how it works. So relevance answer is the question, will my website rank? Authority Answers the question, in what position will my website rank? Okay, here's one more example. Consider authority as being like popularity in high school.
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What makes you popular in high school? People are gonna say, oh, being smart makes you popular, or being good looking makes you popular, or being, you know, being on a sports team makes you popular. But those might be traits that popular people have, but that's not actually what makes you popular. And if you want to think about it further, you can think of it like this. I would presume that in your high school, there were people that were some of those things and were not popular. And there were also probably people that were popular, so that were not any of those things. So that's. This is a misunderstanding that a lot of people have. What makes you popular in high school is when other popular people like you, okay? So if you are friends with all the popular kids, you're probably popular, okay? Think of that as having backlinks from authoritative websites. You probably have a lot of authority and rank well, okay? If you're friends with only a few popular people, well, you might be kind of popular. Like, maybe you might be kind of popular. Think of that as having backlinks from a couple websites with high authority. You might rank okay, you might rank okay, but you're probably not at the top.
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Now, you can have a lot of friends, but if your friends aren't popular, you're not popular. It doesn't matter how many friends you have. So, and that's like having a lot of backlinks from websites without authority. You probably are not ranking on the first page. So maybe that example doesn't make sense. I don't know, but that's kind of a way to think about it. Possibly you should think of SEO as a popularity engine, okay? It's not returning quality results. It's returning results that it thinks are quality because of other factors that it considers, okay? A backlink from another website is a vote from another website, okay? So if another website links to you. It is basically a vote of trust for your website. It is voting for you and saying, okay, the website we're linking to is quality. There's a probable chance that your website is also quality, okay? Because if a lot of other quality websites link to you, you're probably quality too. So the search engines understand this and they say, well, okay, we're going to give this website more authority because look at who's linking to him, basically. Maybe that makes sense, maybe it doesn't, I'm not sure. But I wanted to keep this episode a little bit reduced in length compared to some of the other ones where we really concentrate on some of these topics. So I hope this was helpful. If you have questions, email me and let me know what else you want me to talk about. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe and if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review. It would really help the show out. I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions or want to suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is Grumpy SEO Guy. You can visit the Grumpy SEO Guy subreddit or you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.com if you email me, please either whitelist my email address or check your junk folders, because I've been told that my replies are going into the junk folder and it's probably because we're talking about things like SEO and backlinks, and I think those words will classify an email as spam. And if you want to support the podcast because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet and it's free, you can do so@patreon.com Grumpy Seoguy and I will talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday when we talk about questions to ask SEO agencies.