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This is Grumpy SEO Guy. Episode 51, the four things you need to 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 everybody wants to make their website rank, but there is so much confusion over how to actually do it. So this episode is going to clarify that for you. 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. 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. I'm gonna tell you the four things you need to rank. Let's get started. The first thing you need to rank is no penalties. The first thing you need is no penalty penalties. Let's describe it like this. Everything on your website could be exactly perfect. Greatest SEO ever. And you have the best backlinks and everything is awesome. But if you have a penalty, it doesn't matter. You're not going to rank. You could have 100 doctor and 100 DA and whatever metrics you like. They could be 100 out of 100. Okay, whatever. I don't know what tools you're using, but best. The best metrics possible. Doesn't matter if you have a penalty. Doesn't matter. The highest priority in SEO is not getting a penalty. If you want to learn more about penalties, you should listen to episode two. Episode two talks about what they are, how to find them, how to fix them, and how to prevent them. But other than that, I think it's pretty straightforward. Try to avoid penalties. It's not really challenging. Just don't. Don't keyword stuff. Don't get spammy backlinks don't use too much of the same anchor text. You won't have a penalty, probably. Anyways, that's the first thing. Okay? The second thing you need to do to rank is you need content. Let me be very clear about this. It doesn't have to be useful. It doesn't have to be helpful. It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be correct. In fact, it can be none of those things, okay? It just has to be there. You just need. You need some content. Like, don't be mistaken, because so many people. By the way, there's a lot of like, SEO consultants out there that don't know what they're talking about. Like, honestly just give, like, wrong advice. Do not be confused by anybody who tells you that content is the reason you rank. It is not. You do not get rewarded by the search engines for having good content, okay? You do not get higher rank because your content is greater or more correct than or more useful or more detailed. You don't get better rank for any of those things. It does not work that way. Search engines can tell what your content is about, okay? But they can't tell how good it is. They can't tell how useful it is. Well, they can't directly tell how useful it is. For those of you that listen to episode 48 called Helpful Content Update HCU, you know what the Helpful Content Update was all about. You know how the search engines determine helpfulness, and it has nothing to do with the content itself. Go listen to episode 48 if you wanna learn more about how the search engines determine how helpful content is. But what I'm telling you is it does not matter if content is right, wrong, correct, incorrect, useful, useless, good, bad, or anything else. It simply must be on the website. That's what matters. The search engines can tell the topic of the content, they can tell the relevancy, which is something we're going to talk about more in a minute, but they can't tell how good it is. They can't. It can be wrong. I've even given an example on this podcast before of a website that was ranking very high. And it was ranking very high because the domain had a lot of authority. The information on the website was factually wrong. Doesn't matter. Still, ranked wasn't helpful. In fact, it was terrible. And it was very aggravating to me as the reader because it did not answer my question. It answered it incorrectly, but it still ranked. You do not get rewarded by the search engines with higher ranking results. Just because you wrote content in a specific way. That's not a thing. Get it out of your mind. It does not work that way. And let's be very clear about this. Consultants, agencies, whoever is telling you that the solution to your problem of not ranking is to change your content is doing you a disservice and possibly taking your money for nothing if you're paying them for that incorrect advice. Okay, I see all the time on, for example, the SEO subreddit. By the way, I'm on the SEO subreddit. My username is Grumpy SEO Guy. So come say hi. Send me a message if you have a question. It's all good. But listen, people post all the time and I'm just going to combine all of these questions into one because the question basically goes like this. We're not ranking. Our SEO agency told us that by writing really good content, we would rank. And we've been doing this for a while. Still not ranking. Well, of course you're not ranking because you don't get rewarded by higher position in the search results just because you have good content. Search engines don't work that way. There's so many reasons that they don't work that way that I don't even have time to go into them now. But other episodes do explain it, and I would actually start with a helpful content update episode. But search engines don't work that way. But for some reason this theory exists and people say that if you write good content, you will rank. That is wrong. It does not work that way. And the follow up, by the way, to that question of our SEO agency told us that content was the solution and we're still not ranking. They always say. Not always. They usually say. And by the way, our competition is outranking us and their content is awful. So let's just think about this for a minute. You've been writing content and it hasn't been increasing your rank. Okay? But you still think that content is the reason you rank okay, even though writing content is not increasing your rank. Okay. By the way, by your SEO agency who says they know the way to write content to increase rank, right? It's not working. Okay? And then your competition with terrible content. Okay. Is ranking. So first of all, your SEO agency that you're paying money to is telling you that content is going to fix your problems, and it's not. And then your competition is outranking you and they don't even have great content and they're still outranking you. How many more signs do you need that. That's not how search engine optimization works. Sometimes I don't even know what to say to these people. I mean, don't like, don't misunderstand. First of all, I do, because they're not the ones at fault, okay? Because so many SEO consultants and agencies say that kind of thing. Oh, content is king. We just need to write better content and you'll rank better. It's not their fault because everybody says that anytime you hear that advice, it's wrong, okay? Like almost 100% of the time that advice is wrong, okay? But it's not their fault because everybody says it. Of course people think that. Of course they think that. But listen, if your SEO agency has been writing really good content for you for like six months or whatever and you're still not ranking, and by the way, you're not going to if that's all they're doing for you. But if you're still not ranking, maybe stop working with them. I mean, I don't know if you want to spend money, you could keep working with them, but I feel like the goal is to not spend money on things that don't help. Maybe, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Maybe you just want to tell all your friends that you have an SEO agency even though you're not ranking. By the way, the purpose of an SEO agency is to get you to the top of the search engines for your keywords. That is the purpose of SEO. It's not to write content. I mean, I guess it could be in some circumstances, but it's not working for you. So I don't know, I don't know what to tell you, but let's just be super clear this, okay? You do not get rewarded with better results in the search engine because you wrote good content. It does not work that way. Let me specify something though. Content can play a role in SEO. If you have a content related penalty, okay? Content is significant because what you need with your content is an absence of content related penalties. Yet content is not the reason you rank. Now, does content matter for humans? Absolutely. It matters. If your website is terrible, humans are not going to want to stay on it. They're not going to want to read other blog posts. They're not going to want to convert with whatever you're selling. I don't know what you're doing on your website, but you're probably selling something. But that is conversion optimization. That is not search engine optimization, okay? Search engine optimization is ranking. Getting to the top of the search engines for Your keywords conversion optimization is having people do on your website the thing that you are trying to get them to do, whether that's buy something or sign up or contact you or whatever. So SEO gets people to your website. Okay, but whether or not your content is good, that determines if they buy whatever you're selling. That determines if they contact you. But that is not an SEO thing. SEO makes you rank, therefore you get more visitors. Once the visitors are on your page, the SEO game is done. Then you have to rely on the quality of your content, but the quality of your content does not cause you to rank. Okay, content makes your site good or bad, but your site being good or bad is not the reason it ranks or doesn't rank. So, number one, don't have a penalty. Number two, have content. And the third thing, the third thing you need to rank is authority. You probably already know that, but I'm gonna explain authority really quick. And then we're talking about the fourth thing. Authority is a measure of value of the website. Authority comes from one place only. Authority comes from backlinks from other websites. Now, I want to be clear about this, because people like to intentionally. I'm assuming it's intentionally misunderstand things that I say in this podcast. People like to say, oh, grumpy, SEO guy says you need as many backlinks as possible. No, I have literally never said that. And if you've ever listened to an episode where I discuss authority, you know that it's about quality and not quantity. In fact, I have episodes explaining that high numbers of backlinks can actually be spammy in some cases. I've literally never said that you need more backlinks. Unless maybe I was talking about SEO from, like, 10 years ago when quantity of backlinks was, like, more of a factor. I've literally never said that. But people love to say, oh, grumpy, as your guy says, you gotta get the most backlinks. Just buy all the backlinks. Yeah, I've literally never said that. Way too purposefully misunderstand what I'm saying. And just in case it wasn't purposeful, I'm specifically telling you right now that it is not about quantity. Backlinks. Okay, but authority only comes from backlinks. And the more authority a website has, the bigger amount of authority you get from a backlink from that website. So if some random website with no authority links to you, you get a tiny amount of authority. Is it gonna help? Maybe it might. It might. And if some huge authority website links to you, you're going to get a lot more authority. So obviously those links are worth more. Now, the opposite can also happen. If a spammy website links to you, it can also hurt you. In fact, doing this intentionally to your competition is called negative SEO, but that's a different topic. Anyways, if you want to learn more about negative SEO, by the way, we talk about it at the end of episode two. But I'm just saying authority is received from backlinks. Authority is not like, formed from anything you do on your website, okay? H1 Tags do not get you authority. Content does not get you authority. Site loading speed does not get you authority. Meta tags do not get you authority. Title tags do not get you authority. Your page can be perfect. It can be absolutely perfect from an on page standpoint. And if you don't have authority, you're not gonna rank, Period. End of discussion. That's how SEO works. So the purpose, like, literally, I'm not joking, like 90% of your SEO efforts should concern getting authority, okay? I'm not exaggerating. I'm literally not. I think, in fact, if I were to be, if I were to be truthful, I'd say it's probably more than 90%, but I feel like probably 10% of your time is spent doing other stuff. So I don't know, make your on page stuff good enough that it's not annoying and you're fine. Have your H1 tags the way they should be. But let me specifically mention this. If you're not at the top of the search engines, it's not because your H1 tags are wrong, okay? Like, that's not the solution to your problem. Your problem is not that your H1 tags are wrong, okay? Like, assuming you don't have a penalty, okay? And assuming your content exists, your probable solution is getting a greater amount of authority than you have. Like, I don't know how else to say it. Stop spending money on SEO agencies that write you really good content because it doesn't do anything. Stop wasting money on content audits because that's not the reason you're not ranking. Stop paying SEO content writers because there's no such thing as SEO content. Like maybe 20 years ago, when you could just keyword stuff like crazy, SEO content was a thing, but it's not. It's stop. Stop writing more or better or different. Content is not what you need to do to get to the top the search engines. Okay? Number four, the fourth thing you need to rank is relevancy. Now I'm going to explain relevancy. And I'm going to tell you what it is and I'm going to tell you what it does, and then we're going to talk about it. Okay? Relevancy means what is my website about? What is the topic of my website? What is my website relevant for? For? In other words, if somebody searches for anything, should my website be considered to be in the results? Okay, if your website is about blue widgets and somebody searches for blue widgets, well, you're probably considered to be in the results. You might not be at the top of the search engines, okay? But you should be considered because you're relevant. You might be number 10,000, okay, because you don't have enough authority, but. But you're still considered because you're still relevant for that search term. So I want to talk a little bit here about the difference between relevancy and authority. And then we're going to talk about how to get relevancy, and then I'm going to give you an example. So this all makes sense. Okay? Relevancy answers the question, will my website rank? Okay, I'm going to say that again. Relevancy answers the question, will my website rank? Authority answers the question, in what position will my website rank? Okay. Authority answers the question, in what position will my website appear in the search results? Okay, so let's say this differently. Relevancy answers the question, will my website rank? Authority answers the question, where will my website rank? Do you understand the difference? Relevancy answers the question, will my website rank? And authority answers the question, where will my website rank? Okay, now I want to say one more thing about relevancy before I move on to how to get relevancy. There's this new term in the SEO industry, topical authority. Topical authority is just a different word for relevancy. Everyone's talking about topical authority because it's new. But you know what? Relevancy as a concept has existed at least as long as I've been doing SEO, which is 14 years, and it's existed even longer than that because 30 years ago when people were keyword stuffing their webpages because like, literally in like 1995, that's how you ranked a website was just keyword stuffing it like crazy. That was literally just relevancy. The websites that had the keywords more often were more relevant and they would rank higher. There was no authority. It was 100% relevancy. Make sure you avoid stuffing your keywords nowadays. I'm just giving you an example. The concept of relevancy is not new. Topical authority is just a cute word that people use to describe relevancy because it's got the word authority in it and it sounds cool, but it's all just relevancy. So I call it relevancy. Anyway, let's talk about how to get relevancy. There are two ways to get relevancy on your website. The first way, write content. Whatever your content discusses, you're relevant for that content. If you write about blue widgets, your website is relevant for blue widgets. If you write about something else, your website is relevant for something else. If you just write a bunch of random gibberish, your website would still be relevant for that gibberish if somebody was searching for it, okay? Like, whatever is on your website, that's what you're relevant for. So it's pretty simple to get relevancy, but that's the first way to get relevancy. The second way to get relevancy is using anchor text. Anchor text is the words that are part of a link. So if somebody links to you, whatever the words are in the link, that's the anchor text, okay? So if your website, for example, is not about blue widgets, okay? It is not about blue widgets. You do not appear in any searches for blue widgets, okay? Your website is not about blue widgets at all. If you get backlinks from authoritative web pages, and those backlinks have the anchor text, blue widgets, Guess what? Your website is now going to be relevant for blue widgets. And it could even rank in a search for blue widgets. Even if you don't have any writing on your site about blue widgets at all, that's how relevancy works. So there are two ways to get relevancy. One is by writing about whatever the term is, and two is by getting backlinks with those terms in the anchor text. If you want to learn more about that, listen to episode 29, which is called what is anchor text and why is it important? Or how to rank any website for any keyword. That is how you get relevancy. Okay, now let me give you an example. I'm giving an example because some people get confused with relevancy and they think that writing content is the answer, and they think that writing more content will make them rank higher because it will make them more relevant, and it doesn't work that way. So let me give you an example that will explain the difference between relevancy and authority. Like, I want you to imagine that there are three websites on the Internet, okay? Just three, not millions and millions. Three websites on the Internet. Two of them deal with blue widgets and one of them deals with purple something. Okay, so there's only three websites on the entire Internet. Two of them are about blue widgets and one of them is about purple something. Okay, so if somebody searches for purple something, what happens? Well, there's only one website on the entire Internet that's relevant for purple something. So that website's going to appear. It doesn't matter how much authority that website has because there's only one. There's only one website that talks about purple something. Okay, now we're guessing that the website is indexed. Okay, if it's not indexed, it's not going to appear in the results. But you get the point. It doesn't matter. That website can have 0 authority or it can have 100 authority. There's no competition. So it's going to appear and it's going to be the only website in the results. Now, if somebody searches for blue widgets, well, hold on here, because now there's two websites that are relevant. So the search engine says, okay, we have three websites that we know of. Two of them are relevant for blue widgets. Those are the two that are going to display in the search results. Okay, but now we have to figure out what order to put them in. Which one ranks higher and which one ranks lower. Okay, the website with more authority is going to rank first and the website with less authority is going to rank second. Now, maybe it's about the page and not the website because it might not be the homepage that's ranking, but you understand the point. Whoever has relevancy ranks. But whoever has relevancy and more authority ranks higher. The only time authority doesn't matter is if you don't have any competition. If you don't have any competition, all you need is relevancy. If you do have competition. And by the way, that so seldomly happens that you're the only website on the Internet that's relevant for a certain keyword. So like, unless you basically, unless you make up a brand new term that nobody's ever searched for and that currently gets zero results, that's not the situation that you're gonna find yourself in. So don't like even worry about that. But assuming you have competition, and almost everybody that I've talked to has competition, okay? Like pretty much everybody that I've talked to that says, hey, can you help us rank? And I go, why do you want to rank? And they say, well, because our competition is outranking us. They have competition. Okay? So. So if you have competition, you need relevancy, which you probably already have. Okay? And then you need more authority than the next site. That's how it works. And in the future, I'm gonna do an episode because recently on Reddit, somebody posted a question about how a website with less authority is outranking a website with more authority. And it was a very good question. And I said, can you provide an example of this? Because usually when people ask that question, they don't actually have an example because it doesn't actually happen. It's kind of like when people say they rank without backlinks and then they never provide an example because it doesn't happen. But anyway, this Reddit user actually posted an example, and at first glance, it appeared that the website ranking higher had less authority, but that is not actually the case. And I'm gonna do an episode specifically about that question and I'm gonna tell the keywords and the websites. Cause it's not. It's not like a client. It's not like anybody. So it's just random, like, video game things. So I don't. I'm not worried about revealing it, but I think you will learn a lot from it and learning to understand how. I looked into it and found out that even though one website looked like had more authority, that's not actually what was happening. It's going to be a very awesome episode for those of you that want to learn more about authority and why websites rank and how to rank your own website. Because ultimately that's what we all want anyway. I hope this concept of relevancy and authority makes sense now. Relevancy just means what does the website discuss? What is it about? What kind of content does it have? Like, what is the topic of the website? Is it about blue widgets? Is it about something else? That's all it means. That's all it means. Authority means, how high am I gonna rank? Like, how much power does my website have? How much, if you remember my previous episodes, popularity does the website have? How popular is it? How cool are you? And if you remember from a previous episode where I compare authority in search engine optimization to popularity in high school, it should all make sense. When a website ranks. It doesn't matter how good the content is. It doesn't matter how helpful the content is. It doesn't matter how accurate the content is. It doesn't matter if your H1 tags are correct. It doesn't matter. None of those things matter. It only matters how much authority do you have. Some people still don't understand that. They either choose not to believe it in spite of overwhelming evidence that this is how search engine optimization works, or they just like to troll. I can't figure it out. Anyway, I hope this helped you comprehend how search engine optimization works. You need four things to rank, you need to not have penalties, you need content, you need authority and you need relevancy. 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 grumpyseoguy 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 why sometimes it seems like websites with less authority are ranking higher than websites with more authority.