Grumpy SEO Guy (0:00)

This is Grumpy SEO Guy, Episode one, the Biggest Lie in the SEO industry. 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 90, 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 the SEO industry is full of lies. And in a minute, I'm going to tell you what the biggest lie in the SEO industry is. You've probably heard it, you might believe it, and it might even be the reason that you're not at the top of page one. Don't worry, we'll take care of that. But before we go any further, let me tell you exactly why I'm making this podcast. After 14 years of running an SEO agency, I'm pretty fed up with the lack of truth and the lack of accountability in the SEO industry. Whether that's people posting on forums and sharing SEO methods that don't work, whether that's people selling courses that don't give you any specific actionable steps to actually increase your rank, or. Or whether that's SEO agencies lying to their clients about what they're doing or not even doing anything at all. Do you know how many clients we have gotten that said their last agency didn't do anything and they got no results after six months or after 12 months, if you're not at the top of page one, your SEO agency is wasting your time and wasting your money. In this podcast, I'm going to take everything I've learned over the last 14 years and break it down in a way that makes sense and in a way that is easy to understand. So, basically, if you listen to this podcast, I'm going to explain everything I've learned in the last 14 years of running an SEO agency. For example, we're going to talk about how to rank a website the right way so it gets to and stays at the top of the search engines for years. We're going to talk about how to hire an SEO agency that won't rip you off. Maybe you don't want to do the work yourself, you want someone else to do it for you. There's a lot of scammers out there, but I'm going to teach you how to avoid them. We'll talk about how to start your own SEO agency, if that's what you want to do. Basically, the goal of this podcast is to get you to a point where you know more about SEO than 99% of people who work in the SEO industry. And I'm not kidding. And you will be able to easily spot scammers, easily spot liars, and know exactly what you need to look for and what you need to do to get your website to the top of the search engines. And keep it at the top of the search engines. Alright, let's get started. 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. The biggest lie in the SEO industry is this Content is king. Have you ever heard somebody say content is king? You've probably studied SEO a little bit, Maybe you've been reading some blogs, maybe you've taken some courses, maybe you've listened to some lectures, and probably all of them said something along the lines of content is king. Well, content is not really king. It's kind of important, but it's not important for the reasons you think it is. So I'm going to explain to you what content actually does, because it's definitely not king. And I know you're probably thinking, well, if content's not king, what is king? Let me tell you right now, authority is king. And authority comes from backlinks from authoritative websites. Now, I'm pretty sure I just lost some listeners because some people really do not want to consider the fact that content is not king. Let me just give you one little bit of information before we go on. In 14 years, I would say probably 99% of the clients we've had did not have content problems. They had authority problems. In other words, the reason they weren't ranking where they wanted to rank wasn't because their content wasn't good. It was because their website didn't have enough authority. Let me give you an example of authority. Have you ever Noticed that no matter what you search for, certain websites always appear at the top of the search engines. Do you think that's because they have the best content? That's not the reason. The reason is because those websites have more authority than the competition. That's why there are certain websites that no matter what you search for, they are pretty much always at the top. Let me give you an example. If you search for like a noun or a person, I know people are nouns, but if you search for like a thing, right? Wikipedia is probably going to be one of the top three results. Now, when would you say Wikipedia has the best content of any website on the Internet? No, that's probably not a truthful statement, but it sure does rank for everything. Why do you think that is? It's because Wikipedia has more authority than pretty much everybody else who ranks for that keyword. Authority is what drives rank. It is not content. In fact, I want to dispel two more myths about content before we go any further. The first thing is that duplicate content is bad. Now, don't duplicate content on your own website. That can cause problems. In fact, I'm gonna tell you a story later, probably in another episode, about a client who did that and they messed up their entire campaign. It was a huge mess. But duplicate content, Cause I'm sure you've heard duplicate content is bad. Don't duplicate content. Right? Duplicate content doesn't even matter. Have you ever searched for the lyrics to your favorite song? Every single page on the first page of Google has the same content because they all have the same lyrics to the song. If duplicate content was bad, only one of those websites would rank and none of the other ones would because they have duplicate content. Now, yes, of course, like, the headers and stuff on those pages are gonna be different, right? But 99% of the content is the same because it's the lyrics to the song. Duplicate content doesn't matter. The second thing that I wanna say about content, and I'm gonna explain more about this later, you can rank a website for keywords that don't even appear on the website. So in other words, you can have a website about one topic and you can have that website rank for a search for different topics. Mind blowing. Again, content doesn't even matter. And I'm going to explain to you quickly how to do that, because that is the most important factor in SEO. Like, if you understand this one thing, if you understand how to do this one thing, you will know more than basically everybody and you will probably know more than the agencies you're thinking about hiring. So when we do the episode on how to hire an SEO agency, that's not going to rip you off. This is one of the things that you're going to have to find out if they know it without directly asking them. It's really fun, actually. Okay, so anyway, content doesn't matter. Content is not king. Authority is king. Authority comes from backlinks from authoritative websites, but content actually does play a role. So I don't want to say content is pointless. I just want to say it doesn't really matter when it comes to ranking. So the other thing you need to know is, is that generally speaking, content can hurt you. And there are some penalties that you can get on your website if your content isn't the way it's supposed to be. For example, if you over optimize your website and that means, like using the same keywords over and over again, let's say you have a website about blue widgets. I just like to use that as an example. So maybe you're selling blue widgets. Okay? Now, if your content sounds like this, the best thing about blue widgets is that they are blue and they are widgets. You should buy every variety of blue widget because then you will have more blue widgets than everyone else. Your friends probably have blue widgets. Do you have more blue widgets than your friend? You see what I mean? Like using your keywords over and over and over again and it doesn't even sound normal. That can actually work against you now, like 15 years ago, that was actually a good way to rank. But don't do that anymore. It's a bad idea. But generally speaking, the content on your website doesn't really do anything. I mean, it can penalize you if you do it wrong. Now, nobody in the SEO industry wants you to know this, okay? They always want you to think, oh, content is king. Oh, how are you gonna rank us? Oh, we're gonna make some. Don't hire that agency. Listen, let me tell you kind of what content does, though. So let's say you have, and you should always have good content on your site. Just because I'm telling you that content isn't as important as people say it is doesn't mean you should have low quality content. And this is why low quality content is frustrating to readers. And if you want people to stay on your website and purchase whatever thing you're selling or do, your call to action, you need good quality content, because bad content is annoying. All right? But with that in mind, from an SEO perspective, it doesn't really matter, but it does matter a little bit. So let me explain to you what content actually does. Okay. When a search engine crawls your site, it's gonna look at all your content and it's gonna determine from the content what your website is about. Is your website about blue widgets? Is it about something else? So the search engine uses the content, and I need to tell you there's a big exception to this rule, which I'm going to talk about shortly. But first I need to explain what content does. So the search engine as content to determine what your website is about. And then let's keep using blue widgets. For example, when somebody searches for blue widgets, the search engine goes through all of the websites it has that talk about blue widgets. And then it says, which one of these websites has the most authority? That one gets to be number one. Which one has the second most authority, that one gets to be number two, and so on. That's how the position of websites is determined. Yes, it's kind of related to content, but only as much as content determines what the website is about. The rest of it comes down to authority. This is why you can have the best content in the world and not rank for anything, because you don't have any authority. Now, let me explain to you the one exception that I was just talking about. If you understand this, you will understand more than pretty much anyone you will talk to in the SEO industry. So content matters to determine the topic of a site. Yes, we just talked about that. But there's one more way to associate your website with certain keywords that has nothing to do with the content on your website, and that is anchor text. Anchor text refers to the actual words from another website that links to your website. So, for example, if a website links to you and it says, check out this site, and check out this site is actually the link that you can click on, then checkout this site is the anchor text. Okay? Does that make sense? The most powerful thing you can do, and I am not joking, the most powerful thing you can do is to get backlinks from authoritative websites to your website with your keywords in the anchor text. Now, there's a definite right and a wrong way to do this. So don't run out right now and try and get backlinks with the words that you want to rank for in the anchor text, because you're probably going to do it wrong and you're going to penalize yourself. But just understand the concept that is, without question, the most powerful thing you can do. And that in and of itself has made up a large percentage of what my agency has done for the last 14 years. And the reason our clients get to the top and stay at the top. I'm going to do another episode on backlinking, so we'll get into more detail on that. But just be aware. Anchor text is the strongest ranking signal I have ever seen. In fact, the overwhelming majority of clients that I've worked with, that was the solution to their problem. They didn't have a content problem. Their title tags weren't messed up. You know, they weren't, like, they weren't lacking appropriate headers on their, like, H1 tags on their page. You know, like, all the things that people think of, oh, we need to fix. We need our H1 tags. Like, yeah, I mean, it helps, but, you know, they weren't missing an author bio. Like, that's one that everybody loves to talk about. Oh, you got to establish your credibility as a known author. Yeah, okay. But none of this even comes close to giving you the amount of authority that backlinks from authoritative websites do. I don't know how else to explain it. Anything that you can think of doesn't even come close. At any rate, we'll talk more about this later. This is something else that's kind of funny about backlinks. So now, look, I'm pretty good at SEO, but I'm not really the best salesman in the world. Anyway, I'm going to talk more about selling SEO in a future podcast. I'm going to tell you some of the things that have worked for me and some of the things that haven't worked for me. But in the meantime, let me tell you this. As I mentioned, I'm not really the best salesman. I have actually lost sales because when the person asked how I was going to help rank their website, I explained to them that we were going to build backlinks. And there is such a weird feeling about backlinks in the SEO world because everybody thinks content is king, okay? And they think that, like, backlinks is somehow, like, hurtful and manipulative. Right. And. And so if you mention them in sales meetings, the prospect is like, oh, you know what? I actually read somewhere that backlinks are bad. So I don't think we're gonna work with you. Okay, that's fine. Look, I'm fully transparent. Everything I explained in this podcast, completely truthful. I don't like lying to people, and I would rather not get a client because I was honest with them than, you know, like lie to people and get a bunch of sales and not get them results, which I feel like is pretty common based on what I've heard. So what I tell those people is, hey, look, that's fine. I understand. You need to make the choice that is the best fit for you. Listen, in six months, whoever you work with, if you're not at the top of page one, please reach out to me and I'm happy to help. And of course, if they do reach out, there's a good chance the SEO company that they worked with didn't do anything. But there's also a good chance that they did something wrong. And sometimes what you have to do is clean up another agency's mess before you can actually get your client the results they're looking for. You know what though? That's a different topic. So I'm gonna stop that for now. Something else actually that I wanna say about backlinks is this too. There's a lot of people that sell backlinks. Okay. I'm sure you've spent some time on some SEO forums or some marketplaces, and there's a lot of people claiming that they sell backlinks. I will tell you, 99% of them are rubbish. They will not help you and they will probably penalize your site. And I don't have time to get into the specifics of it for this episode, but let me tell you this, the easiest way to find out. Well, there's a lot of things that you have to look for, so maybe I shouldn't say it that way, but a very easy way to find out if it's probably a scam or not, is if it's a one time payment. There is literally no way that a one time payment, for example, somebody's selling lifetime, a lifetime link on a page, right? There is no way that that is a feasible economic model. It's not possible. I'm going to explain in great detail why that's the case in another episode. It is not possible that that is a sustainable model for the seller. It does not work. If you're making a one time payment, you are getting ripped off. I 100% guarantee you that. Now, does that mean that, for example, monthly or yearly payments are not a scam? No, it doesn't mean that, but it means that any single payment, any lifetime payment is 100% a scam. You are being ripped off. And I want to mention that because now that you understand that authority matters, you're probably trying to get some authority. And so now you might be rushing out, you know, ooh, this guy says they're really authoritative. Let me buy from him. Ooh, this guy says they're really authoritative. Let me buy from him. No, don't do it that way. There's a couple things you have to look for. I'm going to explain this more in the future when we do the episode on buying backlinks. I want to say that in and of itself, there's no problem with buying backlinks. That's how the SEO industry works. My agency has made most of its money and gotten most of its results from selling backlinks, both to clients and to other SEO agencies. And that is a whole other topic. But in the meantime, I just want you to understand that one time payment backlinks are always a scam. The best case scenario is that you will get a little benefit in the short term and then the benefit will run out. The worst case scenario is that you will get no benefit and you will eventually get penalized from it. And as you will learn in the penalty episode, penalties are very hard to recover from. You don't want to deal with them. And spammy link penalties are often one of the hardest penalties to recover from. So we'll talk about this more later. But just for now, understand that one time payment links are always a scam. Do not ever buy them. I want to be very clear about this because most people don't understand that this is how the SEO industry works. I'm going to do an episode on this, but I'm going to give you a little preview. Now, the overwhelming majority of SEO work is done by a very small number of people in the world who actually build backlinks. Most SEO agencies do not build backlinks for their clients. Most SEO agencies do not have the assets or the knowledge to build their own backlinks for their clients. There is generally an SEO agency somewhere at the top who got that company as a client, and that agency is distributing that work down a chain to somebody who actually builds backlinks. In many cases, that's been my agency. A lot of our clients, as I said, are SEO agencies. They don't build their own backlinks for their clients. There are very few people in the world who actually build backlinks and who actually understand the proper method for doing so. Luckily for you, I've literally made a career out of being that person and I'm going to explain everything. Still, I will reiterate, if you've ever worked with a big SEO agency and they did Any kind of backlinking. I bet you there's a 99% chance they didn't actually do it it. But it's likely my agency or one similar to mine that actually have the assets and the authoritative domains and the knowledge to build authoritative backlinks did nobody knows this. This is how the SEO industry actually works. And I'm going to give you a ton of specifics about this in a later episode. Let me be clear. I'm talking about good quality authoritative backlinks. I'm not talking about the spammy stuff that you see for sale on the different forums in the different marketplaces. I'm not talking about the guy who's who says 100 backlinks for $5. I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about most of the stuff that you see for sale commercially. I'm not talking about the backlink building experts that you probably found on some marketplace, okay, 99% of that is spam. If you were buying backlinks, and I'm gonna discuss this a lot in another episode, there are very specific things that you have to look for and you have to ask specific questions and you have to get specific answers. Okay? This is literally an all or nothing proposition. You cannot get some of the boxes checked. You need all the boxes checked or you don't buy from that person. And if you're the kind of person who wants to make your own backlinks, and I strongly suggest you do that, I'm going to give you another very exact set of criteria for domain acquisition and for building the backlinks. It must be done correctly. SEO is more of an art than a science. But backlink building has to be extremely precise or you risk penalties. And all of this is why real SEO is very expensive. All the cheap stuff you see for sale online doesn't even work because it's rubbish to begin with. Garbage links from spammy websites aren't going to help you, but they are going to penalize you. Do you really want to buy something like that? Do you really want to buy links from some guy who's offering you 10 links, 20 links, 50 links, 100 links for $10. They're good quality, I promise. Really? Okay, you know what's gonna happen? I'll tell you what's gonna happen on another episode, but it's not gonna work. Real SEO effective SEO is very expensive. Let me say this, I'm not trying to be mean or rude, but in 14 years in the industry, I honestly think that 99, maybe 95 but I'm gonna say 99% of people in the industry are scammers. I'm not joking. It's really sad. I've talked to some people at some very big agencies, much bigger than my agency is, and they literally don't know what they're talking about. I have no idea why their clients stay with them. They literally do not know what they're talking about. And that's not even the people. Like, online, like, online SEO sellers are literally the worst. Like, go to any marketplace and I guarantee you 99% of them are scammers. Oh, and I'm not exaggerating when I say 99%. I truly think 99% of them are scammers. I'm not joking. I'm gonna explain later. Once you learn more about how backlinks work and what you need to look for and the difference between a good link and a bad link, you will agree with me that 99% of them are scammers. So, as I said one time, payment, anything like that, 100% a scam. There's some different methods to getting backlinks, and I'm going to explain in a future episode that the most popular methods are also pretty dangerous. I guess I can tell you what they are now. So two of the most common methods for getting backlinks, you have something called link outreach, and then you have something called guest posting. They're both pretty dangerous. And I know they're very popular. I don't really have time to get into why they're dangerous now, but I would never do them. I have almost never done either of those in my life because it's just. I really want to explain it right now, but I don't have time, so I'm not going to. So let me tell you this because I think that once you learn how SEO works regarding authority and all that stuff, I think that really, I mean, it makes sense, I think it's understandable, But I think it also brings up a lot of questions, like why does it work that way? So let me explain to you how SEO is supposed to work now. This isn't how it actually works. This is how it's supposed to work. Okay, let's say you make a brand new website and it's great. You've got good quality content. The best content in your industry is on your website. The way SEO is supposed to work is other people will see your content, they'll find your website and they'll see your content, and they will say, wow, this is good content. I'M gonna link to this guy. This is great content. I want everyone to see how great this content is. It's really helpful, it's really beneficial. It would help my readers. I'm going to link to it because think about it, you probably only link to good quality websites, right? Like when you're posting a blog about something, you know, when you're posting content about something, you link to something that helps you. You link to something that explains something. Well, you link to something that's useful to your readers. You don't link to bad quality stuff, okay? So they find it, they find your website and they link to you and then the next guy finds it and he links to you and so on. And all those links are building authority and they're happening organically. Here's the problem. Your brand new website with that great content, nobody is ever going to find it because you have no authority. You have no backlinks. Your website's not even going to be on the first page of Google or the second page of Google. It's probably not going to be on the third page of Google. Nobody's going to find it. So even though you have the best content, nobody's going to find it. The first part of that is how SEO is supposed to work. You make great content. People find it, they link to you, and that helps you build authority. The problem is that the search engines can't tell quality content just from content. So they have to use links and authority as a proxy. The idea being that people only link to good quality websites. So that's basically why traditional SEO of oh, just make good content and you'll rank really well. Doesn't work. If you ever have like a brand new client or something, they're not going to rank for anything in the world. And even if their content is amazing, they're still not going to rank for anything because they're a brand new website and they probably have some competition. So that's why they need SEO. That's why they need authoritative backlinks, so they can even show up in the first place. It's kind of like the rich get richer, right? Like once you have authority, then people find you and then you get more backlinks and you get more authority. But when you're just beginning, nobody's going to find your website, your great content website with no authority, nobody's going to find it. Now somebody listening is going to say, well, nuh, because Google takes new websites and it puts them at the top of the search engines for a couple weeks. So they can become established and determine where they should actually rank. Okay, maybe you're right. I've heard that that happens. I may have seen that happen. Are you thinking that in that brief period of time when you happen to randomly be at the top of Google? Maybe. Maybe. Because the people that say that happens say it doesn't even always happen. So first of all, are you going to just presume that's going to happen? Second of all, are you going to assume that in that short period that you're up there, people are going to find you and link to you? What if that doesn't happen? Are you done? Do you have to start over with a brand new website because nobody found you and now you're going to be at the bottom of Google forever? I don't know. I don't have the answers to those questions. But I can tell you how to not even have to worry about that. It's by getting backlinks from authoritative websites. Something else that I want to say about authority is this. Have you ever ranked a website with no backlinks? Now somebody is going to say, I have, I've ranked a website with no backlinks. And yes, I want to first say that it's possible. And I want to say that there's two exceptions to the rule of needing authority to rank. I want to be like honest about everything. Okay, the first case is this. If you have no competition, for example, if you made up a brand new keyword that nobody's ever used before, yeah, you can easily rank for that with no backlinks and with no authority because nobody else is ranking for it. If there's one website in the world with a certain keyword on it, yeah, it's going to show up when people search for that keyword. But that doesn't really count because how many people do you know that are trying to rank their website in non competitive industries? I mean, it happens, I guess. But I tell you what, every client I've ever had has been in a very competitive industry or moderately competitive. Okay? So we couldn't rank them with no authority. Now the second exception to that is if you post a new piece of content on an already authoritative website, that specific post, for example, you might not need to build backlinks to it. It might be inheriting a lot of authority from the domain. That's true. I mean, in that case, those people ranked a webpage without building backlinks. But that webpage already had a lot of authority because the domain had a lot of authority. Let me give you Two examples. If you post a new article on Wikipedia, you might not build any backlinks to it, but it will probably rank because Wikipedia has lots of authority, and any page on Wikipedia will get some of that authority. This is also the way that news outlets get their stuff to rank so quickly. If some news channel posts a brand new story an hour ago, it's probably going to rank in the search engines. Do you think anybody linked to it in the last hour? Of course not. But that news site has a lot of authority, so anything they post on that domain is going to get some of that authority. In all of these cases, yes, you're ranking a page without backlinks, but you're not ranking a page without authority because it's getting authority from the domain itself. And I want to clarify here, this only works on pages that are on the same domain. So if you make a subdomain, you don't get any of that authority. So if you already have a lot of authority, then it's not even an issue. You don't even need to listen to this podcast because you already have enough authority. And you're already at the top of page one if you don't. The reason is because you don't have enough authority unless you happen to have like a content penalty like I described before. I'm going to talk more about penalties in the future. Don't worry about that for now. You probably don't. Unless you kind of have to try really hard to get a content penalty. Like, they don't just randomly happen, they can accidentally happen. But as long as you have normal content that was written by humans, you're probably not gonna have a content penalty. I really wouldn't worry too much about it. While I'm talking about lies in the SEO industry, I also want to talk about how long it takes to actually rank a website. You've probably seen advertisements out there that say, oh, get to the top of page one in a week, right? Yeah, that's not gonna happen. Well, it could happen, but it's probably not gonna happen. Like, it's probably not gonna happen unless you, you know, like I said, you don't have very much competition. I've ranked websites for certain keywords in like a couple days, but it was extremely low competition. And it was like, say you have like a whole bunch of keywords that your client wants to rank for. Like, some of them are very competitive, some of them are not so competitive. The not so competitive ones, they tend to rank faster because they're not so competitive. And we'll talk more about what competitive means and how to determine how competitive something is later. But it's possible to rank a website for certain keywords pretty quickly. But again, it's probably not going to happen. Some more competitive keywords tend to take months. Okay. Sometimes it takes three months, sometimes it takes six months. It really depends. We have one client in particular who one of their keywords had 450,000 searches per month. That's pretty competitive. And it took about six months to get them to the top of page one. Okay. It's not an overnight thing, but while we're talking about this, I do want to tell you, and this may or may not be helpful for you, but when I go into a sales meeting with a potential client, I usually start the meeting like this. I say, you know, SEO takes a long time and it's really expensive. Why do you want to do SEO? And the reason I say that is for two reasons. One, it sets the expectation that SEO takes a while, and it does. And two, it sets the expectation that SEO is expensive and it is good. SEO is very expensive. Whether you're buying links, good quality links are very expensive, or if you're doing it yourself, which I'm gonna explain to you how to do it, it's probably even more expensive at first. It's very expensive at first. Once you have your infrastructure functioning, it's pretty affordable. But if you're doing it yourself, the upfront costs are. They're pretty big. I'm not going to lie. So I asked them that question. I say, SEO is very expensive, and it takes a long time. Why do you want to do SEO? And like I said, this isn't really a sales episode, but it gets them in the mindset of, wait a minute, it's going to take a while, and it's expensive. Hmm. Because for some reason, everybody thinks that SEO is, like, fast. People that don't know anything about SEO think that if they hire you, you're just gonna log into their website and you're gonna, like, make a couple changes and you're gonna, like, click a switch. That's like the magic SEO switch or something. And then all of a sudden, they're like, at the top of Google. I don't know why people think that, but, like, everybody actually. Do you know why I think that? I think it has to do with WordPress SEO plugins. Like, I think people actually think that SEO means just installing certain WordPress plugins and just that's how you do SEO. Like, they think it's like, set and forget and you just type in some secret keywords in your WordPress plugin and then that's doing SEO. Like, no, no, there's a couple WordPress plugins that are okay, but that's not how you do SEO. And I know you guys all know that, but I'm just saying that for anybody who doesn't know anything about SEO, SEO has very little to do with WordPress plugins. Anyway, like I said, this isn't really, this episode isn't really a sales episode. But one thing you will learn is that managing expectations is very important. Because if your client comes in thinking that tomorrow they're going to be at the top of page one for all their keywords, they're not going to be very happy with you if that's not the case. And if they think that it's going to be, you know, super cheap, they're not going to be very happy with you if that's not the case. So it's important to put that out there, I think, at the beginning of the, at the beginning of the relationship, before they're even a client, obviously. But good SEO is very expensive. And I know I already mentioned buying links a little bit ago, so I told you, if it's a one time payment, it's a scam. And that's true. But if it's cheap, it's also a scam. Good SEO is very expensive. Okay? You can't do it. Look, as an SEO provider, as an agency owner, I cannot offer it to you for cheap. I can't. Like, I literally would be losing money if I were to do it that way. Like, it's not possible. And I'm not going to talk about specific prices and what you should pay. That's a whole other episode. But it's not cheap. I cannot offer it to you for cheap. It doesn't work. Anytime you see cheap SEO, it's a scam. It's probably going to hurt your website because SEO, if you do it wrong, will actually work against you. And that's going to be a topic that we talk about on the episode where we discuss negative SEO. So really quick, if you've never heard of it, negative SEO is basically doing bad SEO to your competition to get them out of the search results. It's terrible. Don't do it. We don't do it. But I want you to be aware that it's a thing. That's a thing that the search engines have denied as being real in the past. And then they kind of come out and they say, Ooh, yeah, You know, it might be possible. And then they're like, nah, it's not possible. It's possible. I had it happen to a client. I'll go all into that. I'll tell you what happened to them and how we fixed it. It's a thing. Just be aware that it's a thing. And if you accidentally do SEO wrong to your own website, you can hurt it. Like, same concept, like you can accidentally negative SEO yourself, especially if you are buying cheap backlinks. So don't buy cheap backlinks. But like I said, real SEO takes a long time and it's expensive. And if you do it yourself, it's expensive. And if you buy links from other people, it's expensive because good links, it's not possible for them to be cheap. It's literally not possible. And I don't want to give dollar amounts because every project is different. But if you see backlinks, for example, for like a few bucks each, don't even talk to that person because it's not gonna help you at all, and it's probably going to harm your website. So I kind of want to do an episode called how to Buy Backlinks, because I think there's certain things you need to look for and there's certain things that you need to be aware of, and if you don't know them, you can really mess yourself up. So I guess what I'm trying to say is don't go out and buy backlinks until you have that information. Because if you do it now based on, like, what I've told you, it's not enough. You know that buying backlinks is important. You know that the way to rank a website is by getting authority, and authority comes from backlinks from authoritative websites. But you don't, at this point, really have enough information to go out and do it. And like I said, I don't have enough time to fit it into this episode. So I'm going to do another episode about that. But this is the last thing that I want to say about backlinking. Building your own is the best way to do it. And it's the way I do it, and it's the way my agency does it. We have a big portfolio of authoritative websites that we use to rank our clients. Because, honestly, I don't trust people to buy links from them. I've been in the industry for 14 years, and I've literally met a couple people who aren't scam artists. Like I said, I'm not saying Everybody in the SEO industry is a scam artist, but most of them are. And I'm not exaggerating. Most of them are. So I'm not trying to say this to sound like a weird sales pitch, like, everybody else has terrible backlinks, but let me tell you about how good my backlinks are. And then, like, I try to sell you them. Like, I'm not selling them to you. They're not. They're in use by our clients. I'm not doing this podcast to try and sell backlinks. No, that's kind of gross, actually. Anyway, like I said, there are so many scammers in the SEO industry. They write these long blog posts, they make these videos. It's full of, like, content is king nonsense. Like, that doesn't help anybody. You know, it's like, oh, you write all this great content. Does it help you? Let me ask you, are you at the top of page one? Oh, you're not? But you've got great content. Are you telling me that with the great content, you're not at the top of page one? Oh, that's weird. I can't believe you wouldn't be at the top of page one with great content. Of course you're not at the top of page one with great content, because content doesn't really matter. Hopefully you know that by now. Authority matters. If you have more authority than your competition, and I'm generalizing here, like, that's not exactly right, but that's right enough that it will be the answer that you're looking for. If you have more authority than your competitors, you will outrank your competitors. Again, that's not exactly the way the search engines work, but it's near enough how the search engines work that you can use it. So let's summarize. Content is not king, but it's kind of important. But it's not important in the way that you think it's important. So that's why I kind of explained what it does. It tells the search engines what your website is about. But of course, so does anchor text, which is why it's possible to rank a website for words that don't even appear on the website. So if content isn't king, what is king? Like we said, authority is king. Backlinks from authoritative websites are how you build authority to your website. It's a pretty straightforward concept. I'm going to explain in detail how to do that, but for now, just gonna leave it at that. All the other little things like meta tags, everybody is obsessed with meta Tags. For some reason, everybody that I start talking to, to maybe become a client, they always ask me, are you gonna do our meta tags? Like, meta tags don't even really do anything. I might be wrong about this, but I think like five or six years ago, Google came out and said that like, meta, keyword tags don't even do anything. Like they're not even considered by the search engines. So, I mean, yeah, okay, I'll do your meta tags. That's cool. But you know, of course, if you say, oh, no, those don't matter, but we're gonna get you backlinks, then they say, oh, I don't wanna do that. Cause backlinks are bad anyway. Even though content doesn't matter, you should still have good content on your page. Because if you don't, nobody's gonna wanna read your website. And you're not gonna have any visitors and you're not gonna make any sales or get any CTAs, whatever. I don't know what you're trying to do with your website, but whatever. They're not gonna like it and they're gonna leave. So let me just give you one more tip since we did talk about content so much. One of the things that I said can go wrong with content is you can get like an over optimization penalty or sometimes it's called keyword stuffing, okay? It's when your keywords appear too often on your website and Google thinks that you're trying to manipulate the results. It's a thing. Don't do it. Here's your tip. Sometimes people inadvertently keyword stuff their website on their menus. So let's say you're selling blue widgets, okay? Maybe you have a dropdown menu that says, you know, info about blue widgets or review of blue widgets. Where to buy blue widgets. A comparison of blue widgets, right? Like all these different menu options that have blue widgets mentioned somehow. So people don't think that that counts as content. Because if it's like a dropdown menu, it doesn't actually appear on the page, right? Unless you click on it, but it still counts as content. So people have inadvertently keyword stuffed their page because the menu is keyword stuffed. And so that means that not only is that page keyword stuffed, but the menu appears on every page. So every page is keyword stuffed. So they might say, my content is just fine. I don't have any keyword stuffing. What's going on? They forgot to look at their menus because the menus are counted as content on the page. That's your free tip. That kind of thing has occurred before. I don't know if you're using menus, but if you are, be careful of them. Anyway, I think that's everything. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. I hope this episode was helpful, and if you have any questions or if there's anything that you want me to talk about on a future episode, you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.com and I'll 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 time when we talk about penalties, what they are, how to fix them, and how to avoid them.