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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello and welcome to SCO101 on WMR FM. Episode number 515. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing. My co host is my company senior SEO Scott Van Ak and we're very happy today to have a special guest which is Steve Wiedemann, senior search strategist of Wiedemann Consulting Group. Thanks for being here today, Steve. This is really cool.
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C
Likewise Ross. Thanks for having me. 500. How many episodes? That's amazing.
- [01:18]
B
515. Yeah, it's been going since 2008.
- [01:22]
C
That is incredible. Congratulations on so many podcast episodes. That's a huge success.
- [01:28]
B
Well, it's one of those things I figured we got going on it. There's no way I'm going to stop. I might as well just keep going and soldiering on. And there's people apparently. Listen, so it's a good thing. This is great.
- [01:40]
C
Well, thank you for having me. I'm definitely excited to talk nerdy with you on SEO and all the things going on in our industry right now. So many things we could be talking about. But I'll let you kick it off and we'll go from there.
- [01:52]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, I was actually about to say I was thinking about all the people who've been on before and we started off with Jennifer. Jennifer at the time, yeah, Jennifer Evans Cairo was my co host and then. Or Kit Laycock at that time and then a few others did some small stints. And then of course John Carcutt, which was my co host for, yeah, 400 of the shows and then the last hundred and something has been Scott and yeah, it's just great. And we occasionally get guests on it. Always say that. I'm sure my listeners just get tired of hearing it yes, I'm gonna have more guests, so I'm so, so pleased we finally got you on and this is gonna be great. So, yeah, one of the things we've talked a lot about in Last POD in previous podcasts is just how much things have changed but haven't changed. And yes, AI is huge. Everyone's talking about AI, AI, AI and GEO and aeo, whatever. It's SEO. It's just SEO. Stop it, please.
- [03:02]
D
Yeah, we don't need new acronyms.
- [03:04]
B
No, we don't. How do you feel about all of this transition and how much of it do you think is just hype right now? I know it's going to change a lot in the future, but right now.
- [03:19]
C
You know, I think I feel the same way everybody felt. Was this immediate sense of imposter syndrome. Like, oh my God, is everything that I've done and how I've learned how to do what I do still relevant? Am I still as good or capable of helping clients increase, you know, search visibility? And is there even going to be a google.com anymore? Right. So I think, I think everybody kind of felt that. And I know we're all navigating our way through it, but the more we look at the data, the more we look at some of the referral traffic coming from large language models, the more we, we look at our effort in increasing visibility in a blended search result as opposed to focusing on just blue links and black texts. The more we, you know, continue to learn from one another, the more we realize this is still pretty much fundamental SEO. We principle based SEO, as you know, is one part relevancy. Do we have content that matches the user's query and search result? Now more for a reference for some of these LLMs as opposed to a specific URL. Two is visibility. Are we still making sure we're visible? In the old days of SEO, it was all about links. Just get as many links as you can and high quality links that you can get. And now it's more about mentions and citations and knowledge graphs. Still visibility, but less important on the link side of things as it pertains to some of these newer emerging platforms. And the third is how users interact with our listings. There's three options. How do we get the user to want to choose us? Is it by having better star snippets and reviews and ratings? And is it still using strong call to actions and unique selling propositions and metadata? Right, those, those three principles are basically kind of guiding laws or guidelines of search. Are we relevant? Are we visible and do users want to choose us more often than the competing listings? So fundamentally, I don't think it's really changed. And the things that we might do to adapt and evolve and to continue to get incremental visibility, especially with AI mode and AI overviews, yeah, there's a lot of, of cool new things that we can do. But again, fundamentally, if every month we're asking our team, did we improve our relevance, did we improve our visibility off the website? And did we work to improve user behavior signals by looking at our results and comparing it up to the competition? So honestly, that's the biggest shift and of course the traffic, right? Yeah, of course traffic is going to go down as users get what they need from these, these answers now as opposed to search results. But that doesn't mean that we can't use that in our favor. It doesn't mean that we can't still show up and be the ones that get the phone call that get the booking that, you know, are top of mind, you know, when a user's closer to taking action and doing that branded search is what we want them to do. So the more we become visible in those answers, the more we're eventually going to get those customers. So, yeah, is that what you're feeling too? Do you feel kind of the same thing? Like, hey, yeah, it's evolved a bit, we're getting a little bit less clicks, but business still seems healthy. Right. As long as we're doing those three things?
- [06:38]
B
It does. And I think a lot of misinformation is out there that because of all this change that they don't need to worry about implementing SEO anymore. And there's a lot of nightmare stories. Reddit's a great place for that. I don't like to hang out there much, but there's a lot of people going, what the heck are people thinking? And they're. Because they're literally just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I hate that analogy. But they're just, there's all right, it's all good. I'm not going to do SEO anymore. It's all about all this AI and some companies are really doing it. Like they're letting you go the entire SEO departments and they're tanking their rankings because they're focusing everything on chat GPT and which is a huge mistake. It's. What is it even as much as 8% now? It's growing fast, but it's still, I don't think it's tiny portion.
- [07:25]
C
It depends on the brand, but I don't know about you, but I've actually seen a decline in referral traffic even on accounts that we've gotten better visibility. And we look at our visibility scores since that's all we can really measure since there's not a lot of traffic coming from it. But yeah, we've seen increased visibility in AI and fewer clicks. So it's almost like maybe it's plateauing out a little bit. You know, everyone's kind of using it and playing with it, but I don't feel like, I don't feel like it's. It is, it is feeling a little bit like that bubble burst that everyone is worried about. Like is this, you know, a lot really fast and then it's going to scale back. When I look at the data, it almost looks like it's plateaued a bit. Which, you know, again, at a high level, you're talking about 2 to 4% of actual traffic coming from these LLMs. And, and that's usually top of the funnel. Yeah, that's often top brand awareness. I don't think that you would deprioritize traditional search to do AI. But that's all the calls we're getting, right? I mean, all the calls we get from folks who are like, look, I know you're really good at SEO. Our team's really good at SEO too. What we really need is an expert that can help us with AI and generative AI and as you mentioned, a bunch of other acronyms, aeo, geo, whatever. We just literally just call it Large Language Model optimization is whatever else we can do to increase visibility. But I feel like that's all the calls we get now. It's not, hey, we heard you're really good at multi location search and that you helped Skechers generated an extra 1.2 million a year in some case study you did. We don't get those calls anymore. We get help us with AI, help us with AI visibility, help us track and measure and monitor our search results in AI mode and AI overviews. And it's, you know, we like any agency, take the work that comes to us, but it's, it's getting a little exhausting. It's like, calm down, it's not what.
- [09:25]
D
You want to do.
- [09:27]
B
So I broke the number one rule starting out here. I didn't. I get so excited and just want to jump into things. Tell us a little bit about yourself. So how did you get into SEO?
- [09:38]
C
I'm just like, you guys, I'm a search nerd. I've been in the industry since around 98. Started as a freelancer, like many of us did, playing around with HTML before we had CSS available. We used to do our websites using tables and now we've got all this great, really minimized coding that we can do to get our sites just rocking. It started for me as a necessity. I had a DJ client of mine who just basically paid me a couple bucks a month to manage his. His DJ business for him. And he's like, dude, I can't keep paying you because I'm not really getting any business from it. And I'm like, well, let me see what I can find out. So I, you know, started following Aaron Wall and Bruce Clay and Danny Sullivan and, you know, all the. The old school SEOs that, you know, some of us kind of grew up following and watching and what are you reading? The blog posts and so forth. And I started creating pages for this DJ and optimizing titles and descriptions and headings and images and so forth for each city. One day he comes in and he's like screaming at me. He's like, turn it off. I'm like, turn what off? He's like, I'm one guy. I do this on the weekends. And he interrupts me because his phone rings and he's like, no, I'm sorry, I'm booked. He hangs up on him. I'm like, what is going on? He's like, dude, I can't handle these calls. This is crazy. I'm one guy. Hold on. No, I'm sorry, I'm booked. It was a funny. And I thought, oh man, there might be something in this. Literally within the next two weeks, I got a postcard from Westwood College of Technology that they had an E business management program. And I'm like, well, that sounds kind of cool. Learn how to be in an industry where it's just focused on the Internet. I imagine, geez, everybody's gonna have a website eventually. And so I just fell in love with it. And from there I started writing a bunch of ebooks and blogs and went back to school for, you know, to see what I can do with this as a career. And next thing you know, it's. It's basically been my life. 2010, I left the agency corporate world behind, which included some time at Disney, where I managed Disneyland.com and adventures by Disney, both paid in organic. And I did some agency work, which I hated. I didn't like how agencies would give, you know, account managers 10, 20 accounts to manage and expect them to be effective. I thought that was awful. So I'M glad I kind of left that behind. We had our kids at home. I'm like trying to see if I can work from home. And I did that for a couple of years and then an agency or two called me up and said, you know, hey, could you incubate our team there in La Mirada and teach them how to do SEO and we'll write, I'll bring them back to la. And I'm like, well that might be fun, you know. And so they, they offered me this crazy amount to do it and so I went for it and we ended up getting it office, office ended up working out. We brought in some folks that didn't want to move to LA that decided they want to stay with us and next thing you know we're incorporating 2015 where we just hit that 10 year point of, of, of our incorporation as Wiedemann Consulting Group. So it's been a, it's been a fun journey. But what we've, what we've learned and discovered in the, you know, decade or so of since we've incorporated is that, that we're really good at certain niches. So we're really good at, at multi location and franchise brands. We do a lot of research and experiments and tests and have done some trial and error brands such as Public Storage and I mentioned Skechers earlier, Meineki Car Care Centers, Applebee's, ihop, you know, qdoba, Dave's Hot Chicken. Some really fun brands, especially in the restaurant side of things. We've also worked with some e commerce sites, Belkin and Linksys and um, love the, the E commerce side of things because it is a little bit more quantifiable when you look at roi. You can say here's how much actual revenue we help drive you versus the foot traffic which isn't always measurable but, but it's been an exciting journey. You met some really, you know, cool clients to work with and you know, built up a small team of, of folks that sort of stick it to the man. That's kind of what the goal was. One day I'm going to run my own business and I'm not going to let someone tell me how to do X. Right? And now we get to be that business. There's no clocking in. We, you know, we're all judged based on our performance and how happy our clients are. We get to be passionate and fired up about the industry and changes and trends and, and getting to test and experiment with things and kind of living the dream. But that's probably More than you wanted to know about me. But other facts I'm sure you could find just by Googling me like I'm a co author of a textbook used by Harvard University and some other universities through Stukent. And I teach at UC San Diego and Cal State Fullerton as kind of a moonlighting gig in the evenings. That's me.
- [14:26]
B
Teaching's hard work. I did some teaching.
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C
Oh, no, it's not. It's fun. It's not really. The only hard part is motivating students that are overwhelmed. Those night students that have the day jobs, sometimes you've really got to stay on them. Look, I know you're really busy. I'm not going to give you lower credit for submitting this assignment. Just try to get it in by Tuesday. And aside from those students, it's fun. It's exciting. You know, they jump on these, these office hours and they're so excited about at least the students that I have. The junior college I was teaching at for a while was. Yeah, that was. Those kids are just there so that their parents don't kick them out of the house. But the graduate students I work with at UC San Diego, they don't need to be in those classes. They're just really interested and fascinated, you know, with the industry. So I, I get to share stories and accolades and, and follow along on their journeys. I've got like 12 of them on different slack groups that, you know, are constantly hitting me up for second opinion or advice or just thanking me for helping them get where they are. So it's not challenging at all. It's just. It's just really exciting to me.
- [15:30]
B
Well, I don't disagree with. While you're teaching. I enjoy that part. When I taught at the college, I thought it was just too much, way too much prep. I looked at how many hours I put into being a teacher compared to what I could do working, and it was just like, I can't keep this up.
- [15:48]
C
So mine are different, minor, asynchronous. So I'm almost. My stuff. I. I prep before the course starts, and then the students just log in, watch the videos, the, the kind of time released to them every week. Aside from the office hours and just grading assignments, my, My workload's pretty low. I don't have a lot. I have to deal with everyone. There's not as much. Prep is probably what you had to do if you went in, in person. Mine's asynchronously.
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B
But you still have to prep all that, create all that work, though that's quite a bit of work to do all the content, you know, for the.
- [16:17]
C
Courses I teach, I only have to do the updates really. There's a few updated videos I have to do and updated screenshots of, you know, search.
- [16:25]
B
Once you've done the first one, the first big chunk.
- [16:28]
C
Yeah, once that first one's done, it's really just, you know, spending a Saturday updating, you know, the course stuff, which isn't a big deal.
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B
That's fair, I guess.
- [16:35]
C
I always teaching in person.
- [16:37]
B
Yeah, I always did it where I had to do all the work and then the next course I did was an entirely different thing so I had to do all the work again. I never had a lot.
- [16:45]
C
You can't do that and run a business. There's no way now.
- [16:48]
B
But I again, I think someday I'll go back. I was at the college the other day actually and they asked me whether or not I would like to do it again. It's just. Yeah, right now we're a little bit busy with speaking.
- [17:00]
C
Was that you could do the guest speaking? Guest speaking is a great way to get in front of future marketers. And I've gotten referrals from students who went to work like the banner company that does the Miss Universe. Right. I got to do some work with them because the students ended up going, getting a job there and referring us to his boss. That was pretty cool. And it's a great way to get some edu links to your website.
- [17:24]
B
Yes, there is that for sure. For sure. So where do you start? If you're a small or medium sized business, which I expect a lot of our listeners are if they want to increase their exposure, say ChatGPT. Where, where do they even begin if they're completely in the block and then they haven't listened to any other shows and they just don't even know where to begin. What would you say?
- [17:53]
C
Sure, I would say there's. There's probably the three areas we really want to focus around if you're a new business, you know, and of course creating a strategy for, you know, what you want to do. Maybe a 12 month strategy and having a third party like a consultancy or agency take a look at that strategy just to give you some feedback. Is this a good starting point as you start getting into it? But I think the first area is going to revolve around content. Right. Is kind of mapping out what content do I need to create ways that you could start as opposed to paying for expensive software is just go out and look at the site Maps of the competition and start analyzing and making a list of pages that you feel are relevant to your business that you don't have on your website. Maybe you're a personal injury attorney and, or your client's a personal injury attorney and they've got one practice area page listing all the practices. But the competition have individual pages for each of those practices. Car accident, truck accident, wrongful death, workers compensation. You can create a dedicated page for each of those things. So do the research. Maybe take 10 or 20 of the competitors and just kind of fan through and build a list of pages that you could create. And then maybe start using some of those AI tools and saying, hey, based on. On this page of content I'm gonna create for my website, could you give me ideas for 10 to 20 supportive pages that I could create around the topics that are on this main page to create sort of some peripheral content? Then you've basically created a content roadmap for the next year. Each page, take your time. Each page has a video where you're talking to your potential clients, sharing your experience and firsthand experience and what you've done in the industry and how you've helped clients. Maybe slip in a testimonial in between, you know, some of those clips, do some diagrams and, and visuals for your clients to see or put some photos. We had one of our team members fly to Michigan last week to take pictures for one of our RPI attorneys. And they literally just set up a little chair where the welcome to city signs are and wait for a truck or a certain type of vehicle to pass. So we get some custom pictures for our page that are unique to us, that aren't just stock images that Google and ChatGPT. And everyone would look at it saying, hey, this is. This is new. This is unique. This is different. This is something that's not in my database already. Start with that content plan, I think would be the place that I would start with. Then do some level of a technical audit, because it could be that the reason your site isn't showing up is that there's some technical issues with it. Maybe from a crawling standpoint is bots are crawling through the web. Maybe they're not finding your website, maybe they're finding your website. But the pages can't be indexed because there's some tags or some data or some filters that the server folks have put on to prevent traffic from going to your website from search engines. So you definitely want to do that technical audit to make sure that we've looked at crawling and Indexing and duplicate content challenges and things to make sure that it's very simple for a search engine to find and understand how your content's organized and what content you have. And that third piece, after we get through content and tech is really going to be around off page. What can we do off the website? Now with ChatGPT and all these new emerging platforms, we look at things a little bit differently. And in the old days of SEO it was let's go get links. We were just laughing about Edu links, right? If it's from a marketing section of a college website and it's referencing our site, yeah, there's still some value there and that's really important. But as we think about the new world of off page SEO, it's no longer let's just try to get as many links, high quality traffic, referring relevant links to our pages as possible. Those are still great and they're still really good for referral traffic. And Google will still use, you know, what was Larry Page's 1998 page rank, you know, and pass some value from those links to our pages. But, but now when you look at a search result, you don't just see blue links and black text, you see images, you see videos, you see. People also ask. You see all sorts of diverse types of content that we can start incorporating into, you know, what we're doing and we can look at all the different ways that ChatGPT and perplexity are sharing their sources. Like what are the sources that they're citing, what types of websites for our restaurant chains, we see a lot of Yelp, we see a lot of TripAdvisor. We don't see a lot of Google, but we see a lot of Reddit. We might even see Open Table. So we'll do some of those searches. We'll look at where our competitors and where we're being cited and we'll put a plan together to get our customers and our vendors and our partners and our marketing teams to start engaging with those other platforms so that we're cited more often in other industries. You might see more of just Reddit or maybe you'll see some LinkedIn articles or you'll see Medium or Quora or some other answers website. And that might be our focus is how do we take every piece of content that's important to our business on our website? How do we get it short and clear? We don't need to be as clever in writing as we used to. We can be super, super blatant about what we do and what we are in these short chunks or passages, and let's make sure those passages are represented where they need to be and referenced and, and mentioned and cited in quoras and reddits and so forth. So I think getting a strategy together that takes everything that you want people to know about your business and putting it in those sites in a way that isn't spammy, that's the biggest kind of roadblock as we're getting into the evolving world of LLMs, is how do we put this stuff out here without feeling like we're back in 2005 link spam world, where we're using article spinners and, and content syndication tools and press release distribution tools to blast our stuff all over the web. That's what we used to do to get links, and now we feel like we might have to start doing that to get our citations and our mentions, but we don't. If we're creative and we really sit down and whiteboard out some ideas of how we can get our customers and our clients and our partners involved in that process. So I think that's where. That's where the interesting piece is going to come in. Your content's not that hard. It's mimicking a little bit what the competition is doing and just creating something better. You know, the, the way that we're approaching tech, you know, as LLMs are looking at these passages, other than making sure they can actually get to our content, there's not a whole lot we have to worry about with regards to page speed and that sort of thing, because less people are going to be going to our website with all this new AI. They want the answers and they want to be able to interact and purchase and do things right within the LLMs, potentially never even visiting your website. So for me, page speed and those kind of things aren't as important now. What's important is that, that we're the answer. That we've got those short answers in a way that's clear and precise and referenced and fact checked and, and conveys trust and experience. So. So I think that's probably where I would, you know, look at getting a third party to help. Hey. Hey. AMA Club at Cal State Fullerton. I have a challenge for you. You guys up for it? I'd love for you to help me come up with a strategy or making sure that my, my passages on my website, my content is represented on these other citation sources in a way that isn't spammy or going to reflect negatively on my business, I think that's where Your biggest challenge is. I don't know if that answers your question, but I think that's where I would start. If I'm a small business, there's a.
- [25:28]
D
Lot I could respond with, but I'm going to start with content. One of I think my biggest challenges working with clients is, is most need content. They need better content. They need to do it, but they don't want to pay us to do it for them, and they're too busy to do it themselves. And so a lot of times it just doesn't get done. And it's when they do it, it's amazing when they listen to us and they actually do it or they have us create it. Either way, it's awesome. Do you have any suggestions to either SEOs who are trying to get their clients to create this content or to small businesses on how to encourage them to actually listen and do it? Because it's a constant battle, you know, just getting clients to listen to our recommendations that they pay us for.
- [26:14]
C
I remember sitting down in 2010 at my little desk in the kitchen when I was working from home before I had an office, and I was going through this massive list of pages that I wanted my personal trainer client to write for me. He's like, like, you want to rank for Loose trainer for losing weight or a personal fitness trainer, Huntington Beach? There's all these keywords you want to rank for. I've created a site structure and a taxonomy for you of all the pages that we need to create to solve for all these different words that you want to appear for. And I remember the same challenge of, hey, here's that list. How's it going? How's the content? As soon as you give this to me, I'll optimize it for you and you'll rank. And I just had hundreds of those. And it got to a point where I'm like, the clients just aren't going to do the work. You know, we gave them a perfect treasure map of how they can dominate in search results. All they need to do is give us the content. It's so frustrating. So one of the things that we've been doing with, with our. Our enterprise clients is we'll actually do an SEO content brief for them. And that brief entails us going out and looking at competing search results and studying the competitor topics and entities and keywords and things that we know are going to be important to that page. If there is an existing page, we'll use their search console data, maybe even their paid search search term reports. So that it's a data driven conversion insight report strategy versus just here's how much traffic there might be for a keyword. Here's keywords that convert, right? Those are important. So we'll put that brief together that'll have everything from what URL to use, metadata, titles, descriptions. We'll have the breadcrumb recommendation in there, we'll have the heading, then we'll have this beautiful table of contents that's derived from all of that extra research. Thanks to AI, we can really speed up that process. It used to take us two, three days sometimes to do a single content brief. But now, thanks to AI, we can take all of the competitive insights, all of the internal data that we have, and we can say, build me a comprehensive table of contents for a page on this particular topic with this intent of this customer intent. And it gives you this beautiful flow of topics to write about and all those subheadings. When it becomes too long, that's when you're like, okay, let's break this down to about a third of this and use the rest of it as peripheral content. I still want it. It's still going to be mentioned, but they're going to eventually be links to subpages underneath what's now a pillar page. So we give that content brief to our clients. It includes rows for the structured markup to use. It includes rows for the expertise piece of it or the trust part of it. Like if for Martha Stewart, what we would do is we took for puffer jackets, the lady who invented the puffer jacket. We put a little screenshot and mock up of what her reviewed by section might look like. Reviewed by the person who invented the puffer jacket. Right. I was like, hey, no one's going to have better authority than the person who invented the thing, right? So let's have her as a reviewer. And then we put video recommendations, image recommendations, what they would look like, how they'd be optimized. So all the client has to do is basically fill in the blanks, just create the media, which tells you what media to create, what format, what context, just fill in the blanks. So now with, with all the cool tools that are available, some clients can just do dictation. So what we want you to do is just read through these topics and these questions for the FAQ section and give us answers. And we'll take that and give it to a writer and the writer will do the work for you. In some cases we'll recommend third party sites like what's the one that we use For I can't remember the name of it now, but there's a lot of tools that are out there where you can basically connect with writers in your industry and set a budget and say, here's how much I'm willing to pay for a piece of content writer access. That's the one that we use. And you can find a whole pool of paralegals if you're looking for law content. You give them the outline, you give them what content you need, and all they have to do is just fill in the blanks. But one big disclaimer here in all this writing process that I'm noticing, and a lot of businesses unfortunately are taking the shortcut, is they're just saying, hey, ChatGPT, write out the content based on these outlines.
- [30:39]
B
Yeah.
- [30:39]
C
And what more this is, the challenge is if, if all of your competitors are doing that same thing and they're asking the same question, you're going to get, yeah, it's going to be written differently, but it's all the same regurgitated content. So that's why it's important to make sure that you've got that firsthand experience in there. The storytelling, the accolades, the awards, the testimonials, the examples, the video of you in front of the camera, you know, and. Or your top, you know, expert in the industry in your company in that video, doing something that's really unique to you, that isn't already known about by the competition. So as you're going through each of those sections, how do you do it differently? What makes you better? How do you differentiate yourself? Why do customers come to you instead of the competition? Why do customers leave the competition and end up going to you? Why do clients stay with you longer than, you know, the competition? Putting up that type of content is something that most of the time needs to come from the business. And a third party writer, even writer access, can't really fill in the blanks there. And that's why the dictation part of it, the interview part of it, is such an important piece. Get that interview, ask all the questions about those different topics and questions, then pass that off to the writer and let them take that firsthand experience and articulate it into something that reads really well. That's been our approach, which again is hard to do for a small business, but it's really well for enterprises.
- [32:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. I find I hear a lot of great ideas. One of my favorite people to listen to and read is Kevin Indig. And it's fantastic. Yeah. And I talked to Kevin and I go, okay, how can I crush this and make it tiny enough and affordable enough for a small business? Yeah. And I, then I stump them. I think pretty much, yeah. He was, he stopped responding to me because I was asking so many. It was just, it was just too much to try and do and it isn't easy. But you know what, let's take a quick break and we come back, we'll, we'll talk more about this and more. Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR FM, hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing. My company, Senior SEO, Scott Van AK, and our special guest, Steve Wiedemann, senior search strategist at Wiedemann Consulting Group. So we've been getting some great tips from Steve here and you know, a few things came up that were if.
- [33:11]
E
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- [33:42]
B
It's always nice to hear. It doesn't matter who I talk to that what we've been talking about in the past has been on Mark and things like you mentioned adding more what we call multimodal but you know, more images, video, creating charts, all these different things and adding to the page and just adding bulk to them, that really adds value is really important. One of the things I've been telling clients to do, again we're dealing with small, medium size, but create these great pieces of content. I know it takes a ton of work and you don't have to have them perfect right out of the gate and then build in as part of your process. And you can, we can help you with this. But building as part of your process to add these components as time goes on, make them better over time instead of just set it and forget it, create a long piece of, no, make it a living document. And it seems like Google and all these different places are really appreciating that. In fact, Scott just finished redoing one for how to maintain rankings after a redesign. It's already showing up in AI because again, he made it multimodal, really added value.
- [34:52]
D
That one was funny.
- [34:52]
B
It exploded.
- [34:53]
D
It was 500 words. And Ross, like, can you redo or can you tweak this to make it modern? Because it's like 15 years old. I look at this is so old it turned into like a 7,000 word article. And I'm still not done. And. But it works like it works when you have. And you know, I think it's quality. It just proves like it's only been live for a couple days and it's showing up at the top of aio. So, you know, AI overview. So it just proves that quality content works. It just probably always will work.
- [35:20]
B
And yet you got to wonder, does this stuff actually have value? Like I almost wonder, are they creating a kind of a monster here? Everyone's going to be creating these huge pieces of really authoritative of content and the next person is going to try and beat that and the next person and the next person. And how big are these pieces of content going to be? Or how consolidated with facts? It's just going to be overkill everywhere. I don't know. Do you think they're creating something that could be a problem in the future? What do you, what do you think about. I'm hearing people rambling about that.
- [35:50]
C
I felt the difference actually recently where we did the opposite. We took these long form pages and we started to, actually, I mentioned a few minutes ago, we start to break it into supportive cluster pages or sub pages. So we take those big sections and like, wow, if there's enough, we can write a whole page about it, let's write a whole page about it and let's just reference it. Maybe even just create a little box in between some of the paragraphs on the pillar page where learn more about. And then you post links, maybe you know, three to nine links to those subpages, you know, that are supportive of those topics or, or if you can figure out a way to tie it into the links within the content itself, that's even better. One thing I want to go back to before we dive deeper into pillar and cluster content is the challenge of writing content. And yeah, you're right, if a small business can afford to have an agency write it, that's the way to go. Because the agency knows what to do, what to optimize, etc. But there are sites like Handshake, I think it's just handshake.com and there are college professors with students that want to get experience. Some will work for free, some will work for, you know, minimum wage that are willing to, you know, just to get the experience. So I think there's, there's that opportunity, too. If your SEO agency is giving you a list of content they need from you, you know, and they've given you the topics to write about on those pages, just record them. Connect with an intern on Handshake or at a university and say, can you help me write this? Oh, and I'm going to be using originality AI to make sure that you're not using AI to write this. So please make sure you're writing it, you know, based on what the recording was and in your. In words that aren't, you know, written by AI just so that they know. And there's a disclaimer there that I'm not, you know, that I know how to use AI as much as you do. If I wanted to use AI, which would I want you to write this as a marketing student. So I think, I think there's an opportunity there. But going back to the pillar cluster content, you're right. 7,000 words is a lot that would have crashed WordPress 10 years ago.
- [37:52]
D
So I do feel like it almost crashed it yesterday.
- [37:55]
C
So, yeah, I did a post on the Autocomplete. I actually had a whole website on it back in 2010 or so called Beat the Autocomplete. And I ended up moving it all to my primary website. But the original page itself was so long that it literally did crash WordPress. And so I ended up having to break it into individual pages on the different pieces of autocomplete, such as the volume of searches and clicks and that sort of thing. So, yeah, I know what that's like. And I do feel like now with AI, because it's around passages and because they're only crawling so much of the page, as long as we have our TLDR at the top for that featured snippet and for the AI overview, we've already set ourselves up for success. And now if we can break that content into sections and have separate pages for them. We see this with the personal injury attorneys now when somebody's doing a query for, let's just say, Fallon grocery store. And so now we created hey, did you fall in a Ralph's or Piggly Wiggly? Right. And so we're creating subpages for that with examples and stories and previous lawsuits and things that happened specific to that brand. And now we're seeing like, Walmart slip and fall number one for a client that was, you know, optimizing for it in the state that they're. They're going for, and McDonald's slip and fall. Instead of just mentioning them in context on that pillar page, we're creating separate pages for them and minimizing that pillar page to just what it needs to be that parent page. What I, where I see the break is I see a lot of the SEOs who are doing this forget to cross link the two so it almost orphans the cluster page because we're not deep linking to it. We're creating it, it's there, it's on the site map. But from a taxonomy or site hierarchy standpoint, there's no direct link between the two. So we want to make sure that they do both, that we have the breadcrumb so that the child page can link back up to the parent page. And then we've got a section, I mentioned a block or something on the pillar page itself where we're deep linking down to that supportive content. That's the only thing I've seen really break in this process. But yeah, I feel like you can take that 7,000 page pillar page and probably get it down to 2,500 words and create a ton of incremental content that now has an even more relevant title and meta description for that long tail query that that section of content would have solved for. So I feel like, I feel like it's going the opposite now thanks to, thanks to AI and how much of a page it can crawl or needs to crawl. We can create lighter, thinner, faster loading pages by creating that whole pillar cluster environment on our website.
- [40:41]
B
Yeah, the hub and spoke method or whatever you want to call it. There's so many different ways of putting it, but yeah, it's the silo approach.
- [40:47]
C
They used to call it siloing.
- [40:50]
B
Yeah, he insists that he invented it, but I'm not sure I remember the.
- [40:54]
C
Tech tips page probably still out there in archive. That was. I lived by that page. And how to do the IP funnel. If you've got, you know, 30 different domains, you don't want to redirect them all to one. You redirect them, you know, to a.net and then redirect the net to yours to prevent Google from thinking that, you know, your, your domain is your SEO technique. So yeah, all sorts of really cool content on that old tech tips page. But I still have it in drive somewhere.
- [41:19]
B
I remember when we, way back when Jim Hedger was my first employee and he was always big on the planning and the ideas and stuff. And one time we started talking about theming and what it came out to. The long and the short of it is it was the same thing as xyloing. And it's just funny how I think we all started thinking the same way at the same time. Just like most inventions happen, everyone just starts thinking this would work and then you have multiple people at the same time coming up the same invention or whatever. And it was just, it was a great approach and it still works fantastically.
- [41:56]
C
I mean, folks are debunking it, they're trying to say it's not important anymore. And unfortunately I have clients that have their own internal SEOs that just shoot off content like shrapnel on the blog as opposed to keeping it siloed and well organized. So it just becomes a bloody nightmare. But yeah, I know what you mean. I feel like that's probably the, the differentiator in modern SEO is the real experts will take the time to create that site structure, to create the taxonomy, to create that treasure map of a content roadmap, whereas the other folks just use keyword clustering tools and just shrapnel their content wherever the hell they want to. So I feel like that's the difference is if you take that two to three months, probably can do it in less than that now with all the AI technology available and really build out, you know, your sitemap for the next five to 10 years, you'll never have to worry about content anymore. You know exactly what you're going to be writing and you know, and how it's organized on the website. But the lazier SEOs are like, let's just do SEO. Well, no, what's our technical strategy? What's our content roadmap going to look like and which one should we prioritize? You know, what's our off page strategy? And nobody really does that. They're just like, let's just do SEO the same way that they do social media. And I think that's where SEO fails because you didn't go in with a strategy, you just started doing things and then a year or two years later you're finding yourself reverse engineering some things that you did because you didn't enter it. Strategically, that's not a lot of fun.
- [43:22]
B
Most of the time when we, when we do encounter companies who did it, a quote, good job of SEO, and they're not bad. They've got some rankings and stuff, it's usually disorganized and the we're faced with having to organize it again and it's not easy and it's a bad idea these days. I actually have to admit cobbler's shoes Here, our site. I've been working on it lately, trying to get more into writing. I'm just horrified.
- [43:52]
C
I can't even log into my website. It's so bad. It's been, I don't know, a couple years since we've even touched it. So we have a new website where we're pushing out that's going to be around, specifically around our initiative, franchise and multi location. But I get a lot of folks are like, oh, this is really old. And I'm like, you don't understand, if I go into this website, it's going to break it. Yeah, you're telling me mine's, mine's worse. I guarantee you'll log into mine and be like, yeah, I'm not touching anything.
- [44:16]
B
Yeah, well, one of the things that we were talking about earlier or I mentioned earlier is how hard it is to get a lot of this to work for small medium businesses with much smaller budgets. One of the things that I'm trying to work on now with a priority guy, he's just, he's brilliant, he's got a great track record. And I'm trying to work with him to figure out a plan to provide consulting to these small medium businesses that's within their budget, that gives them some guidance on their whole messaging and how, you know, where's that story? Can we get, can we make a story out of you and then begin to build it and get people to know it so that you're more attractive to the pressure? Because the press is going to make, if you get earned media, it's just gold. It's very difficult to get. But having a good story and some people have them, they just don't even realize it is fantastic. So that's one of the things we're working on and I love that.
- [45:13]
C
Do you have like a, do you have a pool of ideas that your clients can draw inspiration from? Because I know when, when we work with some of our clients, we love to share some of those stories and accolades of, of clients we've worked with. Daryl Isaacs, for example, in Kentucky did this, this helmet giveaway for children on National Bicycle Safety Day. And not only did it get mentioned and referenced by other local businesses and local news, but they asked him to come onto the station and he actually got on TV and said, yeah, come on down to our office, we're giving away helmets. Make sure your kid comes and have their bike. And, and it was great because he did something for the community. Dr. Shaw Butology up in Fresno and Bakersfield. Once a month he'd give away a free surgery to women who are victims of domestic violence. And it was amazing. He'd help the community and do something great. And he got news and press for it. These are the kind of things that I feel like are neglected. The business would rather say, look, let me just give you $1,000 and go get me some links. Then just take that same thousand dollars and do something local for that. That adds value, makes a difference, builds relationships, builds your network. Because all those people are going to come that you get to talk to and make friends with that might foster a relationship that earns a link, earns a mention, earns referral traffic. But they just don't want to do it. They don't want to put themselves out there. They'd rather just, you know, buy their way to, you know, to success. And you just can't do that in digital marketing and be authentic.
- [46:45]
D
Which is funny because that thousand dollars, the links that you would get by doing that community service are going to be more plentiful and more authoritative. It's like, it's like probably spending 10 grand on link building instead, you know.
- [47:00]
C
Plus you're gonna get tried so many link building companies and we've, it just, it just never works. They're like, oh, our, our links are all through straight outreach and they're on sites that send traffic. And you know, the moment that I hear domain authority or, or numeric metrics on sites that are separate from traffic, I'm immediately, you know, skeptical. I'm like, okay, great, you're, you've got some kind of private blog network or article website network that have figured out a way to game these scores. But the reality is these sites are never going to send any referral traffic. And, and we've tested all of them and we're just like, yeah, this, I mean, we probably went through 11 different experts in link building and agencies in link building just to see if there was one out there that could genuinely be the outreach team. We need the digital PR team that we need to deliver great results and we haven't once found one that actually did that. So now we work with our clients, we work with our clients, internal social media teams and outreach teams and we let them do it. And if we're lucky, they have a PR team. We can reach out to current at Applebee's and say, hey, the Veterans Day page needs a few more links this year. It looks like competitors have earned some good links from these other websites that we haven't. Let's add this to your queue of who you could do some outreach to and hopefully get some better links. So we got va.gov and military.com and some really good ones in doing that. So the collaboration between the PR teams and sometimes the small business social media teams is all you have to work with because these third party link building companies are just, just garbage. You know it's kind of funny when I look back at like Jim Boykin, you know when he had rebuild pages and now it's, it's Internet marketing ninjas which I think just got acquired. I actually took a screenshot and I can't find it to save my life. It's probably in archive.org somewhere of his pricing on Webuild pages for links. It was like starting at like, it was like $10,000 and then it was like if you're an enterprise brand or a link building package, it started $22,000 a month. And like who in the world has this kind of budget? My, my, you know, private fitness trainer guys spending $250 a month with me, you know, how is he ever going to afford $22,000 a month to earn a small handful of three to five links? So the value of what a link used to do in the world of, of PageRank, you know, was huge. So yeah, it's been a three decade dilemma I think for us.
- [49:28]
B
Well my answer to you is yeah, we don't obviously being so new, we don't have any great anecdotes or anything yet, but for this particular service. But I am very excited about it. I think, well it's it, what it's going to help us do is get them more into the knowledge graph in the way that I'm planning on doing it. Which is going to be, which has already worked for me. I'm already, I'm building this on my. What's already worked for me. So I'm pretty excited about it and we'll see how it pans out. But I think it's one of the new services that Step Force is going to be providing very soon.
- [50:01]
C
So. Cool. Yeah, love to hear more about it too. We could do a whole episode just on Knowledge Graph and building your brand and your personal brand using Knowledge Graph and you know, mimicking a bit of what we would put into Wikipedia into our own syndication and you know, authorship and so forth everywhere we can. But I don't see a lot of businesses thinking about it that way. They're just like, I'll just write a creative byline. Like well, why wasn't your byline represent the semantic vector of what you want to be known for. Why don't we keep that consistent across all of our social profiles and author bylines and author sections so that the Internet as it crawls through sees that correlation like I used to with Steve Wiedemann and SEO expert, both of which you can still put into quotes separately and see a lot of those instances where I was mentioned in context that way. But you're right, brands don't think about knowledge graph and semantics. They think about how do I get a page to rank for a given array of keywords. They don't think about the off page part of it or, you know, off page semantics. I'm glad you brought that up.
- [51:04]
B
SEO Grok is where I've been writing a lot lately and I'm trying to create an article on how to do proper authorship these days. It is not the easiest thing to explain. The basics are, but getting into the depth of it is. It's not 101.
- [51:21]
C
I see an infographic in your future. See me sharing an infographic that you create in your future here.
- [51:27]
D
I'll get AI to do one right now.
- [51:30]
C
Done. No.
- [51:31]
B
Well, we covered so much. Is there anything you'd like to end on? Steve? I know we've got to sort of tie things up here. No.
- [51:37]
C
This has been a lot of fun. I would say we started with talking about imposter syndrome, and I want to remind everybody that anyone who's listening, if you've been doing search and you've been doing it the right way, that fundamentally you've already been doing everything right, are there some things that we can do a little bit differently for those answers? Sure. And there's a lot of content out there that you can explore and experiment with. But how much my time would I put into it at max, maybe 10 to 15% of my holistic search engine optimization time? And I'd stick to doing what Jim Rohn says, which is, you know, you don't have to do extraordinary things to be successful. You only have to do ordinary things extraordinarily well. So just keep doing what you're doing, but make sure that you're doing it better than the competition and you're going to be just fine. When it comes to search traffic, especially for those lower funnel intent pages that have done you well for the last decade, they're still going to do you well. As long as you're keeping it up to date and keeping that content as helpful as you possibly can, you should be just fine.
- [52:40]
B
Awesome. Perfect way to tie it off. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunt, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, my company, senior SEO Scott Vanack, and our special guest, Steve Wiedemann. Thank you for joining us today. If you have any questions you'd like to share with us, please feel free to post them on our Facebook group, easily found by searching SEO101podcast on Facebook or email us. Rosstepforth.com will get right to me. Anyway, have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes, which air every week on WMR fm.
- [53:09]
D
Thank you for listening, everybody.
- [53:33]
C
Dude, this new bacon, egg and chicken biscuit from AM pm. Total winner. Winner, chicken breakfast. Chicken breakfast?
- [53:39]
B
Come on.
- [53:39]
C
I think you mean chicken dinner, bro. Nah, brother. Crispy bacon, fluffy eggs, juicy chicken, and a buttery biscuit. That's the perfect breakfast. All right, let me try it.
- [53:49]
B
Okay. Yeah, totally. Winner, winner, chicken breakfast.
- [53:52]
C
I'm gonna have to keep this right here. Make sure every breakfast is a winner with the delicious new bacon, egg and chicken biscuit from AM pm AM P. M. Too much good stuff.
- [54:03]
A
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