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- [00:01]
Ross Dunn
Are you tired of juggling contacts manually following up and deals falling through the cracks? We can fix it so you never lose another lead. Enabling 24. 7 sales and support via an AI that learns your business. Ready to close more deals with less hassle? Get a free trial of our marketing automation@thebuzzcrm.com hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR FM episode number 478. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing and my co host is my company senior SEO Scott Vanack. All right, we got a big show today, so let's just jump right into it. What's first on our agenda?
- [00:52]
Scott Vanack
Yeah, so we're going to Talk briefly about WordPress and guess what? It is not a hack that you have to worry about. Seems like that's all we talk about. But this one I kind of caught my eye a little bit. I don't usually talk about new plugins or anything. I have not played with this plugin yet, so I really don't know if it's any good, but it's created, it's called Progress Planner and it's by some co founders from Yoast and Yoast is awesome. So maybe this plugin is awesome. I don't have a lot of details on it yet. Roger Monti had just posted about it, I don't know, maybe an hour or so ago before this. So we haven't really dug super, super deep into it, but apparently it will help you in a lot of ways. So it helps plan tasks, it helps defeat procrastination. I'd love to see how that works.
- [01:36]
Ross Dunn
Sign me up.
- [01:37]
Scott Vanack
Yeah, no kidding. That's right there. Hopefully real life, not just business life. And it helps remove distractions. So what that exactly means is. I'm not totally sure, but it sounds good. It also simplifies managing critical tasks like maintaining website health, publishing posts and updating content. So because I haven't played with it, I'm speculating but I'm guessing it's just like a reminder system with pop ups and say don't forget to publish this post or don't forget you got to work on this. I don't really know. Might be cool. It's currently in beta, fully functional and the official launch is slated for October 3, 2024. Currently it is free and they are planning a pro version in the future. So you know, it's. What would I say it was called? Progress Planner. Maybe take a look next time you're bored and I will do the same. I want to Check it out and see what it's all about. But who knows?
- [02:29]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, the tough thing with those things is is they either are too heavy handed, they try to tell you no, you can't do this, no you can't do that and I don't want you. But as soon as they do that, I'm like, screw you, I'm gonna do it. Or they're just too soft and, or, or, or they're annoying. So I don't know, you just. I'm not sure if there's a way to win, but good luck. I hope they hope they kick the kick ass here and, and make it work.
- [02:52]
Scott Vanack
I think for some people it'll be good. But as anything, it's like even if we look at regular Yoast, the green light, yellow light, red light thing for a page, clients are always asking, well, this page isn't green, why is it not green? It's like, well, because for whatever reason the builder you're using, Yoast can't see any of the content on the page and it thinks you have zero words in your post. So it's going to give you a red light forever because it's an empty post. Like I'm always finding little reasons like that why these not just Yoast, but various plugins don't work because they don't get the full picture always. So who knows, maybe this will be a win, maybe not. We'll see.
- [03:22]
Ross Dunn
It always makes me think of this person. Now we all are. Anyone at the small business knows that you, you end up having, how shall we say, challenging clients occasionally. I'll never forget what's one lady who was very upset with us and fired us because Yost was not giving green across the work we were doing. We're like, well, you know, it's a fantastic little tool that we use aspects of to help with our work, but we don't actually use the SEO component. It's not our focus because it's a generalized SEO tool. We're experts. We do it by hand and make sure it works the way we know it'll work. Anyway, it didn't matter. Just there was no making her happy. And we'll always run into that type. But it is frustrating.
- [04:12]
Scott Vanack
You know, it's a great system for people that are just trying to figure stuff out. But if you know what you're doing, it's not really necessary most of the time.
- [04:21]
Ross Dunn
No. Anyways, just an interesting aside there. I'll never forget that. It was so much fun. Anywho, let's jump into some SEO News here. Google Search adds Internet Archives Wayback Machine Links to About this page so tell me about this page.
- [04:39]
Scott Vanack
Yeah, so, so first of all, what is about this page? A lot of you probably know, but probably a lot of you don't. So when you do any kind of search in Google, beside currently at least to the right of the URL, there's a little ellipsis, so three vertical dots. Click on that and Google has sort of this little pop up thing that slides out and tells you more information about the page. You know, it'll tell you various data about it, links to share it, all kinds of stuff kind of depending on what the page is. So they've got a new link there now and it links to that page's history within Wayback Machine. And I guess if you don't know what Wayback Machine is is it's a snapshot of how your page has looked over the years. Some sites you may have updates in there every day for 10 years or you might have one update seven years ago. I don't know Wayback Machines crawl schedule and why some sites are so heavily indexed in there more than others. But it's a real trip though.
- [05:35]
Ross Dunn
It's something you really want to check out if you haven't looked at it before and look back at some of the sites you knew back in the.
- [05:40]
Scott Vanack
Day or even your own. Don't, don't look@step4.com but I'm going to because now I'm curious what did it look like 20 years ago? I forget now. Like I kind of remember. Probably looked terrible, but maybe we want to go back to it.
- [05:53]
Ross Dunn
So, and it's on archive.org is where you would go for the Wayback Machine if you wanted to go directly there.
- [05:59]
Scott Vanack
Yes, exactly. So, so that's cool. Google had stated I can't remember what this quote is, but I'm going to read it because I put it here. We know that many people, including those in the research community value being able to see previous versions of web pages when available. That's why when added, that's why we've added links to the Internet Archive Way Back machine in our about this Page feature to give people quick context and make this helpful information easily accessible through search. So it'll be useful. Maybe, I don't know. We're going to see.
- [06:30]
Ross Dunn
Okay, well I, I love the idea. That's whether or not people will like what they see is another thing entirely. And, and, and there has been issues in the past with content that's being well stuff that shouldn't have been saved. Being saved there too. So I might draw more issues for the Wayback Machine, but let's hope not, because there is. They do. As a valuable. It's very valuable.
- [06:54]
Scott Vanack
I don't know if we spoke about it or maybe we had a client or. I can't remember the situation, but I feel like there was a recent, like recent being in the past couple years, someone who had a bunch of stuff in Wayback Machine that they had to get removed and maybe we helped them do it or we talked about it or something. There's gotta be a way to get yourself removed from Wayback Machine though, if you want to.
- [07:12]
Ross Dunn
Oh yeah, I'm sure there's.
- [07:13]
Scott Vanack
Yeah. So look it up if you don't like being in there.
- [07:16]
Ross Dunn
Just keep in mind it is an archive. It's like the library of the Internet. It's the history of the Internet. I mean, so I don't know. I'm looking at one of my old websites and it's. Most of the images are gone. I just see the text because it was so old back in 97, but it's still interesting to see. And. And wow, blast from the past. I don't even have SEO there because SEO hadn't. Didn't exist as a term. It was promotion, website marketing and promotion is what I had there. It's wild to think that SEO didn't exist as an ad. At least it didn't in my. It wasn't on my radar yet. Yeah, it was. What. What I did was promotion and marketing. It wasn't SEO, which is still the stupidest term ever. I do not optimize search engines. But anyways, it's a flashback.
- [08:05]
Scott Vanack
I remember when you hired me, like I don't even know, 20 some years ago. I think one of the questions you asked me was, what do you know about SEO? Or something. I was like, huh, I don't think I had an answer for you. I didn't know what you're talking about, so.
- [08:16]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, yeah, no doubt.
- [08:17]
Scott Vanack
Thankfully I'm employed though, so it worked out.
- [08:20]
Ross Dunn
Yes, yes. I liked training people in the ground up at that point. Don't have the time now, but back then it was. It was great. Well, there was no other option, really.
- [08:27]
Scott Vanack
Yeah, that's true.
- [08:29]
Ross Dunn
All right, so another piece here. Google Search supports ineligible region properties for videos. That made a little sense there. But anyways, the idea here is that when you put video into your website, your documentation of any kind that can be indexed, you can now put in a property within the background within the. The embedding of the video either in ISO format or another one, which is regions allowed or regions. So there's a regions allowed and ineligible regions. So you can do either way. Ineligible means these countries cannot view this video. Regions allowed will allow you to specify only the countries that it will be allowed to see in see it and the rest will be exempt. Nice that they did this. I kind of surprised. I mean, I don't do a lot of video stuff, so I didn't. I kind of just assumed I was already there, but I guess not. Yeah.
- [09:25]
Scott Vanack
So the nice part though is if you don't care who sees your videos, you don't have to do anything. It's just mostly if you, you know, if you're American and you're Netflix and you don't want us Canadians watching all your cool shows, this is for you. Although they have much more sophisticated ways to do that, of course, but muggers, maybe they don't like us.
- [09:44]
Ross Dunn
All right, next up, Google AI Overviews are now showing shopping results for commercial queries. Or I should say again. So what's this?
- [09:52]
Scott Vanack
Yeah, Barry was like, I don't remember them going away, but I guess if Alita says they, they're back, they must have gone away for a while. Yeah. So what Alita said. Alita Solis wrote in X. She said, if you're a retailer, please double down on your product detail. Page optimization their content, reviews, images, video, structured data merchant feed, everything. So AI Overviews is now showing again links to product pages and things like that. So, you know, it's great. Do that. Do what you can. Those are some. That's some great advice from her to try to help increase your product exposure and AI Overviews. But even without AI Overviews, you should probably do that anyways. You're going to get some advantages there with organic search. So it's. That's cool. It's just like a bit of a reminder on keeping up with your product pages.
- [10:43]
Ross Dunn
All right, all right. This is a report. Half of Google AI overviews. Sorry, Half of Google AI Overviews. Links overlap with top search results. And when I scanned this, and I only scanned this quickly, I believe you put this in here. I was little uncertain whether or not that meant that the cont. Like the content used in the AI Overview is from sites that are also in organic rankings. Is that what it means? Yes. Okay.
- [11:18]
Scott Vanack
So yeah, they're saying that. So I guess some background information. There were a little over 11,000 queries that they tested. Of those, about 20% say 2,400 overview AI overviews appeared. And out of those 2,400, half of those links that were appeared as citations within the AI overview content were linking to content that was already ranking organically at the top of search results. I don't know what they mean by the top of results. Is it top 10, top 5? I don't know what, how deep they're going there, but it's kind of funny to me because it's not surprising Google would pull from those top results because clearly they're the most relevant. But, but at the same time, I feel like at one point Google had talked about this being a way to bring other content to the forefront, give people more options and see more forms of content. But if they're just going to regurgitate the top 10 organic or whatever, do we need AI overviews? It's already there. They're just repeating. It's like they're summarizing the top 10, essentially. Well, I guess maybe that is kind of what they're doing in a way.
- [12:25]
Ross Dunn
Well, and you got to remember it's all part and parcel to their, their experience where they're trying to make it so that you don't have to go to the websites.
- [12:34]
Scott Vanack
Yeah.
- [12:35]
Ross Dunn
Unfortunately they want you just to get the result and stick to Google and just keep churning away with all their paid results and. Yeah, all their money making and, and they use the same content I expect for their voice responses as well. So yeah, it's, it's a sad direction they're taking, but I guess it's been inevitable. Yeah. Anyway, don't want to go down that rabbit hole.
- [13:02]
Scott Vanack
No, this might be a bad analogy because I haven't thought about it in advance, but wouldn't that be kind of like you open up the yellow pages and the phone number for every business is the phone number for the yellow Pages and then you call them and then they tell you the things you want to know. Like you never actually get to the real business.
- [13:18]
Ross Dunn
Yeah.
- [13:18]
Scott Vanack
In a way, it's just a search engine telling you how to find the search engine that you're already on.
- [13:24]
Ross Dunn
Okay, let's take. Yeah, no, no worries, no worries. Let's take a quick break. We come back. I've got a very interesting concept that is helping local rankings. SEO101 will be back right after recess. Welcome back to SEO101 on WMR FM, hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Van Achieved. All right, so this is the local SEO nose component. And this is very Interesting to me. I saw this and kind of scratched my head. It just amazes me that this exists. But people will do anything to increase their rankings and this is a good example. So don't do this. But there is a way apparently to influence your local rankings using directions or driving in the area. So get, let's get into the brass tacks here. So there are discussions I've seen lately about companies selling a service that will emulate driving in your local area and going to your location using Google. So they're using this to they check for directions and they drive to your location or at least they're in the area. When they do that. Google can tell where they are based on their location details in their phone. Another tip was to have your employees request driving directions to your business each day on their way to you or their office. All right, why is this helpful? Well, again, Google is always paying attention to locality, so. And this is about local. So if you're in the maps and you want to hear more in the map pack, these are ways to do it, but they are not safe. I want to say that Google's going to crack down soon, but we know that they suck with local SEO. So there's very much a possibility that you could benefit from this. Just know that it's against Google's guidelines severely and you can get in trouble. I just had to mention it because it's so wild. So if you have your. Literally, if you have your employees request driving directions each day on their way to work, it's potential. It's. It potentially you'll see rankings improve for your local business in, in your area. It's mind boggling that that's so simple.
- [15:51]
Scott Vanack
It, it's so simple and it kind. I get why it can work, but I also get how easy it would be to detect, yeah, you know, the Same Direction at 8am every day from point A to point B, repeated times, you know, 300 days a year. Like, you know, I don't know, it just seems.
- [16:09]
Ross Dunn
But conversely, deadly. How many other pieces of spam that Google is letting people get away with in local is easy to detect. It's insane. It's just a dumpster fire. So. And what really blew me away, I was telling Scott, is that I just don't think like this anymore. Back in the day when I was, you know, it was gray hat, black hat, whatever, we didn't care. We didn't even know. There's a difference. Back when search engines started, um, I guess I was in this field a little more and I thought, whatever, what can I do to screw with Google in that case, it wasn't Google, it was Infoseek or whatever. But these guys are, there's actually companies selling this as a service now. They've found this and they've gone to the point, I mean, I know how much work's involved in getting a service to the point that you can sell it, never mind do outreach and sell it. It's mind boggling that that's already out there. And it just makes you wonder how many other tactics are being tested and tested and we don't even know about. I don't know. It pays to be a white hat SEO like we are, I can tell you, because we don't have to worry about all these little details. And if we do end up with a client who's being hammered by black hats, we try to take the upper road and either just show that the other guys are, are doing bad things and, and they really shouldn't be there because we need a fair playground here or we do some gray hat stuff if we have to. We've mentioned before that that does happen. It's just this black hat stuff's mind boggling at times. It really is.
- [17:45]
Scott Vanack
You know, a service like this makes me wonder how incredibly lucrative it would have to be because it's going to be short lived one way or the other. It's not a forever service. So they've got. Well, yeah, okay, fair enough. How much black? I mean, yeah, okay. I guess a lot of blackout stuff lives on. It never actually really does.
- [18:01]
Ross Dunn
Again, we're talking about Google Logan here. I've got no faith in local. For Google, nothing gets fixed.
- [18:07]
Scott Vanack
So does it work on Yelp? No.
- [18:11]
Ross Dunn
All right, Google Maps is showing business photos on review sentiments. What's this?
- [18:17]
Scott Vanack
I haven't heard this, so this is kind of cool. I haven't seen this in the wild yet, but I'm sure we will. It's kind of cool. So one example that Barry posted, probably easier to explain with an example, is Outback Steakhouse. There was a review for Outback Steakhouse. The person that left the review was talking about their ribeye steaks. And then right above that review, Google was sourcing images from the business, business supplied images, not user supplied, of steaks from Outback Steakhouse. So you're seeing a visual of what the review is about when there's an image that exists related to the review. So I thought that's pretty cool. And if you're, you know, you're browsing through reviews, it's probably quite helpful for people. But my big takeaway here was that this just is. It's highlighting another very important reason to keep your business photos updated. In Google Business Profile, put photos of all your products or, or your menu items, in this case, whatever you got. Put photos and if you see a bunch of reviews about something and you don't have photos about that, upload photos of that and hopefully it'll show up in the review and just get a bit of extra exposure. It's kind of cool.
- [19:24]
Ross Dunn
Interesting. You know, another thought that occurred to me about that last Black Hat thing we were mentioning is that it's inevitable that by the time we hear about these things or by the time it's actually posted publicly, it's been out for a long time. That's something that we should consider. That's mind blowing. How long has that been working before it got announced publicly? Because I'll all the stuff ends up being run into the dirt before it's publicized, usually. Oh yeah, and by that point it is about to be burned and not going to work anymore. That's typically how it works. Again with Google Local, I cannot say that's probable. It never seems to stop all your garbage.
- [20:04]
Scott Vanack
You're going to be dreaming about this in your sleep tonight. This is like your whole day now.
- [20:10]
Ross Dunn
Okay, well let's jump into some Mueller files. We've got a couple here. The first one is and this was. I love this because we're always preaching about this but John talks about when not to worry about traffic fluctuations. This is an article from Search Engine Journal mentioning pretty much just espousing upon his comment in a Reddit. So someone, a Reddit user has expressed anxiety about their website's performance. They're reporting fluctuations in both clicks and impressions. This caused some some to worry that every spike or drop in numbers is a cause for alarm. This is overall Reddit users were starting to think my man, God, this is a big issue. John had this to say. Here's a quote as others mentioned especially the clicks are just very small numbers. So any change by one or two will look like a big spike. There's a somewhat humorous way to look at this. And he links to and Wikipedia page and this will be in the show notes called strong the Strong Law of Small Numbers. And let's continue the quote now there aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them. That's the quote from the Strong Law of Small Numbers. John says quote basically you can't make a smooth graph if the individual steps are so big. You'll note this is much less visible in impressions, partially because you're looking at average values of 150ish where a handful more or less doesn't trigger a big spike. So the concept here is if you see a drop in ranking or drop in clicks of 50%, that looks really alarming. Unless you realize it was just a drop of from 4 to 2. Yeah, percentages are very, very difficult to work with because of that main issue. Unless you're very familiar with your site, that can really be alarming. In short, these are some of the takeaways that were posted on the article Small Traffic Small traffic numbers can cause exaggerated fluctuations in graphs. Focus on long term trends rather than daily changes, and don't panic over minor variations in website traffic, which is something we talk about often. Yep, although we're usually talking about it in terms of major algorithmic updates, not to overreact to any changes. Okay, I thought that was a really good addition and I love that John mentioned it because I know a lot of people do obsess and I can't bold that enough obsess over rankings and changes and and so on. All right, next up, Google says fixing headings won't change rankings what's this is another Mueller file.
- [23:00]
Scott Vanack
Yeah, another Mueller file direct from Reddit. I think John must live on Reddit. Lately he's all of our all of our content on John seems to come from Reddit now. So there was a question posted by a user by the name of beginning example. I'm hoping that's not the name his parents gave him or her, but rather a handle, which of course it is. And they posted how harmful is having non sequential header tags like having a H4 title and H1 tags below or having an H4 H3 H5 but no H2 tags? So John's response to this was doing things properly right? Order headings is a good practice. It helps search engines lightly to better understand your content. It's also good for accessibility. If you're setting up a new site or making significant changes on your templates, or just bored, then why not take the extra 10 minutes and get this right? If you have an existing site, fixing this isn't going to change your site's rankings. I suspect you'll find much bigger value in terms of SEO by looking for ways to significantly upvalue your site overall. I do like how he doesn't flat out say won't help period. He says it it helps search engines lightly to better understand your content. Lightly. Okay there's the keyword right there. But he also says later that it's not going to change your rankings. And, and I, I agree with that and I disagree with it at the same time. Because if those changes are helping Google to better understand your site, naturally it should be helping your site to rank. Doesn't. Don't those two things go hand in hand? But it's not. I mean, yeah, fixing your hierarchy of your heading tags is not likely to see any huge noticeable gains or anything, but it's. It's just one of those little pieces of the puzzle. I think I thought of this analogy the other day. It's like if you take a sandbox and you take one scoop of sand out of it, you're not going to see anything happen in the sandbox. But if you have a hundred of those scoops or a thousand of those scoops, you're going to notice a difference. So it's just kind of like one of those little scoops of sand in your sandbox, I guess.
- [25:09]
Ross Dunn
Yeah.
- [25:09]
Scott Vanack
Great.
- [25:11]
Ross Dunn
All right, well, we're going to go back to you again here. You have a great tip here using Exile Excel formulas. Kind of interesting.
- [25:19]
Scott Vanack
Yeah. So more AI stuff. So AI is one of those things that I absolutely hate and absolutely love it. And I keep coming. I've got a few things that I do fairly regularly with it. And then every now and then I'm like, well, why haven't I tried this? And this is something that happened to me, I think it was last week. And so I'll just tell you my story and it'll make sense. Yeah.
- [25:36]
Ross Dunn
Just to, to, to, to preface this, this is SEO, because you were using this to help crunch data that we do on a regular basis.
- [25:43]
Scott Vanack
Right, Exactly. So it is relevant. If you're doing SEO on your site, you're probably going to use Excel a lot to manipulate data. And this is where the AI came in handy for me. So it's all kind of merged together. So, in short, I had a bunch of data in Excel. In this case, I had about 10,000 rows of individual keywords and then three separate columns that had rankings for those keywords at different date intervals for a client. So we could see how they ranked in month one, month two, and month three. And what I wanted to do was add two more columns at the end that compared those rankings, month one versus the current month, and month two versus the current month, to see how things had changed and try to flag anything that had gone up or down. And the rankings were all exported from SEMrush and so I started by putting some really basic formulas in there and it worked. But then every now and then it would come across maybe a certain keyword didn't rank in a certain month. And that just broke everything because now it was like comparing to nothing. So a ranking that is better looked worse and worse looked better. And so I started playing with the formula and it was a nightmare. I couldn't quite get it right. It was not where I wanted it. And then I remembered AI like always, forget about AI. Should think about that first from now on. Went over to ChatGPT and wrote in just plain simple English exactly what I was trying to do. I gave it basically what I just said, full details. What do I do? What's the formula? It spat out this big ugly looking formula. I dumped that into Excel and it solved all my problems. So the lesson here is go straight to AI if you're, if you're. Especially if you're dealing with code. It's so awesome. With code it just works. It's not always good at content and idea development and stuff, but code, it's almost always perfect, at least in the little things like this.
- [27:25]
Ross Dunn
That's cool. And I keep meaning to do a lot of that because I think it'll be fascinating to see just much how much more I can do. But yeah, it's. How much time do you have in the day? Right?
- [27:35]
Scott Vanack
Yeah. Like, I think this saved me 10 to 15 minutes. Like I would have gotten there on my own because I, I know Excel well enough. But you know, 10 to 15 minutes is 10 to 15 minutes and that adds up in a hurry. It gives me 10 minutes to ditch work early.
- [27:49]
Ross Dunn
It is. But you know, the other thing that people don't take into account, and this is really important to my coach, Chris Ward tells me this a lot. It's. It saves you mental energy, which you cannot put enough emphasis on because we only have so much in a day. And the more you waste, essentially the less you'll have to apply to your next task, which could be more important or more technical. You never know. So I really find a lot of value in that. Okay, well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Vanack, thank you for joining us today. Remember, we have a Show Notes newsletter you can sign up for@seo101radio.com where you'll get all of our links mentioned from the show and the notes as well from the discussions. Have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes which air every week on WMR fm.
- [28:44]
Scott Vanack
Awesome. Thank you, everybody, for listening.