A (0:00)

Foreign. Welcome to episode 277 of the Kate Show. I am Kate, and today I'm talking about white hat versus black hat SEO. You might be like, what on earth is that and why do I care? Well, if you run a business in the home industry, if you are a designer, a stager, an organizer, or a window treatment professional, this absolutely matters to you. And it's one of those situations where what you don't know can and probably already is hurting you. In this case hurting your website, which can in turn have massive impact on the success of your business long term. So let's just get into it. I have of course sourced the information for this episode from not only my own experience, you know, having been doing this for over over a decade, but also from actual, like, well respected SEO sources like Search Engine Journal. So I just want you to know this is not just an episode full of my own opinions. Of course, you know, I am going to give you my opinion because that's what I do on my podcast. But it is all like, verifiable. You can go look it up for yourself. And I hope that this episode empowers you to know whether you need to hire an SEO consultant, whether you need a new website, whether you need new copywriting, or whether you're actually doing just fine as you are. And you can stop worrying about it, which is always a good thing. Now, as someone in the home industry, you've likely had a few thoughts about your SEO recently. You might have even hired someone to work on it. But what if you haven't been getting the increased website traffic after months and months of paying for that work? Or what if you were getting traffic and suddenly it dropped off the face of the earth and you're like, what the heck happened? And people are trying to tell you, oh, it was just an algorithm update. If this describes your situation, your website might be using black hat SEO tactics. And as the owner of the business, you need to get that fixed as soon as possible. Now, today on the show, I'm going to share the difference between black and white hat SEO, the dangers of using black hat tactics, and how to know if those tactics were used on your website. Plus, I'm going to share what you can do to fix or improve your SEO the right way going forward. So before I get into the episode, I want to explain why I'm talking about this. There are a lot of outdated SEO tactics being used. Outdated is just another way of saying, it's black hat, it's wrong, it's bad, it's harmful. It's like. It's like eating vegetable gummies instead of the actual vegetables. It does no long term benefit for your body. Black Cat SEO has no long term benefit for your business. It. It will just hurt it in the end. And I work with people in the home industry exclusively, and part of what I do is an SEO review of their website. And I have been astonished lately at the number of people who come to me with websites with blatant SEO problems that were caused by black hat SEO, which I. I know these clients. I know that they don't understand SEO. Therefore, they have no idea if they hired someone and they used the wrong tactics. They just know that their site's not getting traffic. They can't figure out why it actually used to be better. But. Or maybe it didn't. But this is something that I hope will empower you to make good decisions going forward. And of course, my disclaimer whenever I talk about SEO is that I tend to really irritate a lot of SEO professionals. So I want to preface this with, there are a lot of really great SEO pros out there. The trick is, just find them. If you have a colleague who had great success with an SEO professional, an SEO agency, get their information and call them up if that's what you need to do. You'll know by the end of this episode whether you need to do that or not. But don't hire somebody off Fiverr for this. Don't hire somebody based on no referrals from people that you trust, because unfortunately, SEO companies are aggressive. I get emails from them all the time. Oh, your website's not good. Here, let me fix it. You just need to hire us to do this, this, and that. And I'm like, no, thanks, buddy. I know what my traffic is, and it's exactly what I want it to be. And if you're not watching your traffic, you might just be like, oh, I feel like. I feel like I'm not getting enough traffic. I feel like I'm not getting the right traffic. But feelings really are irrelevant here. You have to actually just look at the data. All right, guys, I digress. Let's get into today's episode. All right, so let's do a quick summary of what SEO actually is. SEO, or search engine optimization, makes it easier for your website to be found online. Imagine that the entire Internet is one huge filing cabinet. Where would your website be filed? Your site had better be filed in the folders where your potential clients are most likely to look. For example, trying to rank your Site for a quote unquote interior designer near me is pointless because Google will determine what your location is if you've listed it and connect online searches to your geographic area automatically. This is also why creating a separate page of your website for every city or state you serve is a terrible and needless tactic. In fact, it's a black hat tactic. But more on that later. SEO helps determine where and when your site shows up in search results or if it does at all. On site SEO is different from off site SEO. On site SEO or your actual website is determined by content layout, loading speed and user friendliness. Off site SEO is determined by high quality links from other sites. And the note there is quality, not quantity. So you maybe are the president of ASID or one of their chapters and there's a link to your site from the ASID site. That's fine, it's a high quality site, no big deal. But you wouldn't want your site linked on a bunch of trash sites that only exist for the purpose of selling backlinks that will hurt you. Plus it is actually in violation of Google's terms of service. Now I want to get back on track here. So off site SEO is determined by high quality links, positive client reviews on places like Google, and directory listings. So Yelp and Google Business for example. But you need to be aware, good on site or off site SEO does not ensure that you're going to get more clients through your website. SEO by itself is not a sales funnel. It's not a conversion tool either. SEO in fact, is just the very first step in a larger sales funnel. SEO is important, but its power should not be overestimated. It's kind of like with social media. It can be helpful. You got to use it in the right ways, just as with any tool. But you can't expect it to do like everything like dig the foundation and build the house and furnish it. You have to use different tools for those things. All right, so let's get into black hat SEO. In short, I'm going to quote Wordstream here because they said it well. Any SEO professional you hire should be asking is the work I'm doing on your site adding value to the user? So your ideal clients the user? Or am I just doing this for search engines? That litmus test is a good way to determine whether an SEO tactic would go against search engine webmaster guidelines. To quote Wordstream again, if no value is added to the user so the person using the site but rankings are likely to increase, which we would think is a Good thing, but it's actually not because it's of no value. Then your decisions are highly likely to be black hat. Though there may be some short term success through increased traffic to your site, Google penalties are getting more and more sufficient sophisticated and can have devastating effects on your rankings and traffic. With hundreds of millions of users searching on Google per day, can you really afford to be de indexed? Basically that just means Google looks through their files, finds yours and shreds it. Deindexed. No longer part of search results ever. You don't want that to happen. Now here are some actual examples of black hat SEO. I have seen so many of these used recently on some of my clients websites and I of course tell them about it right away. It's a big deal guys. It is such a big deal. Okay, so the first one would be content automation. So if someone other than a human being is producing content, that is likely going to be an issue. I know that AI is huge right now and AI can be helpful for proofreading, for doing some research, but it's no replacement for a human being creating content that other human beings want to consume or would find helpful or relevant. The next example of black hat SEO is a doorway page. So for some of you guys, that might also be referred to as cloaking, which is a needless landing page that has no purpose other than to direct users somewhere else. This might also be called a website welcome page or an entry page. So if people go to your site and there's nothing they can really do on there except click enter, that is a problem. That's cloaking. That's a doorway page. Get rid of it. You do not need that. It actually hinders the user experience. The next thing, and I have seen this so much that I just cannot believe it, Hidden text or links. Some site owners will use the same color text as their background, so they can hide keywords within their pages. This allows a site to rank for keywords that are seemingly invisible. This can drive traffic to a site via irrelevant keywords, which will boost their traffic. So if you happen to know of some really popular keywords, you stick them in your site, people can't see them, Google can. Therefore you think you're going to get traffic, but it will end up not being the right traffic. And if Google actually catches you doing this, then you run the risk of getting your entire site de indexed. Another thing that is considered black hat SEO and I see this one a lot too, keyword stuffing. So Moto25 describes this as blocks of text listing cities and locations a website is trying to rank for which I mean, there's a lot of other ways that you can hide keywords and, and stuff them. Like if text becomes unreadable because you're constantly saying professional organizer near you, professional organizer in Texas, professional organizer in Dallas, it's like, okay, that is keyword stuffing. It. You're saying the same thing too many times. People don't naturally talk like that. If you wouldn't talk like that, don't write like that. Another thing would be reporting a competitor or trying to get your competitor to have negative SEO. I have not seen any of my clients ever do that because my clients are good ethical people. So we'll skip over that one. Sneaky redirects or other cloaking measures or guest posting networks. These I don't see very often and I'm glad. Guest posting networks might be like where a group of five home stagers are constantly posting on each other's sites. And you might think, oh, that's a good thing. But Google knows when you're up to something and you need to be careful about how you're spending your time online. That is one of the things that you should probably just stop doing. If you want to blog, great, blog on your own site. Link manipulation or buying links is another big problem. So paying for links is walking a fine line. I have seen this one being used. People have told me they're paying for it. And the problem is link farms exist where SEO companies, not every single SEO company, okay guys, don't bite me. Just like some SEO companies, or the majority of them as what I found, um, will work with link farms to put links to their clients websites on those other websites. Those websites are not good. They just exist for the purpose of linking to other people's sites. They don't have value. And like I said earlier, if you're going to get a link from someone's site to your site, just make sure it's good quality. Make sure that you want to be associated with them and make sure that it's not about just the quantity of links that you get. And you should absolutely never be paying for them either. You might see short term results in doing this, but if you're discovered by Google and they're very good at catching this, you could be heavily penalized because this goes against their policy. This undoes all your work and it means you've wasted a lot of money. So instead of paying for links, you should focus on creating high quality content that is relevant to your industry. Yes, this is stuff I've said before, but I'm going to say it again. And I'm also quoting Some other like modal25 search engine journal who are all saying the same thing. Okay, Another thing I do see this one happening is article spinning or repeating the same words or phrases so often it sounds unnatural. Or taking an existing article and then using ChatGPT to paraphrase it or rewrite it. Those pieces of content tend to be written quickly. You know, one can imagine why, and they might be part of an outreach or a link building campaign, but that type of content doesn't offer any value to the reader. Therefore you could get in trouble for that too. Now when I say get in trouble, I do mean like get deindexed. But Google's not going to tell you if they de index you, you're just gonna stop getting website traffic. Like not entirely, but mostly. And there's no warning for this. They're just like, well, they're done. Okay? No more content coming out of that domain that's any good. So we're not gonna send traffic. There's a few other things that this would be more so done on behalf of someone who's very techy but rich. Snippet, markup, spam, automated queries to Google creating pages, subdomains or domains with duplicate content. You want to avoid all of those things. But now let's turn the tables here. Let's talk about White Hat SEO. White Hat SEO quite simply is ethical. It will not result in in penalties. It might take longer to get results, but unlike Black Hat, those results will last and they will likely build. So Search Engine Journal had a nice list of white hat SEO tactics and I firmly agree with all of them. So blogging on your site or for other sites, creating content of value to the user with the goal of educating, informing, or delighting them. It ranks well because it's relevant and helpful. It's optimized to the right audience. The content is written with a user's needs first, which actually reflects exactly what Google said they want to see on the Internet. And the other thing is copywriting that speaks directly to your ideal client, from the very first word of the homepage to the last note on the contact page. In fact, in my opinion, the fewer sentences that start with we or our, the better your site should be about the client and how they'll benefit from your services. Your website does not exist to share every detail you, design, philosophy or professional credential that you or your business hold. You should also use proper placement of headlines and buttons. So if your button says learn more, it needs to be fixed. Just in short. And most websites are lacking proper calls to action and headlines. A lot of sites don't even have headlines. And lastly, a well designed website needs to be easy to navigate, load quickly and look good on mobile. And that shouldn't be a lot to ask for, but sometimes it is. So if your site is missing these things, or if you know some black hat SEO tactics have been used, that could be why you've had a drop in traffic. So your site could have technical issues due to those things. You could have significant content changes that totally changed how your site is indexed. It could just be the seasonality of your market or of your business industry. Or it could be competitor changes. But drops in traffic are rarely, rarely due to an algorithm update. That's the excuse everyone wants to go for right away. Oh, it's just the algorithm. There's nothing we can do with the algorithm. Rare, rarely the case. But now let's talk about how to fix your SEO and use white hat tactics exclusively. You need to pay attention to this part. Even if you don't manage your own site, even if you didn't build your own site, even if you really don't want to care, unfortunately, you got to care. Got to care a little bit. Here's what you need to do. Check the coverage report in Google Search Console. You might be like, what is Google Search Console? Well, go Google it, set it up and connect it to your site because it helps your site get more accurately indexed by Google, which is a huge favor to you. Plus, it's free to use. You should also use Google Analytics to investigate which pages of your site took the biggest hit or the biggest drop in traffic. And look at those pages. Is Google Analytics saying, oh, these pages load really slow. Maybe that's why they're not getting traffic. You should also be comparing year over year traffic, so not month over month, not week over week because that would be too small of a data sample. Compare full year to full year. We're in 2025 now, so you should be comparing 2023 to 2024 to see what the overall shift was. You should also redo your copywriting, as therein lies the majority of your keywords. Make sure you have headings and calls to action that are specific and provide information, not exclamation. Now the difference between information and exclamation is let's say you're an interior designer and you have a headline on your site that says we design spaces around you, okay? That's not really informative. It's just an exclamation of like woohoo, look at what we do. An informative headline would be something like Interior design for Career professionals in the metro D.C. area or something like that because it's who, what and where. The other thing that you can do to help improve your site is remove all images from your site, from your portfolio, from everywhere, compress them, rename them with relevant keywords. So make sure that you are kind of describing the project. So like Kitchen Pantry organizing in Minneapolis, Minnesota, you know, or wherever you're at and then re upload those images to your site. You should also be creating high value content. So if you choose to blog, you need to do it consistently at least once a month. And remember, write for the person who will read it, not for the search engine who will index it. Search engines are meant to operate more like human beings brains, so just write for the human being. You'll also need to redesign your website pages to make them easy to use, mobile, friendly and able to load quickly. Lastly, make sure that you set up your Google Business listing and keep it current along with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. That way you're not relying on your feelings when you're like, oh, I just feel like I don't have a lot of website traffic. We don't have room for feelings here, just data. All right, some quick little warnings. Like I said earlier, a lot of SEO professionals will get angry with me when I say stuff like this. It's fine. I I have your back as people in the home industry and I want you like if you're going to work with an SEO pro, just make sure they're good because there are a lot of good ones out there who will get you the results that you need. But be wary of website designers who claim to offer on site SEO without also doing your copywriting. Those two services are pretty much inseparable. Copywriting is a massive factor of SEO, and SEO will never be complete without good copywriting. Also, be aware that keyword research does not take months to complete. Due to the direct and specific nature of the home industry, keyword research can often be completed in as little as one afternoon. I know this because my agency does it for our clients, who rank well, by the way, all the time. Before you engage in the services of an SEO professional, send them a list of black hat SEO tactics without saying that's what it is and ask them which of those tactics they'll be using on your site. Is it a trick question? Yes. It is, but this is called watching your own back. If they state that they'll use even one of those tactics, you should probably find a different vendor. If you've already hired an SEO pro, you can still send them a list of black hat SEO tactics and ask which of them have already been used or will be used on your site. If they reply affirmative to any of them, you might have a difficult conversation ahead of you. But you have to do that to protect your business and your investment. So those are my words of warning for you, and I will just part with this. If you aren't sure how to read the reports that are sent to you by an SEO company, ask them to hop on a call with you so they can explain. Now, if you're not receiving any reports, reach out and ask why. You need to be aware of whether your investment is being put to good use. Now, obviously I get on a rant about SEO because it's important it matters and home professionals are largely taken advantage of, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, because we don't know everything about everything. But this is something you should know at least something about enough to be dangerous if you're like, I don't have time for this. I just need someone who knows what they're doing and who will actually do right by me and help me out with my on site SEO. That is what the socialite agency does. We specialize in white hat on site SEO for home pros. So whether you're doing a fully custom site with us or a semi custom website, you're not going to have to wonder was this done correctly? Is this hurting me or is it helping me? Because when we design a site, we always do the SEO, we always do the copywriting. Those things are linked together and trying to separate them out. Like, oh, I'm going to hire a copywriter here, I'm going to hire a website designer here, I'm going to hire an SEO consultant there. You can do it that way, but it takes five times longer and is it's five times more expensive. So if you can get all of it done together so that all the parts are woven, the SEO impacts copywriting, design, everything. Just get it done and be done and move on with your business. But anyway guys, thank you so much for listening and watching today. If you have questions about SEO, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me at kate the socialite.com Send me a message through the contact form. I look forward to hearing from you. And until then, keep your marketing clear, keep your message simple. And I will talk to you soon.