THE KNOWLEDGE PANEL PODCAST

“How to build an SEO-friendly content marketing strategy” – InLinks Knowledge Panel episode 38 with Chima Mmeje, Edward Ziubrzynski, Martin Huntbach and Holly Cartlidge. Hosted by Genie Jones.

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In this blog post, we delve into a valuable conversation about creating effective content marketing strategies that align with SEO goals. Four SEO experts came together in a podcast to share their insights, and we’ve distilled their wisdom into key takeaways for crafting SEO-friendly content strategies.

When it comes to amplifying the impact of SEO-friendly content through distribution channels like social media and email marketing, there are several effective strategies that can be employed. Here’s how our panelists approach this.

1. Repurpose and Distribute on Social Media:

Martin: Convert subheadings into social media threads. Each subheading becomes a topic for LinkedIn and Twitter threads, allowing for ongoing discussions and interactions without just promoting the blog link directly. Additionally, utilize social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn to engage with communities and share valuable insights.

Holly: Tailor content for different social media platforms. For example, creating visual content for Instagram and bite-sized content for platforms like Twitter. This ensures that the content is optimized for the specific platform’s audience and format.

2. Utilize Content Threads and Threads:

Chima: Break down subheadings into content threads. Develop threads on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn that provide value and insight, with each thread related to a specific subheading from the content. This creates a cohesive narrative that can attract engagement and interest.

3. Engage with Niche Communities:

Chima: Engage with relevant communities on platforms like Reddit and Quora. Identify questions related to the content topic and provide valuable answers while sharing the content as a resource to further enhance the discussion. This helps position the content as a valuable solution within the community.

4. Guest Posting and Collaboration:

Chima: Repurpose subheadings for guest posts. Expand subheadings into detailed guest posts for external platforms, ensuring that the content is valuable and relevant to the target audience of that platform. This helps build backlinks and attract a new audience.

5. Email Marketing:

Ed: Incorporate the content into email marketing campaigns. Craft email newsletters that highlight key takeaways from the content or present it in a unique way to the subscribers. This can drive more traffic to the content and keep the audience engaged.

6. Engage with Influencers:

Chima: Collaborate with influencers in the industry. Identify influencers who resonate with the content and share it through their channels. This helps leverage their existing audience to increase the content’s reach and impact.

7. Slack Communities:

Chima: Leverage Slack communities. Participate in relevant Slack groups or channels where content sharing is encouraged. Sharing content in these communities can lead to discussions and interactions that boost visibility.

8. Community Research:

Chima: Use tools like Perplexity to conduct community research on platforms like Reddit and Quora. This provides insights into real user questions and pain points, enabling the creation of content that directly addresses these concerns.

9. Content Drafting and Strategy:

Martin: Approach content with repurposing in mind. When creating content, consider its potential to be repurposed across various platforms. Craft content that can be adapted into threads, posts, and other formats.

Martin: Focus on the bigger goal. Instead of solely aiming to drive traffic back to the original content, consider building brand authority and trust by sharing valuable insights without constant links to the content.

Overall, the key is to think creatively about how to present the content to different audiences on various platforms while aligning with the client’s objectives. Effective content distribution involves adapting the content’s format and messaging to suit each channel, sparking engagement, and driving value beyond simple link promotion.

In this blog post, we delve into a valuable conversation about creating effective content marketing strategies that align with SEO goals. Four SEO experts came together in a podcast to share their insights, and we’ve distilled their wisdom into key takeaways for crafting SEO-friendly content strategies.

10. Educate, Don’t Just Sell

Holly, one of the experts, emphasized the importance of educating your audience rather than solely focusing on selling. This educational approach builds trust and rapport with potential customers. By providing valuable information, you can position your brand as an authority in your industry, ultimately leading to better conversions.

11. Think Like a User

Martin suggested a powerful method to evaluate your content’s effectiveness – use a fresh pair of eyes. Enlist someone unfamiliar with your industry, like a friend or family member, to assess your content’s user-friendliness. Their feedback can shed light on whether your content is clear, trustworthy, and engaging for a broader audience.

12. Strive for Excellence

Ed shared a crucial tip: before hitting that “publish” button, ask yourself if your content is the best possible version available online. To rank well on search engines, your content must stand out and offer something that isn’t easily found elsewhere. Strive for excellence and aim to create content that users can’t help but engage with.

13. Internal Linking Matters

Holly highlighted the significance of internal linking for user experience and SEO. Ensuring that users can navigate seamlessly through your website enhances their engagement and trust. Internal links can guide users to related content, keeping them on your site longer, and also assist search engines in understanding the structure and importance of your pages.

14. Build Content Hubs

Chima stressed the importance of organizing your content into hubs or topic clusters. This approach allows you to group related content together, making it easier for both users and search engines to navigate and understand the content’s context. Topic clusters help to demonstrate your website’s expertise and authority on specific subjects.

15. Create for Adaptability

Chima also encouraged adapting content to various platforms. Different social media platforms require different content formats, and your strategy should account for this diversity. For instance, what works on Twitter might not resonate on TikTok or Instagram. Crafting adaptable content ensures it performs effectively across a range of channels.

16. Emphasize Hub Pages

Ed echoed the importance of creating hub pages to centralize related content. These hub pages can serve as comprehensive resources for users seeking information on a specific topic. By organizing your content this way, you can establish clear connections between related pieces, offering value to users and signaling to search engines the significance of these topics on your site.

17. Focus on Valuable Internal Links

Chima highlighted the value of internal links in guiding users to important pages on your site. By thoughtfully placing internal links within content, you can drive users to relevant information and keep them engaged longer. Remember that internal linking isn’t just about SEO; it’s about enhancing the user experience and encouraging exploration.

18. Prioritize User Intent

Martin emphasized the importance of considering user intent when creating content. Understanding what users are searching for and tailoring your content to match their needs can significantly boost your SEO efforts. Creating content that aligns with user intent helps improve the likelihood of ranking well and attracting high-quality traffic.

In conclusion, building an SEO-friendly content marketing strategy requires a holistic approach. Educating and engaging your audience, optimizing user experience through internal linking and content hubs, and aligning your strategy with user intent are all essential components of success. By implementing these expert insights, you can create a robust and effective content marketing strategy that not only ranks well but also resonates with your target audience.

What does it take to become an SEO freelancer? And how do you run a successful SEO freelance operation? This month the Knowledge Panel show sees Genie Jones interview Natalie Arney, Nick LeRoy and Lukasz Zelezny.

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In the latest episode of the Knowledge Panel podcast, industry experts Natalie, Lucas, and Nick delve into the world of SEO freelancing, sharing their journeys, essential skills, and strategies for success. If you’re considering stepping into the realm of freelancing or seeking to refine your approach, this insightful conversation provides valuable insights.

Introducing the Experts:

Natalie Arnie is a freelance SEO consultant based in Brighton, UK, with a focus on all things freelancing. Lucas, who has spent two decades in London, brings his expertise in sharing valuable tips. Nick, a seasoned freelance SEO professional with 15 years of experience, hails from Minnesota, USA.

Embarking on the Freelance Journey:

Each expert has a unique journey that led them to become SEO freelancers. Nick, who faced an unexpected job loss, embraced freelancing as an opportunity to rewrite his career path. He overcame challenges with unwavering determination and used his past experiences to fuel his success.

Natalie, on the other hand, transitioned to freelancing just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With a contracting role that evolved into a freelancing opportunity, she capitalized on her timing and the shift in the industry’s landscape.

Lucas’s journey involved a desire for greater work-life balance, inspired by the birth of his daughters. His years of preparation, including building a personal brand through conferences and networking, positioned him to confidently step into the world of freelancing.

Essential Skills and Qualifications:

The experts collectively emphasize several essential skills and qualities for successful freelancers:

Expertise: Freelancing is not the place to learn from scratch. Having a solid foundation of SEO knowledge is crucial.

Communication: Effective communication with clients and decision-makers is pivotal. Explaining SEO nuances and demonstrating the value of your services requires clear and persuasive communication.

Business Development: While SEO expertise is paramount, freelancers need to market themselves effectively. Business development skills, including understanding client needs, are indispensable.

Courage: Freelancers must possess the courage to stand by their convictions, challenge clients’ misperceptions, and offer alternative perspectives.

Approaching Clients and Building a Client Base:

Building a solid client base is a multifaceted process that demands creativity, perseverance, and networking.

Nick’s well-established personal brand and network proved invaluable when he made the leap to freelancing. Utilizing his SEO for Lunch newsletter, active social media presence, and existing connections, he was able to tap into a supportive network of potential clients.

Lucas echoes the importance of networking, especially within the SEO community. Leveraging LinkedIn, he was able to connect with potential clients and fellow professionals, enhancing his visibility and credibility.

Natalie highlights the significance of being available and visible within your niche. Being an active participant in relevant communities, like LinkedIn groups, can help you position yourself as an authority and attract potential clients.

In the rapidly evolving field of SEO, freelancers need to adapt their strategies continually. From utilizing online platforms to attending conferences, consistent networking and visibility are key.

Are you considering taking the plunge into the world of freelance SEO? This blog post is here to offer insights and advice from seasoned SEO freelancers who have successfully transitioned from traditional jobs to freelancing. While the journey may not be without its challenges, the rewards and opportunities in the freelance realm are abundant.

Why Freelance?

The allure of freelance SEO work is multifaceted. Flexibility, the potential for greater income, and the ability to choose your clients and projects are just a few of the benefits. Freelancing empowers you to take control of your career and shape it according to your goals and values. However, before you dive in, it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of what lies ahead.

Building Your Client Base

Starting as a freelancer may seem daunting, especially if you’re not sure where to begin with clients. The experts emphasize that you don’t need a massive financial safety net to get started. Instead, focus on building strong relationships, providing quality work, and leveraging the connections you already have. Networking, attending events, and being visible online are all effective ways to attract clients.

Managing the Transition

The transition from a traditional job to freelance work involves more than just switching to remote work. You’re stepping into a world where you’re your own boss, and that requires a shift in mindset. Freelancers need to set boundaries, establish a work routine, and prioritize self-care to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Mental health should be a priority, and seeking support when needed is crucial to long-term success.

Staying Informed in the Ever-Changing SEO Landscape

Keeping up with the ever-evolving SEO landscape is a crucial aspect of freelance success. But as our experts highlight, it’s important not to get overwhelmed by constant updates and changes. Following industry newsletters, engaging in communities, and attending conferences can help you stay updated without drowning in information overload.

Proud Moments and Successful Projects

One of the most rewarding aspects of freelancing is the opportunity to work on projects that truly matter to you. Our experts shared some of their proud moments, which were often centered around making a difference for brands they admired or working on projects that align with their passions. Freelancers often find that their work becomes more meaningful when they can choose the projects they’re passionate about.

Advice for Aspiring Freelancers

If you’re considering making the switch to freelance SEO work, here are some key takeaways from our experts:

Don’t feel limited by financial concerns. You can start freelancing with just a few clients and gradually build from there.

Consider gaining experience in an agency or in-house role before transitioning to freelance to build a strong foundation.

Be prepared to invest in your SEO knowledge and skills continually. The industry is always evolving.

Focus on building relationships and connections within the SEO community.

Prioritize your mental health and set boundaries to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Celebrate your milestones and achievements, no matter how small they may seem.

In the end, the journey to becoming a successful freelance SEO professional is unique for each individual. But with determination, a commitment to learning, and a passion for the work, you can build a thriving freelance career that offers both personal and professional fulfillment.

Conclusion:

Transitioning to an SEO freelancer requires a combination of skills, self-confidence, and adaptability. While each expert’s journey is unique, their collective advice centers around expertise, communication, business development, and the courage to navigate challenges. Building a strong personal brand and a supportive network can greatly contribute to a successful freelancing career.

Whether you’re considering freelancing for the first time or looking to refine your existing approach, the insights shared by Natalie, Lucas, and Nick offer valuable guidance to help you thrive as an SEO freelancer.

In this episode of the Knowledge Panel Show, we’re discussing technical SEO in 2023, with Andreas Voniatis, Ritu Goel, Nikki Halliwell and Serge Bezborodov. Hosted by Genie Jones.

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Welcome to Episode 34 of the Knowledge Panel Show, where we delve deep into the world of technical SEO. In today’s episode, we’ll be addressing the common misconceptions and challenges faced by technical SEO experts. Join us as we introduce our esteemed guests: Andreas, Serge, and Nikki. Let’s hear what they have to say about their experiences and insights in the realm of technical SEO.

Andreas: Unveiling the True Essence of Technical SEO

Andreas, the founder of a renowned SEO consulting firm, shares his insights on technical SEO. Having entered the SEO landscape two decades ago, his primary focus is on ensuring that content is discoverable and comprehensible for search engines. Andreas emphasizes the importance of providing a seamless search engine experience, where content not only can be found but also makes sense to search engines.

Serge: Navigating the World of JavaScript and User Experience

Serge, the CTO of a cutting-edge technical SEO tool, dives into the evolving landscape of technical SEO. With his development background, Serge’s experience spans over a decade, and he’s witnessed the transition to JavaScript-driven websites. He highlights the intricacies of ensuring that search engine crawlers and users alike can navigate websites effectively. The intersection of technical SEO and user experience is a key focus for Serge.

Nikki: Bridging the Gap Between Technical SEO and User Experience

Nikki, a freelance Tech SEO consultant, sheds light on her journey in the world of technical SEO. Collaborating with a renowned technical SEO specialist, she emphasizes the importance of making websites easy to discover and navigate. Nikki’s perspective aligns with her peers, highlighting the role of technical SEO in enhancing user experience and site performance.

Defining Technical SEO

The hosts engage in a discussion about the essence of technical SEO. Andreas draws parallels between technical SEO and the role of a mechanic in maintaining a well-functioning engine. He emphasizes that technical SEO ensures that content is findable and meaningful for search engines. Serge further explains the intricate connection between technical SEO and user experience, underlining the need for effective website navigation and internal linking. Nikki contributes to the discussion by highlighting the significance of efficiency, discoverability, and site speed in technical SEO.

Evolving Challenges in Technical SEO

The conversation shifts to the evolving challenges faced by technical SEO experts. The speakers collectively express the misconception of viewing technical SEO as a quick fix or a superficial application of keywords. They stress that technical SEO encompasses more complex aspects such as internal linking, JavaScript optimization, and site navigation. Nikki introduces the concept of quantifying the monetary value of technical changes, acknowledging the difficulty in demonstrating immediate value.

The Role of JavaScript and Modern Challenges

The challenges presented by JavaScript in technical SEO take center stage. Serge identifies JavaScript as a pivotal challenge in modern websites, noting the complexities it introduces, especially during migrations. He emphasizes that proper implementation and developer collaboration are essential to overcome JavaScript-related issues. Nikki and Andreas concur, highlighting that JavaScript migration demands meticulous planning and meticulous execution.

Internal Linking and Entity-based Navigation

Internal linking emerges as another intricate aspect of technical SEO. Nikki, Serge, and Andreas collectively share insights into the complexity of internal linking, especially when approached through entity-based navigation. They discuss the challenges of explaining the mutual benefits of interconnected pages to clients and stakeholders.

Tech SEO is a vital aspect of ensuring your website’s visibility and performance in search engines. In this insightful conversation, seasoned professionals share their experiences and advice on navigating the world of technical search engine optimization. Let’s delve into their thoughts, perspectives, and tips to shed light on this intricate domain.

Understanding the Importance of Outbound Links

The conversation begins with a humorous anecdote about a colleague’s reluctance to include outbound links to external websites due to concerns about dwindling “qual budget” and inadvertently directing traffic to the NHS. The absurdity of worrying about the NHS being overwhelmed with website traffic highlights the misconceptions that can arise around SEO priorities.

Tech SEO: A Constantly Evolving Landscape

The misconception that tech SEO is a one-time task is debunked. The analogy of site speed is used to illustrate that even if you optimize your site’s performance, subsequent changes or additions by other team members can affect your efforts. The dynamic nature of tech SEO is underscored as it requires continuous adaptation to emerging trends and developments.

The Art of Communicating with Developers

Navigating the relationship between tech SEO experts and developers can be challenging. Andreas, one of the experts, highlights the importance of a balanced approach. He suggests using both positive (carrot) and data-driven (stick) methods to engage developers effectively. Nikki adds that developers appreciate logical arguments based on data and facts, making data science an invaluable tool in these interactions.

Learning by Doing: Building Your Tech SEO Skills

The conversation shifts to advice for newcomers in the field of tech SEO. The experts unanimously emphasize the value of hands-on experience. They suggest creating your own website, experimenting with optimization strategies, and even breaking things to learn from the experience. By working through challenges on personal projects, beginners can gain practical insights that transcend theoretical knowledge.

Mentorship and Networking

Serge suggests seeking mentorship and collaboration with experienced professionals. By learning from mentors and joining SEO communities, newcomers can benefit from the shared wisdom of those who have walked the same path. Connecting with others in the field, whether through social media or specialized groups, offers opportunities for guidance and networking.

Leveraging AI in Tech SEO

AI’s role in enhancing tech SEO is explored. The panel shares how AI can assist with tasks like generating text, writing code, or analyzing data. While AI holds promise, the experts caution against overestimating its capabilities and emphasize the importance of understanding its strengths and limitations. They recommend approaching AI as a tool that complements human expertise rather than replacing it.

Closing Thoughts: Embracing Tech SEO

As the discussion concludes, the experts emphasize that while AI offers innovative solutions, it’s essential to maintain a human touch in the realm of tech SEO. Understanding AI’s capabilities, learning from real-world experiences, and actively collaborating with developers are all crucial aspects of navigating this ever-evolving landscape. By combining technical skills with effective communication and a willingness to adapt, SEO professionals can optimize websites for success in the digital realm.

Wrapping Up: Dispelling Misconceptions and Embracing Complexity

As the episode comes to a close, the hosts debunk common misconceptions surrounding technical SEO. They emphasize that technical SEO goes beyond simple fixes, instead involving a multifaceted approach to enhance user experience and search engine discoverability. The conversation underscores the ever-evolving nature of technical SEO, which requires collaboration, strategy, and a deep understanding of web technologies.

Join us for more insightful discussions in the next episode of the Knowledge Panel Show.

It’s often the case that SEOs and creative content producers don’t work closely enough together. So how can this be resolved and what creative content works best for SEO? That’s what we’re discussing in episode 32 of the Knowledge Panel with Genie Jones, Armarni Lane, Iona Townsley, Hope Anderson and Kirsty-Elise Noonan.

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Introduction:

Welcome to Episode 32 of the Knowledge Panel Show! In this episode, we delve into the world of creative content and its impact on SEO. Our panel of experts includes Armani, Kirsty, Hope, and Iona. Each of them brings a unique perspective to the discussion, ranging from digital PR to technical SEO. Let’s dive in and discover what creative content truly means in the realm of SEO and how it can make a difference.

Defining Creative Content for SEO:

Defining creative content for SEO isn’t limited to words or images. It’s an amalgamation of various elements, including data, trends, and unique insights. Creative content goes beyond the norm, bringing originality and a fresh perspective to the table. Whether it’s a new take on existing data or a unique visualization, creativity adds value to content, making it stand out in the digital landscape.

Challenges in Crafting Creative Content:

Creating creative content comes with its fair share of challenges. One significant hurdle is aligning the expectations of SEO objectives with a brand’s values. Balancing SEO-driven goals with a brand’s identity requires effective communication and collaboration between teams. Additionally, the pressure to replicate competitors’ success can lead to campaigns that lack originality. Overcoming these challenges involves effective communication, pitch refinement, and flexibility in adapting to changes.

Maintaining Uniqueness and Impact:

Maintaining creativity and uniqueness in content is essential. While the industry may seem saturated, finding creative angles within established methodologies, formats, and topics can yield impressive results. Combining SEO research with a fresh perspective can help content creators demonstrate their expertise and provide valuable insights to users. Staying true to your brand’s values while embracing creative strategies can lead to campaigns that resonate with both audiences and search engines.

The Role of Timing and Industry Insights:

Understanding the significance of timing and industry insights cannot be overstated. While originality is crucial, knowing when to leverage trends and capitalize on industry-specific discussions is equally important. Looking beyond your niche and exploring what works in related sectors can provide valuable inspiration. By identifying unique data sources and visualizing information in new ways, you can infuse creativity into your content while aligning it with user intent.

In the world of digital marketing, the lines between disciplines are often blurred. Campaigns and strategies don’t exist in isolation but are rather interconnected, drawing from different expertise to create a comprehensive approach that yields the best results. This fusion is particularly evident in the dynamic trio of Digital PR, SEO, and Social Media. In this article, we delve into how these three elements interact and amplify each other’s impact.

The Dance of Timing and Luck

In a recent discussion, industry experts explored the intricate relationship between timing, content quality, and campaign success. “Yours is just a little bit later than the next person; it’s like timing and luck a lot of the time,” remarked one participant. This observation underlined the challenges that creative marketers often encounter, where even meticulously planned campaigns can sometimes fall short of expectations.

Navigating the Competitive Landscape

The digital PR landscape is a dynamic one, where creativity and timing can make or break a campaign. What’s fascinating is how often multiple agencies might independently ideate around similar concepts simultaneously. The result is an inadvertent competition to capture journalists’ attention. As one participant shared, “It’s impossible to not have that crossover.” However, the key is to focus on creating content that stands out, both in terms of methodology and story. A winning strategy requires offering unique insights and value in the reactive realm.

The Power of Evergreen Content and Updates

While timing plays a crucial role, it’s essential to remember that not all content relies on immediate impact. Evergreen content, which remains relevant over time, can yield results long after its initial release. Updating existing content, especially in the SEO realm, can breathe new life into campaigns. By optimizing and repurposing content, brands can maintain their authority and adapt to changing trends.

The Nexus of SEO and Digital PR

In the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization (SEO), digital PR’s influence is undeniable. Brands that earn mentions and coverage from authoritative sources enhance their backlink profile, a critical factor in SEO success. A comprehensive approach involves not only securing quality backlinks but also understanding the backlink profile’s significance and leveraging it for long-term growth.

Social Media’s Vital Role

Social media is a potent amplifier in the realm of digital marketing. It’s not just about sharing content; it’s about crafting assets that are inherently shareable. As campaigns migrate from one platform to another, it’s crucial to maintain context and clarity. Ensuring that assets are self-explanatory, even when they’re shared out of context, enhances the campaign’s overall success. Furthermore, integrating schema markup and optimizing YouTube videos for SEO contributes to the overall visibility of a brand’s online presence.

Bridging the Gap and Holistic Collaboration

The separation between disciplines like digital PR, SEO, and social media is artificial. Successful marketing strategies thrive when these departments collaborate and leverage each other’s strengths. Collaboration ensures that campaigns are optimized for every channel, reinforcing brand presence and amplifying results. Moreover, embracing this holistic approach allows brands to adapt and excel in a landscape that’s constantly evolving.

Conclusion:

The intersection of creativity and SEO is a dynamic landscape that demands a balance between innovation and industry norms. Crafting content that appeals to both users and search engines requires a blend of creativity, data-driven insights, and expert knowledge. By incorporating unique perspectives, maintaining authenticity, and embracing industry trends, content creators can navigate the challenges and create impactful campaigns that stand out in the digital realm.

In conclusion, the synergy between Digital PR, SEO, and Social Media is undeniable. The dynamic interplay between these elements creates a robust marketing strategy that’s not only resilient but also incredibly effective. As campaigns weave through the complexities of timing, trends, and platforms, the key to success is embracing the interconnectivity of these disciplines and leveraging them to their fullest potential.

Are you thinking of moving on to a different SEO role in 2023? In episode 30 of the InLinks Knowledge Panel we’re exploring how to find your dream SEO job in 2023 with Katherine Nwanorue, Orit Mutznik and Paige Hobart – hosted by Dixon Jones.

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Are you an aspiring SEO professional looking to embark on a fulfilling career journey? The world of search engine optimization is ever evolving, and landing your dream SEO job requires careful consideration of several factors. In this blog post, we’ll delve into a conversation about how to find your ideal SEO job, exploring distinct aspects such as agency vs. in-house roles, fixed salary vs. results-based income, and more. We’ve removed timestamps and distilled the key insights from a discussion among seasoned SEO professionals Paige Hobart and Catherine Oluwatoyin.

Agency vs. In-House: A Learning Curve

Paige Hobart, an experienced SEO manager, and Catherine Oluwatoyin, an SEO specialist, share insights into the agency and in-house sides of the industry. Paige emphasizes the value of agency roles for those starting out in SEO. She believes that agencies offer rapid learning opportunities due to the diverse range of clients and projects. With her extensive agency background, Paige notes that agencies are hubs of collaboration, where teams work together to solve challenges and share insights.

Catherine, who transitioned from freelancing to an agency role, highlights the advantages of contract positions in agencies. She suggests that these roles provide a balance between the flexibility of freelancing and the structured environment of an agency. Catherine’s advice for junior professionals is to initially explore contract roles to build experience and manage workloads effectively.

Security vs. Risk: Fixed Salary vs. Results-Based Income

The topic of income structure sparks an interesting conversation. While Paige and Catherine lean towards fixed salaries for their sense of security, they acknowledge the potential benefits of results-based income. Paige points out that tying income entirely to results can be risky in the unpredictable landscape of SEO, especially with the ever-changing algorithms and updates.

Catherine finds peace of mind in a fixed salary, as it offers stability and certainty. She highlights how financial security contributes to a healthier work-life balance and overall well-being. On the other hand, Paige recognizes the appeal of results-based income for its alignment with demanding work and the motivation it brings. The consensus is that a blend of both fixed and results-based structures may strike a harmonious balance.

The Importance of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose

An intriguing insight emerges as the discussion takes a philosophical turn towards the elements that lead to job satisfaction. The trio identifies three critical factors: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy refers to the ability to control one’s work and decisions. Mastery involves excelling at one’s role through continuous learning and growth. Purpose centers around finding meaning in one’s work, either through the job itself or external passions.

As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that achieving these three components contributes to a fulfilling and satisfying career. The consensus is that while financial stability is crucial, a sense of fulfillment comes from autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Balancing Work and Life: Navigating Unexpected Changes

The conversation kicked off with a candid discussion about the unpredictability of career paths. One participant shared a humorous anecdote about a change in plans due to the rapid expansion of their family. Originally, the plan was for one panelist, Marie, to return to work after having her first child, but her pregnancy schedule changed those plans entirely.

Another participant chimed in, sharing how they found themselves in an unexpectedly stable position despite prior uncertainties. They realized that focusing on financial stability and taking a strategic approach to work had contributed to their current advantageous situation.

Agency vs. In-House SEO: Exploring Career Paths

The conversation then shifted to discussing the pros and cons of agency work versus in-house SEO roles. One panelist highlighted the benefits of agency work, where exposure to a variety of projects and industries allows for rapid learning. On the other hand, another participant emphasized the advantages of focusing on a single website, as this approach provides an in-depth understanding of a particular brand’s objectives and nuances.

Effective Communication and Diversity

The importance of communication within a team was a key point of discussion. Panelists agreed that transparent communication about work progress, challenges, and ideas is vital, particularly in remote work settings. One participant emphasized the value of presenting ideas and updates openly, as it ensures that team members are aligned and have a clear understanding of ongoing projects.

The topic of diversity within teams was also explored. Panelists shared how diverse opinions and backgrounds contribute to stronger outcomes. They discussed the shift from earlier days when a single approach dominated the SEO landscape to the current realization that multiple viewpoints enrich problem-solving and innovation.

Performance Measurement and Recognition

Determining how to measure success in the dynamic field of SEO was another intriguing topic. Panelists offered different perspectives on how they want their work to be recognized and evaluated. One participant stressed the importance of open communication as a means to highlight their progress and results. By sharing updates and challenges, they believe their contributions become more visible and easier to assess.

Another panelist suggested that success should be grounded in driving results, especially in an ever-changing environment like digital marketing. They emphasized that being initiative-taking and transparent about the efforts and outcomes helps build trust within a team.

Embracing Change and Looking Ahead

As the podcast concluded, the host introduced a new member who would be taking over as host in the upcoming year. The incoming host expressed enthusiasm for the opportunity and promised to bring fresh perspectives to the show. The episode ended on a positive note, with participants sharing their plans for future episodes and insights into the upcoming topics.

In summary, the podcast provided a comprehensive look into the diverse paths of SEO professionals, highlighting the importance of effective communication, adaptability, and initiative-taking engagement in the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing. From balancing unexpected changes to leveraging the power of diverse teams, these insights offer valuable guidance for both newcomers and seasoned experts in the field.

Conclusion

Finding your dream SEO job involves evaluating several factors, from the nature of agency and in-house roles to income structures and personal values. Both agency and in-house roles offer unique learning opportunities, and the choice between fixed and results-based income depends on your risk tolerance and financial goals. A balanced approach that provides autonomy, mastery, and purpose is key to a rewarding SEO career. So, whether you’re a newcomer or a seasoned professional, consider these insights when embarking on your journey to find the perfect SEO job in 2023.

What are the key elements of digital PR that cross paths with SEO? That’s what we’re covering on Episode 28 of the Knowledge Panel.

Joining DIXON JONES are LEIGHANNE MAKRYGIANNIS, NATALIE ARNEY, HANA BEDNAROVA & LUKE BUDKA.

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How should you be using log files to assist your SEO? That’s what we’re discussing on episode 26 of the Knowledge Panel show, where Dixon Jones is joined by Gerry White from Oda, Sophie Brannon from Absolute and Steven van Vessum from Conductor.

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Dixon: Hello and welcome back to The Knowledge Panel Show. It’s Episode 26 and it’s “Using log files in SEO”. So, I’ve got a fantastic panel again with me. I’ve got Gerry, Sophie, and Steven. I’ll ask them all to introduce themselves in just a moment.

For those that are seeing me on camera, I do apologize for the lack of shaving. I spent last week at the British Chess Championships and shaving didn’t seem to be a thing there. They didn’t do that very much. So, I didn’t bother.

Anyway, thanks so much for coming in. Why don’t we just start with the introduction? Sophie, why don’t we start with you? Tell us about yourself. So, who are you and where do you come from?

Sophie: Hi everyone, I’m Sophie Brannon. I’m the client services director at an agency called Absolute Digital Media and I’ve been working in SEO for the last six and a half years. I’ve dealt with campaigns across a broad number of industries, huge websites down to tiny little brochure websites, and like to get my teeth stuck into log files so I’m really excited to join the panel.

Dixon: Fantastic. Thanks very much for coming on. And Gerry, what about you? Where are you and where do you come from?

Gerry: So, at the moment I’m the SEO director for a company called Oda. It’s a Norwegian supermarket. We’re expanding globally as we speak. We’re kind of looking to kind of grow into Germany, into Finland, where it’ll be next week, and well, I mean, that’s basically the start, but historically, I’ve been everywhere from agency side to I’ve been the SEO of JUST EAT, I’ve been at BBC, I’ve been more places that I can remember in like I say 20 years’ worth of experience.

Dixon: Brilliant. Thanks very much for coming in, Gerry. And Steven, tell us about yourself and where do you come from?

Steven: Thanks. So, my name is Steven. I’m the director of organic marketing over at Conductor. Conductor is an enterprise SEO platform. I’m also the co-founder of ContentKing, a real-time SEO auditing and change tracking solution, which was acquired earlier this year by Conductor. And similar to Gerry, I’ve been all over the place. I worked in-house, agency side, run my own agency, and now in the SEO tool space for the last seven years.

Dixon: So, as was said on Twitter earlier on today, a dream panel. Thanks very much for coming in guys. I really do appreciate all of your attention here. As always, this whole event is sponsored by InLinks. So, thanks to inlinks.net. That’s the advert for them out the way.

Let’s just check with my producer though, I haven’t missed anything important before we get on. David, how are you?

David: The only thing I want to say… I’m very good thank you. I just want to say, Dixon, we got many people listening to the show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, but if you can, try and join us live next time. We broadcast live on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. So, follow the InLinks channels, especially on YouTube. We go live once a month on YouTube. So, subscribe there and get an alert when we go live, and then you can interact. You can see what the next show is and hopefully, you can watch us live and ask questions on the next show, and I’ll tell you about the next show later in this one.

Dixon: Brilliant. We’ve got a little opt-in if you want to sign up and get an email when the shows are coming on, then if I remember, I send that out an hour before the event, but you know how I am. I’m not always quite as perfect as I should be. Okay guys, so thanks a lot.

I’m going to start as I always do, around the topic. A lot of people don’t jump into the whole 45 minutes all these podcasts and wish that we got to the point quicker. So, I tend to start with the question of if people don’t have 45 minutes to hang around – what one tip would you give to people about, a tip, a suggestion, a takeaway, surrounding, using log files for SEO? One thing that you think, “Hey, that’s an easy win. Go do that.” And I’m going to jump in on Gerry first to go with that one because he’s always got an answer for me.

Gerry: To be honest, I’m struggling with this one. There’s so much to it. Log files are actually one of the most complicated parts of it all. There are some great tools to kind of analyze it. I mean, obviously, ContentKing has got the kind of log file analysis part of it, component to it. If you haven’t got that, then Screaming Frog, and they’ve got kind of great dashboarding solutions. These two tools will allow you to kind of do a really quick and deep analysis.

So, basically, you can’t really do log file analysis without a great tool anymore. It’s not something which is possible because you’re talking about terabytes of data. Unless you’re kind of a programming database big data kind of guru then kind of analysis of it does require some kind of tool. Like I say, I’ve used multiple different things in the past but yeah, use a good tool.

Dixon: Okay. Sophie, what about you? Any tip, suggestion, idea?

Sophie: Oh, I think mine comes probably more off of one of my biggest pain points of log file analysis. I guess my tip would be if you can use a CDN to access your log files then do it because it makes it a lot easier to access and it stops all of those headaches of trying to find where they are, trying to get access to it, particularly if you don’t have the full access anyway and you’re trying to go through lines of developers or stakeholders to try and get hold of them. If you can get them in the CDN then that’ll be the easiest way.

Dixon: We’ll probably come back to that because I was going to talk about CDNS anyway because I’m so, so old that CDNS didn’t exist when I started, and to Gerry’s point, I used to use a templated Excel spreadsheet where you could cut and paste everything into a spreadsheet and then I did some analysis.

Sophie: Manual.

Dixon: Yeah, I’m really, really old school but things have moved on a little bit. So, can we come back to CDNs?

Steven, I thought of you and, obviously, I think it’s fair to say: “Use the ContentKing tool”. You’re allowed to say that. It’s okay. I’m not going to stop you from talking about your own tool. But any tip?

Steven: Yeah. So, love what Gerry and Sophie said and continuing where Sophie left off. Using CDNs where you can basically plug in the log streams from CDNs into SEO platforms such as ContentKing, for example, and you can get real-time insight into what’s going on your site. So, that’s super, super useful. A lot of folks think about log file analysis as, like, a rigid process that you go through once a year and it takes forever and you need to bribe people with donuts to get the log files in the first place, but there’s a whole new world out there and I would highly recommend exploring it.

Dixon: Let’s start with the CDN thing then because that’s kind of… Well, actually no, before we go into the CDN and I’ll come straight on to that one because I think we should get into that but let’s just, for those that CDN is two steps too far, let’s just ask, what is the real difference between a log file analysis and just using Google Analytics? I mean, it’s a question that I’m asking rhetorically but does someone want to jump in and say, what are the main differences between log files and things like Google Analytics, which is what we all use?

Gerry: I’ll jump in. Basically, Google Analytics is really very, very different to log file analysis. I mean, a bit of history, actually. There is the fact that Urchin, actually, used to be… Well, in fact, when we first started doing web analytics it was based on log files, but we are going back to when Dixon was young, so we are talking quite a long time ago.

But basically, since then what we’ve done is we’ve been almost firing this client-side. So, basically, when a user interacts with the page then JavaScript is fired and so we only track users in analytics packages. In fact, we actually try really hard in analytics packages to only track users, and normally the best way to do this is to basically only track the ones that are firing JavaScript and then basically filtering it then down. We’re going to be talking about user agents later on but basically, we try to kind of restrict it right down whereas log files it’s kind of the opposite. It’s literally trying to understand what is hitting the server and how it’s hitting the server, why it’s hitting the server.

What that doesn’t track is when it doesn’t hit the server. So, a good example of that is we often have interactions within pages which don’t necessarily fire kind of a something back to the server. For instance, if you click play on a YouTube video, it won’t actually fire back to your own server, so it doesn’t get tracked in the log file.

So, fundamentally, the two now have very, very different purposes and I think one of the things we’ll be talking about here more for log files is we don’t really even look at users in log files. We want to look at the robots. We want to look at people in, like, Google, how Google crawls your site, how Bing crawls your site, even how some of the other search engines actually handle your site and what we can do to kind of either stop them or improve the way in which they go through it.

And I think that’s the biggest thing that we look at in log files is basically the inefficiencies of how all sites are being crawled whereas in analytics packages we’re almost looking at inefficiencies or how to convert users. So, they have kind of similar purposes but really totally different.

Dixon: Steven, do you try and blend sort of JavaScript-based signals with log file-based signals to have one kind of streaming signal, or do you keep them separate?

Steven: Personally, I keep them separate because I look at the crawlers and users in different ways as Gerry explained. So, when it comes to log files, I really look at, I zoom in on Google’s behavior primarily because it’s the dominant search engine in most countries that we target and I am looking for ways to improve the time to crawl, time to index, and time to rank because, obviously, when you push the button and you publish a content piece, you want it to drive organic traffic as soon as possible and especially when you start analyzing that in real-time, at scale, it gets really, really interesting.

Dixon: Okay. So, then Sophie, let’s go back to… Well, feel free to add to those two points, but let’s go back to the CDN thing, you made the point at the top of the show, if you can get your log file through CDN network, instead of through the end server or whatever, then that’s going to be a better thing.

I’ve got a couple of questions, two or three questions really, I’ll just sort of throw them all out there to you and talk to you Sophie, if that’s all right. Do all the CDN systems provide that data very effectively and why is it better to have the CDN stream rather than the end server log file data? Why? Why and how easy is it?

Sophie: So, for me, my personal preference is Cloudflare and that’s for a number of reasons not just because of log files. I’m talking like DDoS attack with security, everything on top of that as well, overall site speed, and I think I’ve seen a bigger increase in people using CDN since the whole core web vitals everyone needs to improve their site speed, oh quick, let’s shove a CDN on top of it without really seeing or doing much else with it.

The reason why I prefer using a CDN is literally the ease of access more than anything, particularly when you’re working with big corporate companies, big brands, or even just people who don’t know where their log files are or they’re dealing with kind of legal teams, really strict legal teams, and there’s a whole other range of issues there which I think you might talk about a little bit later, which we can, with GDPR and things, but it just really helps you to access it a lot quicker.

One of the biggest things that I also find when having to go through a development team or going through a whole list of stakeholders is the length of time those log files are held for you can kind of control that on a much kind of closer scale when you’re dealing with CDNs because really you can access all of that, whereas when you’re going through kind of the client side and you’re trying to go through the development teams you turn around, they’re like, “Oh, we only held the log files for 24 hours. Sorry about that.” Great. That’s really helpful when I’m trying to analyze something.

Dixon: Okay. Gerry, anything on that? Any other good reasons to use CDNs?

Gerry: Yeah. I mean, this whole CDN is actually quite a recent thing for me. I say that because back when I was younger, CDNs were almost a problem. They didn’t store log files. They didn’t kind of… In fact, what they tended to do was stop the logs, they’d stop the servers from being hit as much because they’d actually cache a lot of the hits and do other bits and pieces. So, it’s interesting that now we kind of use the CDN as a way to get access to log files, that we would not have got before. So, I think that’s absolutely kind of really important that we kind of do use the CDNs. But one of the other advantages is the fact that when I was working, for example, at JUST EAT, the website is made up of like 12 quite separate kind of servers, services. One is a PHP box, one is a .net box, one is a WordPress box, there’s so many different ways in which these kinds of engines will kind of store the hits, and this really is important that if you then try to analyze it, you need almost the complete pitch, you kind of have to understand what’s happening everywhere.

And I think one of the things Steven will probably be able to expand on is the fact that all of these different services have a different log file format. Sometimes it’s a different column, different everything, so even if you got access to all of these, consolidating it, pulling it into one, and kind of analyzing it, you’re kind of trying to look at loads of different formats, and it’s like when 10 people are trying to consolidate one Excel document, it’s… sorry, 10 Excel documents, it’s absolutely horrendous job to do. But yeah, Steven, I think you’ve probably got an opinion.

Steven: Yes, I do. I totally agree, Gerry. It just makes life as an SEO so much easier if you have one place to look for your log files. It’s a breeze.

Dixon: I guess as well, you know, I mean, Gerry made the point of a large website has six servers say but a small website that uses CDN that has only one server, then has quite likely, especially if you’ve got static content, cached content that’s in the CDN that would never hit the server and that’s the whole point of a content display network or a distribution network, sorry, I just can’t remember what CDN stands for. But that means that, it’s very likely that if you try to use the raw server logs then and you’re using a CDN, you’re going to miss a whole load of the traffic because the traffic is never actually going to hit your log file. Is that correct or am I being naive?

Gerry: One hundred percent correct, yep. We saw this time and time again. Again, this is before the times when CDNs actually produced their own log files. When I was working at JUST EAT, I was like, “Oh, okay, so none of these actually,” particularly for images, particularly where we have like a long cache life, so any time… I mean, a good example of that CSS, we did not want every single user to kind of access the CSS file on the server. We wanted the CDN to handle 80% to 90% of that. And so yeah, exactly right Dixon.

Dixon: I think as well for those that haven’t seen another show that we’ve got, we’ve got SEO on the Edge, which you can find out there. Well, one of shows that was about the Edge and Edge workers. And the Edge workers, for those that don’t know, is where effectively you’re using a CDN network to literally change the code at the DNS level and that is increasingly common amongst SEOs, not always with the approval of the web developers or the admins, assistant admins, but is getting us through quite a few problems for previous issues when admins have been unwilling to give us access to various bits and pieces. So, very useful tool. So, look up that if you want to go into that a bit further.

Okay. So, let’s talk a little bit about the traffic that we see in log files because I know Imperva used to do an annual study on the types of traffic that they see on websites and they tried to work out how much of the content was human versus how much of it was machines, how much of it was malicious versus how much of it was not, and one of the startling things that always came out is that pretty much half the traffic on the Internet is not human orientated at all.

Is that the sort of thing that you see, Steven, in ContentKing or is it something that varies a lot on website-to-website? And what is the sort of non-human traffic that you see, or one sees?

Steven: I haven’t looked across all of our clients, I can’t, to see what the ratio is between real traffic and bot traffic, but I would wager that it’s more like 80% bot traffic and 20% user traffic nowadays, just because there’s so much crawlers out there doing their thing. A lot of them are, we don’t really know what they do, what they’re up to, but they’re out there.

And if you’re talking about ratios for sites, it depends. If you have a massive site like Gerry’s, for example, you’d want to see a lot of bot traffic on it because if a lot of pages get refreshed and they’re pushing a lot of new content out there, you want that content to be re-indexed as soon as possible. So, I’d rather have like 10% human traffic and 90% Google traffic on my site than, say, 50/50 because whenever I publish something, I want Google to eat it up.

Dixon: Okay. I wonder if the rest of you, Sophie, have you got the same sort of views or different views?

Sophie: Kind of similar for me. I see there’s a bit of a difference depending on the industry I’m working on. So, like, I find that with kind of health, finance, particularly bigger websites you do tend to see a lot more bot traffic than what you do with smaller ones. So, I’m talking like, I don’t know, Jim the local guy, you’re probably not going to see too much, you know. I like to kind of split it between good bot traffic and bad bot traffic.

Now, that may be controversial depending on who you’re talking to, but for me, like, good bot traffic would be website crawlers, website monitoring, like UptimeRobot or something, scraping, aggregation bots, but then bad bots would be like the spam, the DDoS attacks, ransomware, the ad fraud. It does depend, I really hate saying it, I really try and avoid saying it, but I think it’s just a matter of being able to block some of the bad bot traffic if you’re able to really identify that.

Dixon: It’s hard though, isn’t it, because we, unless I’m mistaken, we’ve got two basic ways of identifying that bot, that traffic, either the user agent or the IP address that it comes from, and if it’s the user agent what I think a lot of people don’t appreciate is that the user agent is given by the choice of the user. I mean, it’s something that’s pushed by the bot. So, the bot could sit there and say, “Hey, I’m Mr. Google,” quite happily or “I’m a very good bot,” and you wouldn’t have any way of knowing, or they could sit there and say, “I am a bot that you’re already familiar with” or “I’m Firefox” or whatever.

And, of course, IP addresses are getting much, much more random and variable these days, particularly with IPv6 being people are changing their IP addresses all the time. So, Gerry, when you’re blocking, if you’re going to use log files or information from log files to start blocking bots, how much danger are you in? Are you going to slip up and actually start stopping, I don’t know, Google’s image browser from looking at your information inadvertently, for example?

Gerry: Yeah, absolutely. I won’t mention the client’s name, but basically, I have seen clients where we can see something where somebody is trying to basically hack the site. An example of that is, I think everybody here knows, you can buy usernames and passwords off the internet off of sort of black sites basically, relatively cheaply. I’ve never done it myself, so I don’t know exactly how to do it.

Dixon: I’m glad about that, Gerry.

Sophie: A bit of a disclaimer there.

Gerry: I know. Absolutely. But then you can run these against any kind of site, any major site. And a number of sites that I’ve worked on have sort of spotted that, very specific passwords and things have been done at scale often from a strange country like America if you’re based in the UK or often it’s like Russia or something like that. And, as you say, if I was doing this myself, I would use a range of different IP addresses, different countries, and different user agents to hide it as much as possible.

So, exactly what you say, although we can sort of see this pattern happening, us trying to block it using user agents and us trying to block it using IP addresses, it’s a massive challenge. There are ways in which we can kind of try to fix that using things like a good example of that is, like, is it human, the kind of the Google thing, the CAPTCHA stuff, but again that means that other bots which are valuable, will struggle as well.

So, it is that sort of magical balancing act. So, I mean, we do rely a lot on things like Cloudflare’s own protection to kind of say, you know, “We can see bad behavior. Switch it on in Cloudflare.” But again, Cloudflare is not perfect, you know [crosstalk 00:22:05].

Dixon: No, Cloudflare is got this big button that you just, this one button that you can press, and it strikes me that that is using a mallet to knock in a paper clip really.

Sophie: To just decide, yeah, just trust it aside.

Gerry: Yeah, but often when they, I think it’s called Shields up, isn’t it, but basically when you hit that button it’s because you know there’s kind of a security incident going up ahead. And, I mean, I think all three of us, all four of us have worked on big sites where security trumps everything else, you know, you kind of get to that point where you kind of go, “Okay. SEO is really, really important, but security really, really important.”

But again, you know, I’ve often found it where they’ve hit the button almost and they’ve almost forgotten they’ve hit the button until suddenly we start falling out of Google and kind of going, “Oh, we seem to be blocking Google.” But as a user, I can’t see it because we’ve been whitelisted because we’re UK based or we’re whitelisted because of this or the other, but it’s kind of like until Google starts to sort of say, “Hey, we’re actually starting to drop you out.” It is something which is definitely worth kind of paying attention to.

But so, to your point, IP addresses can be… Well, you can’t fake Google’s IP address but what you can do is you can kind of give yourself a random IP address in effect in any country. You can’t fake user agents completely. So, yeah, I mean, I for one often browse news websites that I don’t want to pay for by pretending I’m Google and they just magically let me read all the private content and everything.

Sophie: Yeah. I think a good example of that as well was when everyone was… Well, a few people booking in their COVID vaccines, and everyone was trying to skip the NHS queue by doing exactly that. It was all over Twitter changing their user agent. So, it’s hard and same talking about kind of just blocking certain regions or kind of countries, people use VPNs all the time. People are so much more invested in their own privacy and their own security and it’s probably becoming a bigger trend than ever. That’s where it starts getting really dangerous.

Dixon: Yeah, I know, I’m British and I’ve got a TV license. So, I definitely want to be able to use my iPlayer from abroad. So, I use a VPN for that all the time as well. I think we do use that, we’re more and more of us are using VPNs and certainly a hacker, whether good or bad, whether a good person or bad, they know how to use a VPN. So, it’s not going to be an effective barrier.

And I think on Cloudflare there’s two different buttons. We’ve got a DDoS. A denial-of-service attack is happening right now, press this button. I understand that, you know, if you’ve got panic, it’s great to have a button. What I worry about is they’re more subtle. Here’s the setup that’s running in the background sort of thing that if it’s just taken at face value you start to miss an awful lot of potentially good traffic because if you want some… Coming back to the idea of SEOs being the subject of the podcast. If you want somebody to click on your website from a search engine whether it’s YouTube, whether it’s a Majestic or whether it’s Bing or whether it’s an image search engine, or anything that’s not the core Google is the biggest search engine, there’s loads of different Google crawlers and stuff, then if you don’t let the bots see that information then a human will never click on the link that’s then indexed by that information. I think people forget that quite a lot. Anyway feel free to carry on, come back on that one.

But let’s talk about error codes and how that could be useful on log files and let’s get to something really useful for SEO. Why can’t I see error codes in Google Analytics and what error codes can I see in log files that I can use to improve my SEO? I see Gerry is come off his mic, so we’ll let him go in.

Gerry: Sure. I mean, this feels like a great question for ContentKing, to be honest with you, but I’ll go in first. The fundamental thing is that JavaScript can’t see the error code and as we mentioned before Google Analytics uses JavaScript to kind of tell you what sort of page it is and it’s like that, so if it can’t see the status code, then there’s no way to know if it’s an error code. Now, I do actually hack in error codes into Google Analytics a lot of the time, so I often kind of go, “Hey, can we make sure that we track which ones are 404s, which ones are 500s,” if you can put your analytics code on the 500 page which is sometimes a challenge.”

So, fundamentally, that’s one of the key things that’s really, really different. So, Google Analytics literally only uses JavaScript to kind of like understand what’s the pages. So, unless it can know what the error code is then there’s no way for it to see it, but equally, you can build other things into it which you can’t necessarily build into the hit. So, for instance, you can say stock levels, or you can say whether or not pages somebody is logged in, logged out.

So, there’s loads of other different codes which you can put into analytics that you can’t necessarily put into log file analysis. So, they’re different. And one of the things that is important is understanding what goes where and how to consolidate the information afterwards.

Dixon: I’ll come to Steven last on this one, I think, because you’ve probably got plenty to say, but Sophie, are there any error codes that you very much look out for because you’re looking at log files probably day-to-day more often than Steven or Gerry or me.

Sophie: Yeah. I mean, for me the 404s, the 500 errors, particularly on large e-com websites where there’s, like, loads of people accessing the site on a regular basis, updating products, taking things down, taking things out, and not putting redirects in place, or when they do put a redirect in place, let’s put a 302 in because they don’t know the difference and all this kind of stuff because they’re not there for SEO, they just manage their website, they’re just there to manage their stock. If that is a huge website and you know that kind of thing is happening on a regular basis just from the standard nature of it, that’s when I turn to log files.

I mean, I can run crawlers on sites like Screaming Frog and things like that or ContentKing but just really understanding and drilling into that more regularly and then seeing what Google is hitting because if they’re regularly hitting those 404 pages then you know there’s a problem and you know you need to do something very quickly.

Dixon: Steven, what do you want to add in there?

Steven: So, when it comes to error codes and Google Analytics, as long as a page is loading, and JavaScript is executed, and the Google Analytics JavaScript is executed, it’s going to be logged and tracked in GA. So, typically you’ll see that 4xx error codes are all going to show up in GA. But for instance, like the 302 redirected that Sophie mentions, definitely not going to show up in Google Analytics, and in most cases 5xx status codes same thing.

So, what I like to do is, I pull in all of the status codes that we get and pull it into a different place than Google Analytics because it’s just not the right place to make that overview. So, you could build your own platform, or you could use something like ContentKing that continuously monitors your site and leverages log file analysis, Google search console data, and Google Analytics data and you could piece it all together. You can even add the stock levels that Gerry was talking about through an API. So, you’re basically piecing together your own platform and getting the insights that you need.

Dixon: Okay, cool. So, there’s a lot of things you can pull in but apart from things like error codes are there some other things that you pick out in log files at all, that you’ve got a pet choice? Sophie, you’ve come off mic, so I’ll let you dive in there first.

Sophie: Yeah. For me, if a page is unnecessarily large or slow and the reason why I use log files for this more than anything and it’s one of my biggest frustrations in SEO is people will typically just run the home page of the site through kind of page speed insights or Lighthouse and just be like, “Oh, everything is fine. This is fine.” That’s not fine.

So, I tend to use it more specifically for that, and finding things that may be like static resources that are crawled too frequently or not frequently enough. But yes, the page speed, especially with this whole turning around towards the core web vitals and user experience, and like the big trend towards that, a lot of clients I see on a monthly basis are asking a lot more what are you doing with our site speed, what are you doing with our core web vitals.

Now, that’s not always going to be the top priority, but being able to really identify that in a much larger website where it’s going to take a really long time for it to crawl on kind of a website crawler like a Screaming Frog, for example.

Dixon: So, do you then use that also to find really large image files that are sitting there just, you know, they’re actually a little icon in the browser but when you look at them, they’re 4HD, Ultra HD, and that’s really slowing stuff and you wouldn’t see it another way. So, I think that’s a really, really good example.

Gerry, Steve, any other things that we need to bring out before we hit the top of the show?

Gerry: I think the one thing that I get inspired and I basically find interesting is the wastage. Basically, you often find that there’s, like, parameter URLs that are being crawled at scale. There’s sub-domains that are being crawled or there’s often things which you don’t expect. I mean, the funny thing about log files is the fact that you tend to look for things that you didn’t really see anyway almost. I mean, a lot of the time we kind of look at the website, we have a kind of understanding of the website, and using tools like ContentKing or Screaming Frog or whatever kind of crawler we’ve got, we have a really good idea of how Google should be seeing the website. But then, often we kind of look in the log files, and we’re often surprised when we go, “Oh, Google has got a bit weird over here” or “Google’s found something over here.”

I mean, one of the things that I would mention is before you get into log files, another place you can look for the same kind of information is in Google Search Console. There’s something called The Crawl Stats section which I think is massively underutilized, and once we’re talking about log files, I think kind of starting there allows you to kind of go, “Okay. This is something which I need to look at,” and then you go to the log files. It’s almost kind of a, “Where do I start to kind of then go somewhere else?”

I mean, one of the things Sophie mentioned before is things like 302s versus 301s. We kind of understand the difference but explaining to a developer that a 302 will be hit hundreds of times whereas the 301 will be hit a few times before Google will kind of go, “Okay. This seems to be permanently moved over here.” 302 is like, “Oh, I have to keep checking back and checking back and checking back.”

So, a lot of the time developers, IT guys, they want to improve the crawling, they want to improve the efficiency of observing content to not just users but also to the search engines especially if a huge proportion of the traffic is search engine based. We want to improve the efficiency there, and the best way to do that is to kind of go in log files.

Another thing Sophie mentioned was page speed and one of the things that I never knew before recently was that there was like a status code called a 304. Actually, I mean, I say recently, this is like 5, 10 years ago but when I first found out about that, I was surprised. I was almost worried when I went, “Wow, there’s so many 304s in here. What are they and is it causing me issues?” And it turns out that’s a good thing, but nobody had ever really told me that we should be using 304s to improve a crawl which means that Google will check it and then when it comes back again it won’t rescan the page. It will know that it’s not been modified because that’s a not modified status code.

All of these kinds of little things which you kind of go, “Okay. These are the little things that are kind of massively improving things,” or “This is where Google is gone a bit crazy over here and is found some spider trap or something,” which means Google is kind of finding millions of pages of parameter content that it doesn’t need to find. A good example, going back to kind of my time at JUST EAT, we had hundreds of thousands of sub-domains and Google was crawling them even though they weren’t generating any traffic. It was just basically canonicalized back to the main site and we didn’t realize just how bad it was until we started doing log file analysis.

Dixon: I might come back with some of that, but I wanted Steven to have a chance to wade in.

Steven: Yeah. I love the 304 and using Google Search Console’s crawl stats report to get some pointers on where to optimize to use your site’s crawl budget more efficiently. So, what we typically see is that a lot of sites are not leveraging the 304 not modified HTTP status response.

Dixon: So, let me ask, how do you leverage a 304? I mean, so basically, what you’re saying is a 304 response is better than a 200 response? Is that right?

Steven: It depends. So, if you’ve got content that’s not changing or not changing that often, it makes a lot of sense to use the 304-response code because you’re essentially telling both browsers and crawlers like, “Hey, this piece of content, whether it’s a font or a logo or HTML, it hasn’t changed. So, you don’t need to fully crawl it.” It hasn’t changed. So, you can use whatever you have, and that way you decrease unnecessary load on the site.

So, for example, like a company’s logo doesn’t change that often, it’s totally fine to use the 304 HTTP status there and you can use it in a bunch of places where it makes sense.

Dixon: So, you do it on the logos and the images not necessarily on the HTML pages, URL itself, is that right? How do you do that? I mean, if I’m a WordPress user, am I stuffed? Do I need to be a little bit more tech-savvy than that or can I do it in WordPress?

Steven: There’s probably plugins for that, so any speed plugin that’s worth their salt is going to have options for this, so that’s built-in pretty much any plugin I’ve seen.

Dixon: Okay. Cool. And… sorry, Gerry?

Gerry: No, I was going to say you can also do that using the CDN layer basically. So, you know, often that’s what CDNs are really, really good for is kind of going, “Actually, I want to cache these hits and use a 304 and other bits and pieces.” So, it does exactly what Steven is saying, it kind of gives you the ability to kind of go, “Okay. These image files, I want to basically extend the, oh God, the data points.” Oh, I’m talking rubbish now. I’ll pass it back to Steven.

Dixon: No, I’ll move on because I want us to get onto GDPR just briefly before the end and before that you brought up, I think it was Gerry, the idea of… Well, actually, Sophie brought it up really, data basically, these large files and that being really obvious when you look at log files and you suddenly see that 80% of your resources have been used to load images and you didn’t know you had an image-rich site or something like that or it’s just been streaming a video to one person for the last 24 hours or something.

Does that mean, is that an opportunity to talk to data, to developers, and systems admins in a language that they more understand? If you sit there and say, “Look, you’re using 20% of your resources just to load this image up,” are you going to get a faster reaction than if you say, “Look, you’ve got 3000 bots hitting this web page,” or something like that? Is data a better way to communicate with systems admins, or is that an it-depends kind of question of the system admins?

Sophie: I think, it’s always an it-depends question. I think anything is an it-depends question, isn’t it really? I’ve always found it’s easier to build relationships with developers if you are almost speaking their language. If you can show them how it impacts them rather than how it impacts you or kind of just really building that bridge because they don’t really care, they’ve got their own job list, they’ve got their own ticket system, like they’ve got all of these things that they need to work through, why should they care more about what you’re trying to get pushed through than what they already need to.

So, you just really being able to showcase to them what the impact is and kind of talking to them about what the effort behind that is as well and how they can resolve that and leaving that open to them because if you storm into kind of a development meeting being like, “Great. This is definitely a low effort task. I need all of these things done because it’s going to benefit me and it’s going to benefit the SEO,” you’re not really going to get anywhere. They’re going to be completely just shut down from that. So, I always think just talking to them in their language, showing them the data, is going to help.

Dixon: Then I’m going to defend, it’s not it depends, it’s yes. You reckon that if you can talk to them in their language then you’re going to get further faster.

Sophie: Yeah, unless they know SEO, I guess, but that’s really hard. I can’t say I’ve found a developer who’s like the same level of SEO as what an SEO is, but yeah.

Dixon: Yeah. Okay. We agree with that Gerry and Steven?

Gerry: Absolutely.

Steven: Yeah.

Gerry: Go on, Steven.

Steven: Yeah. It’s more of a communications issue as Sophie put it, yeah.

Gerry: I think the worst thing or the worst habit I’ve seen from SEO people is telling developers how to do it rather than what they want to get done. If you kind of go, “Oh, you need to edit the htaccess file,” and the guy turns around and kind of goes, “We don’t have a htaccess file or a .net server.” You look like a… Yeah, you don’t look like the best SEO guy out there and it is basically your job to kind of talk to them about what you need and why you need it rather than how to do it.

They’re always very good at kind of telling you how they think it should be done and talking to you through it and you need to be in those conversations because often they come up with a solution which doesn’t really work for you, but equally, you know, you almost have to trust them to kind of understand their own systems to kind of come up with the best ideas.

Dixon: Excellent. Okay. Before we… We’re nearly at the end of our time. These things go really quickly when you get into them, but I did want to just finish up with this question which if you don’t want to answer that’s actually fine, but GDPR law is something that, you know, when it came in, I thought, “Well, I believe in this and I do, I want people to opt-in to have their data or not to have my data stored or whatever.”

But one of the quirks of GDPR law is that IP addresses are considered to be personally identified information. So, does that mean that server logs are illegal? Who wants to go on with that one?

Gerry: So, fundamentally, no, they’re not illegal in the basis that they have to be stored. They have to be stored in that way. Basically, the whole GDPR law is if your data… It’s a bit complicated but, basically, if your data is used and matched up in a different way. Now, if we kind of use the IP address to then re-target you and do sort of all bits and pieces and match it up with other kind of data sources then yeah. Basically, if it’s for the core service that we’re doing then absolutely we need to use the IP address and so on and so forth.

Now, it is debatable whether an IP address is actually personally identifiable. The reason I say that is because…

Dixon: I agree.

Gerry: … I used to work at the BBC and everybody at the BBC whether they were in the Manchester, the London, or any other office, all shared one IP address, and it’s the same with most organizations. And equally, as I browse around at home, my IP address could change. I could pay extra to have a fixed IP address, but I don’t because I’m tight and I don’t need one, but basically an IP address is one of those things which is only just kind of a way in which you at the computer that you’re at accessing the internet at that time.

And again, as Sophie’s mentioned, so many people now are using VPNs and other bits and pieces. It’s quite interesting that we still consider an IP address to be kind of personally identifiable. However, on the basis that GDPR and, I mean, the company that I work for, we don’t use Google Analytics, for instance, because Europe has deemed it to be potentially illegal. So, in Germany and Finland, we’re looking at different tools but what we are doing is we’re not sharing the IP address externally. We’re not using the IP address that we capture to kind of then share that with other tools and other services to kind of use it in ways for retargeting and other bits and pieces, but we are using it to kind of provide the best service and to make sure that what we do and how we do it is functional.

So, without storing and using IP addresses literally the internet would collapse, and whilst I’m a great believer in my level of privacy I’m also a great believer in having a functional internet.

Dixon: No, I absolutely agree with all you’re saying, it’s just that it wasn’t me that deems IP addresses are personally identifiable information. It’s in the legislation which seems to me absurd because there’s no way you can… It’s like having a telephone call between two people but the system doesn’t know what one of the telephone numbers is, that’s not going to work. You need it to be able to do the communications.

Gerry: Yeah. I mean, one of the things I would say is I’ve had some very interesting conversations with legal teams and big companies where they were trying to figure out how we’ve given permission for Google to scrape the site or similar things. Basically, lawyers don’t always understand the implications of law. They understand their side of it. We understand our side of it, but the two are not necessarily very well connected. Internet lawyers are a new breed and I think that’s a fascinating kind of area if I’m honest.

Dixon: Sophie, Steven, you got anything that you want to add in that conversation? I find it fascinating, but it probably bores the hell out of a lot of people. So, I left it to the end of the show.

Sophie: I mean… Go on, Steven.

Steven: Yeah. So, I think the discussion you need to have it’s like how do you go about IP addresses. In a lot of cases, you can discard them, or you can just remove the last couple of octets. And you can do everything that you wanted to do anyway. So, it’s not really an issue that’s holding back your work as an SEO. So, moving beyond that, it’s pretty easy.

Dixon: Yeah, that’s certainly what I do. On InLinks we kind of have a tracking system on our, it’s like Intercom, it’s called GoSquared but it’s sort of basically a web chat system, which everyone needs to be logged into to be able to have a chat. So, I’ve got their email address and everything. But where I haven’t got any of that information or haven’t been given permission to hold that information then we kill the last three digits of the IP address, so that we’re GDPR compliant. And obviously, if somebody signs up for the service then they’re obviously then…it’s a different nature of a different relationship.

But I find it weird because you go down a different internet lawyer who’s worried about, I don’t know, terrorism, and all of a sudden it’s illegal not to have the IP address of your customers. So, the ISPs are damned if they do, damned if they aren’t. So, I find it… Anyway, it’s a story for another day and I don’t want to take people too much off the beaten track, but I do find it fascinating.

Anyway, guys, we’re up to our 45 minutes and a little bit beyond already. So, thank you very much for coming in. Before I ask you all to, please tell people how they can get hold of you and find out more because a lot of interesting stuff comes out of this session. I’m going to bring back my producer, David, to let us know what’s happening on the next show and when that’s going to be.

David: Sure. The next show is going to be on the 19th of September, 4:00 pm BST. That will be Episode 27 and the topic will be: “How do you Target Audiences using SEO.” We’re booking a few guests for that and stay tuned to the InLinks channels to find out exactly who’s going to be on that show, but the topic is going to be, “How do you Target Audiences using SEO.”

And the sign-up link is theknowledgepanelshow.com if you want to sign up and watch the next episode live.

Dixon: I might have to talk about GDPR again then, that’s going to happen. Okay, guys, thank you very much for coming in. Guys, before we go, can you tell people how they can get in contact with you as long as you want them to, and please don’t say what you can see on the screen because bear in mind most people are on Spotify or iTunes or whatever. So, Gerry, how can they get you?

Gerry: You can always find me, if you Google me, Gerry White. You can find me on Twitter which is @dergal, or you can find me on LinkedIn. They’re the two best places to find me.

Dixon: Okay. And Gerry is with a G. Sophie, how do they find you?

Sophie: Similar for me as well. Twitter more so just because I’m dreadful with my LinkedIn DMs because they’re normally full of backlink builders, but @SophieBrannon is the best place to get me on Twitter.

Dixon: Excellent. And Johnny Scott is on YouTube in the background. So, thank you very much. Thanks for coming on, Johnny. That’s great. Steven, how do they find you?

Steven: I’m an SEO, not a hard person to find. You can search for Steven van Vessum, and if my last name is too difficult, you can go to steven.land and you’ll be able to find me and contact me.

Dixon: Brilliant. Steven with a V. So, guys, just leaves it for me to say thank you very much for coming in, and if you all want to be on the next session live go to theknowledgepanelshow.com and sign up there. Cheers. Bye for now.

Transcript edited on 8th October 2022.

Can SEO and PPC work together? In this episode of “The Knowledge Panel,” we find out what the friction points may be, and why we all just can’t get along!

BECKY SIMMS, NADIA MOJAHED and NAVAH HOPKINS join DAVID BAIN for episode 24 of the Knowledge Panel.

Sign up below to watch future episodes live…

Do you want to read instead? Here is the transcript

David: “How SEO and PPC Can Work Together.” “The Knowledge Panel,” Episode 24. Hi. It’s your temporary host, David Bain, here. And today, we’ve got another wonderful episode with three great panelists here discussing all the merits of perhaps just doing SEO, perhaps just doing PPC, or perhaps doing them both together and working very extensively and effectively together. And so, we’re gonna have a great discussion about that as well. I just wanna mention quickly to anyone that happens to be listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, any different podcast platform, we do broadcast live. So, if you can, come and watch the next show live. Just sign up, theknowledgepanelshow.com, and hopefully, you can join us watching the next one live.

But without any further ado, let’s get straight on to introducing the three wonderful panelists that we’ve got today. So, in traditional Dixon fashion, I will say panelist number one, who are you and where do you come from?

Navah: Howdy, all. Thank you very much for having me. My name is Navah Hopkins. I have been in the digital space. I actually started off as an SEO, made the transition to PPC. I’ve had the pleasure of working with international accounts across every vertical. I’ve taught courses on PPC. I’ve built the paid agency or the paid arm within tech SEO agencies, worked on software. But most importantly, I love helping people. I am the “Ask the PPC” for Search Engine Journal and one of the founding board members for the Paid Search Association. So, all of that is to say I’m really excited for our conversation around empathy, technology, and how we can ultimately help you.

David: And one of the ideal guests for this particular topic and if you’ve crossed the boundary from PCC to SEO or the other way as well. And Becky as well. Oh, rather, I shouldn’t say Becky. I should say panelist number two, shouldn’t I? Who are you and where do you come from?

Becky: So, I am Becky. I’m founder and CEO at Reflect Digital. We’re a digital marketing agency based just south of London in the U.K. And I guess what makes us special is the fact that we’re kind of here to unleash digital performance, and we do that by connecting motivations and psychology into digital marketing strategies. So, we’ve got an SEO team, a paid team, a CRO team, and we really look at a holistic strategy. So, yeah. So, I’m gonna commit it very much from a strategy angle today and looking forward to the conversation.

David: Superb. Strategy perspective, bird’s eye view perspective perhaps as well. And moving on to panelist number three. Who are you and where do you come from?

Nadia: So, hello, everyone. My name is Nadia Mojahed. I am based in Geneva, Switzerland. So, I’ve been in the digital marketing field since more than 12 years, and recently since 2018, I decided to create my own agency, SEO Transformer. And I help international businesses and organizations and various sectors with our organic growth, basically with content strategy, website migration, technical audits, and all what helps bring the brand to the users actually. So, I’m glad to join you here, and thank you for having me.

David: Yeah. And I’m glad you talked about brand as well because brand is something that SEOs weren’t so great at maybe 10 years ago. Getting a lot better at it nowadays, of course, as well. And so, shall we start with perhaps looking at whether it’s possible to work in either SEO or either PPC in a fairly siloed manner? Just thinking about your own role in mind. We’ve got Navah shaking her head there as well. Not possible nowadays, Navah?

Navah: Well, not only not is it possible, you will hurt yourself if you try. So, the days of I’m gonna go hide in a corner and keep the client in the dark and work my magic voodoo, they’re over. And it’s actually really good because it means that not only are we sharing data that we own, privacy-first web compliant data where the users consent to cookie tracking, where we have our global analytics tag installed, all that. We want to make sure that we are collaborating both PPC and SEO so that we’re sharing that same source of truth, but also so that we can prove out ideas in a meaningful way.

It doesn’t make sense to hide what converts and what doesn’t on the paid side from the SEO team so that… Like, they have to create content strategies in the dark and vice versa if there is really solid intel on the content side or the insight search side that can be relayed to the paid teams to understand what ideas might convert and be worth that more expensive auction price. Makes zero sense to silo that. So, you’re hurting yourself if you’re trying to hide, and you’re also hurting yourself if you refuse to share reporting data. So, yeah, no, no.

David: Okay, okay, okay. So, share, share. Make sure you talk to people. Becky, you obviously manage a big team and you’ve got SEOs and paid search specialists that work for you. So, obviously, there are different mindsets that are perhaps better for different roles that the individuals happen to do. If someone isn’t a brilliant expert at paid search and just wants to do that, are you quite comfortable with that person staying in paid search and not educating themselves about SEO?

Becky: I think so. It’s making sure you’ve got the people to bridge the gap internally. So, not everyone themselves needs to be an expert across everything, but the thing that I say to the team all the time is your customer does not care what channel they find you on. They just care that you’re there when they need you at the right time and depending on where they are in the journey. So, that’s the bit. So, it’s one of the reasons we created our kind of customer experience team that we’ve got that kind of major on CRO analytics and bridging the gap between the two because it’s their job to get into the mindset of the user more and to map out what customer journeys look like and where we’ll find different audiences. And then to bring the two teams together from an SEO and a paid point of view to say, “Hey, look, this is how we make this happen.” And then actually, naturally the teams start working better together because they can see that central customer first. I don’t care what channel you’re on strategy and then they see where they play in and how they work together. And that, for us, is how it’s working and working really well.

David: So, Nadia, customer first. Is that how you approach trying to encourage SEOs and PPCs to work more closely together?

Nadia: Yes, absolutely. I mean, there is… So, SEO and PPC are just like the other side of the coin. And if the brand’s users are on Google, then both of the channels are actually important to reach to the customers. So, it’s basically the customer that we are trying to reach to. And by sharing the data and knowledge, we will just help each other perform better with PPC, for example, sharing the data of what are the keywords that they are targeting, then when SEO incorporate them in the text, we will help them by reducing the bit cost, for example, from performance perspective and the same as well with the different aspects.

Now, talking from an SEO perspective, so the more we actually share knowledge, SEO will help PPC achieve better results together when it comes to page speed elements, having the page better for the user experience as well. So, I always promote it as a win-win. We’re not competing. Actually, we are helping reach for better results.

David: Now this is a great panel because I can see that you’re suggesting great topics to further the conversation as part of the private chat as well. So, also feel free to jump in and add to people’s suggestions your thoughts. So, completely open panel discussion. Just jump in whenever you want. And shall we just move on to how to decide to spend your budget? Because, obviously, every client has a limited budget and you wanna maximize the impact of that budget as well. So, I guess what kind of perspective do clients tend to have and how they want to spend their budget? And how do you go about not pushing them in the right direction but ensuring that they go along the right path to maximize the impact of their budgets? Becky, would you like to go with that?

Becky: Yes. So, we take a research-driven approach because actually, to us, we don’t mind where they spend their budget, but actually, it’s more about starting with where. Again, we’re gonna find the customers and how they’re performing currently, benchmarking against competitors. So, we’ve got kind of an in-depth discovery process that we’ll take people through which does everything from profiling audience, finding drivers, looking at all the channels in-depth to understand the opportunity, understand the kind of cost, obviously, from a paid media point of view. And paid media, we’re talking everything from Google through to YouTube through to programmatic social channels, like, anywhere we can pay to put an ad. We wanna be thinking about that in relation to the different audiences.

And then it’s starting to marry that up against the business objectives because we need to understand what are they looking to achieve and where are we gonna get our kind of quick wins, our low-hanging fruit that’s going to help them justify that to the board that this makes sense and the investments working? Where are we gonna have our long-term strategy that maybe…? Especially from an organic point of view. There might be some keywords that are kind of our 6 to 12-month plan that aren’t gonna happen overnight but actually will dramatically help and maybe reduce some ad spend in the future.

So, it’s more about coming from a less emotional and a more rational database to being able to say, “Look, these are our options and these are kind of different ways that we could look at it,” and getting feedback from the client and making sure that we’re gonna answer the demands of their objectives.

Nadia: Can I add something here?

David: Yeah, go for it. I was just waiting to see who’s gonna jump in there. Nadia, yeah.

Nadia: So, I totally agree with Becky. Actually, it depends on, yeah, the business objectives as well, and also what are the objectives? And what is the business situation? So, sometimes it’s…like, some brands would like to…they want to show results, especially with the case of startups when they want to raise funds, for example, or, like, shorter-term projects. They want to see results now, but at the same time… So, if it’s a very competitive industry, then it might be most, like, very closely to just, like, rely on or to build the processes to rely more on PPC and not to benefit from SEO, for example.

It’s basically for certain keywords. There might be… SEO might help the business, for example, finding the niche that they can actually target that has not been never addressed before, whereas the low competition exists for that, and then tap on that growth organically very quickly. Relying solely on PPC, for example, on the other hand, might, of course, drive results for the time being, but maybe at some certain stages that the bit cost will increase, the drop-down of performance might happen. So, it’s best when it’s based on a case-by-case situation. It’s best when both are invested in, both to have, for example, one property as a place where you push for immediate results and one property to build and to invest in to grow over the time.

Navah: I’m so glad you brought up the look at each individual channel. So, whenever I’m working with a client, we have a very candid conversation about what are your customers worth? How many customers are you currently getting each month, and where could that number grow to without any foundational change or any operational change? Are you seasonal? There’s a lot of business questions that go into it. And there are certain folks where I will never ever recommend a Google Search from a paid standpoint simply because they do not have the budget, but I might recommend a display approach or a local service ads approach coupled with SEO from either technical or content, or I might recommend, “Hey, let’s just work on video content,” or, “Let’s work on guerrilla marketing.” Just like maybe we look at just more conventional media. It depends on the client.

One really useful way to do this actually is go to Google Trends and actually do a search for the different ideas that you want to potentially invest in either from an SEO content standpoint or from paid, and you’ll be able to see localized how each idea works. And depending on the search volume, you might even get auction prices back. So, as a general rule of thumb, you never want to set yourself up to be able to afford less than 10 clicks in your day if you’re doing anything paid because for non-branded, less than 10 is asking your campaign to fail because a 10% conversion rate is exceptional. And if you’re asking to do better than that, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

So, when you set up paid, especially if you’re not B2B, I mean, B2B, it’s a little bit more forgiving on that ratio, but you still definitely need to be mindful of that. Make sure that you’re setting your budgets up to drive results that you need and that you understand what the factors are that influence that conversion rate. If you convert better on the phone, you better be setting yourself up for calls. Your landing pages better be set up for calls. The types of queries, the types of content that you’re doing better, be encouraging that kind of conversation, planting that need to speak to an expert.

If you know that your site sells you well, just worry about that. Worry about that easy navigation, the path to conversion. Starting from business metrics and understanding pragmatically whether you can afford X, Y, Z channel or not will help quite a bit, and also understanding locally and time-wise where it might make sense to make a paid play definitely will increase the chance for success.

David: Navah, just to let you know, your headset got a little bit crackly there.

Navah: Oh, no.

David: We can still hear you okay but I’m not sure if it’s something that’s just slightly loose or you’re touching the wire or something like that. But just to make you aware of there. Hopefully, it’ll clear up there as well. Something else I just wanted to touch upon, Navah, was that you mentioned beforehand that we should maybe talk about how PPC is more than just Google Search. In terms of when you talk to clients about opportunities, are many clients actually aware of that, the fact that Google is a lot more than just text ads nowadays? And also, I guess to follow on from that, are areas like display or different video ads sometimes a much more cost-effective way to start PPC with?

Navah: Not only are they, it’s where Google is going. But dirty secret, Microsoft Ads exist, too, and it tends to actually convert quite a bit better, and it’s a lot easier to get more out of your budget there. So, just a general disclaimer, I am a huge Microsoft Ads fan girl. I love Microsoft Ads, Audience Network Search. They’re great. Love Google, too, but I do have a very near and dear place in my heart for Microsoft.

That out of the way, Google rolled out last year a campaign type called Performance Max and it basically rolls in everything together, display, video, local, shopping, search. And the reason why they did that is they wanted users to stop focusing on the individual channel, the nitty-gritty, and leaving out opportunities that could serve them well, and really focus on business objectives. The downside of Performance Max as a campaign type is that we just don’t have as much intelligence yet. Our ability to set certain settings aren’t as great.

However, based off of the tools at our disposal and based off of the way consumers are interacting with content, especially in the post-COVID world, video is non-negotiable, display is non-negotiable. Luckily, every ad network has at least a Shutterfly or Shutterstock integration, and it will crawl your site, and it will help you create beautiful content if you do not have the team to do it yourself. But absolutely, absolutely, you need to be taking advantage of those channels, both from an auction price standpoint and lack of competition. But also, that’s where your customers are. And if you do not have a cohesive brand message and a cohesive hook to pull people into your offering on things other than Google Search, you’re just gonna be paying a premium every single time and they haven’t decided that they have the need yet. You need to be owning that entire user journey.

David: Is video generally more a brand marketing tool and…

Navah: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So, this is actually very, very important, and I would really love for both Becky and Nadia to weigh in on this, too, because there’s a lot to unpack here. There’s a reason why YouTube is the second largest search network. There is a lot of mechanics that you can do, a lot of things that you can play with. YouTube by the nature of what it is, you can have those very transactional ads that are focused on shopping where you have that amazing ad and then the product is right there. There are the landing page-focused. Yes, you can have brand awareness and, yes, you can have brand lift, but ultimately, YouTube is a gold mine, a genuine gold mine for dynamic meaningful conversations with people where it’s that much more important nowadays to build that trust and to build that desire to interact with the brand so that they consent to not only engaging with you but to letting you know that they’re engaging with you.

Becky: I agree so much. It’s all about building a relationship, and that’s what that marketing journey is all about. And I think too many people are just running their text ads at the point of conversion,but you haven’t done anything to build a relationship. So, then the customer clicks on it and then they land on this site, and they’ve never seen you before, they’ve got no relationship, no trust. So, then they probably leave and they go to one of the other results where maybe they have been doing all the other activity, and they’re like, “Oh, this feels like a safe place actually. Two weeks ago, I read an article that helped me make this decision.” And they don’t even realize they’re putting all those things together. It’s just they’ve got this feeling that they don’t have about this brand that’s just popped up out of nowhere.

So, I think the thing that we find really important is making sure that where you’re using different channels for different things that you’re matching up what the customer should expect from it. So, our clients should expect from a metric point of view because some of them will be very different from a converting point of view. You’re not necessarily expecting them to convert. Yes, you can use YouTube for kind of that final part of the funnel, but depending on what you’re using it for, making sure you’ve had that conversation so that clients start to understand where they’re expecting the users to be in the journey. And what you’re expecting, as a result, is really important because otherwise, they can so easily bucket all of…especially on the paid marketing side of things. They think it’s all about driving ROI. And sometimes it’s not about that, it’s playing a different part of the game to get towards the ROI figure. So, yeah, that’s really important as well.

David: Nadia.

Nadia: Yeah. So, I also would like to add for video. Like, different types of people consume different kind of content and media. So, your audience might not be willing to read long blog articles or long texts, but then with a video, you could reach out to those who look for videos to learn about your brand. So, basically, it’s an opportunity not to miss as Becky and Nav said. Actually, I found video very effective as well to fuel the website, to fuel the social media interactions as well. So, it adds this, as you said, Nav, a personal touch, an interactivity. And actually, talking about SEO, sometimes for specific keywords, you need to have videos actually. Sometimes for the ranking of a specific keywords, a text doesn’t work. Sometimes images, you need to have images. Sometimes the content is best described by a video.

So, basically, it’s best that you as a brand to reach to the users with different channels and not to limit yourself. And nowadays, with having…like, users don’t expect a brand to spend that much on videos now with this, you know, like, live videos and stories on social media. And, like, your portable phone can be your video recording tool. So, it’s basically, let’s say the expectation on, like, how we should invest in video production, it might not be like that much cost here. So, like, return on investment will be bigger.

Navah: I have one quick point on this, and then I promise I’ll release the floor. This is a very powerful PPC and SEO collaboration opportunity. There’s a great audience type within paid search or any Google channel. They actually take the YouTube audience, the people who have subscribed, people who have seen a particular video, people who have commented on a video. So, as you’re working on your content and you’re deciding where to invest that content, that audience that has engaged with you before can then be used to pre-qualify your paid spend so that you’re not just shooting in the dark and you’re not just creating that cold call there. There’s that warm interaction that Becky mentioned, and you’re able to really move the needle both on the PPC and the SEO side. So, definitely, if you aren’t already, use your YouTube channel to your advantage not just to sell and to build brand awareness, but also from a targeting standpoint as an audience.

David: So, primarily, the audience for “The Knowledge Panel” show are SEOs, but obviously, SEOs that are aware that it’s important to learn different digital marketing activities from other people, and probably a lot of knowledge from paid search is an important part of that as well. Is it still the case that the quality and possibly volume of keyword data that you can get from paid search tools is better than the keyword data available for organic search?

Navah: No.

David: No? Okay.

Navah: No, it died. We are all crying into our search terms report. So, basically, what happens now is we’ll look into our search queries and we’ll see some data, then we’ll see other queries and a whole other chunk of data. That’s just this black box of, “Oh, no.” So, what’s actually really interesting is that SEOs, you’re used to dealing with this, you’re used to modeling, you’re used to making those educated guesses, you’re used to building out the data from the scraps that we get from Google. This is a really powerful time to collaborate and to build those cross-platform reports because PPCs, we’ve kind of recovered at this point. And yes, our modeling from a conversion standpoint is there, but, yeah, we definitely do not have the gold standard of full robust data that we once did.

David: I guess one thing that you can do for PPC, for SEO, sorry, is you can actually test PPC for a short period of time then decide whether it’s actually worthwhile to spend a decent amount of budget focusing on SEO for those particular terms.

Navah: So, this is actually very important. Different ad platforms have different rules of engagement. Google requires age in order to ramp up quickly, and actually, the smaller the spend, the longer the ramp-up period will be. So, if you wanna test if an idea is meaningful before you engage in the 6-month to 12-month content strategy, you need to make sure that you’re budgeting in at least a quarter to give paid to actually prove it out to give you a meaningful data set, and you need to make sure that you’re budgeting efficiently and effectively, going back to that equation, can you get enough clicks in your day to trigger your conversion rate? If you’re not doing that, I’m sorry, but you’re gonna get bad data.

And on the flip side, if there are content strategies that you have in play and they’re converting, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be search volume enough for it on the paid side. Like, those amazing opportunities that Nadia was mentioning about low competition, kind of getting those 15% unique queries that happen in paid, if there isn’t enough search volume, Google is just not gonna serve it.

So, yeah, just a little qualifier there that you do need to give it time and you do need to actually build in a test budget that’s actually probably higher than what you intend to spend so you can clear that learning pretty quickly.

David: Becky, is there something that your teams do? Do you use PPC as a way to decide whether or not to invest in SEO?

Becky: We do. We also use PPC quite a lot to test, obviously, content from the ads, but then we look at that from a metadata and page performance point of view of what’s working, what’s resonating with audiences. So, there is lots of data that can be shared both ways, but 100% using it where you can’t test. But Navah is completely right, you’ve got to have enough budget to make a meaningful data set because I think too many people make decisions on not strong enough data or we’re looking at averages that just don’t mean anything. So, try to find that kinda outlier data, that interesting…those numbers that actually tell you something that you can do something different because of it is the really important thing and probably the more difficult thing, which is why people struggle with it.

David: And what about the other way around? What are the learnings that PPC can take from SEO? For example, if traffic reaches a website and it’s probably the first time a visitor has landed on a website, there’s an opportunity to have a tracking script on there, do some retargeting, and things like that. What retargeting tends to be effective after someone has landed from an organic visit?

Becky: Who’s taking that one?

Navah: I actually would really love to hear Nadia’s perspective on this because I have a feeling as you’re working on content, like, there’s a lot of conversations about, “Should I go to paid or should I not?” So, I’m genuinely curious.

Nadia: So, basically, like, just like taking the conversation from where it ended on the testing part and then bridging it to the remarketing part. When it comes to the, like, search volumes, they actually… When it comes to keywords, then it’s… I mean, it’s not all about search volumes and it’s not all about… I mean, like, even what competitors have in terms of keywords. We all know that for the B2B keywords, you won’t even find search volumes for that. The point is that to prioritize to be useful to users even if there are even no search volumes for that.

And so, when it comes to SEO, like, just having the content that serves the users and leaving it some time to cook, to bake for Google to start driving results for that, and then looking again at the Google Search Console and seeing what traffic it can bring, and then taking those keywords and then giving them to the PPC team to actually do remarketing for those campaigns. Targeting those campaigns will be very useful because there are lots of…

I mean, when it comes to…especially to the traffic that comes from organic, not all people will be ready to buy now and not all people will be… Especially, like, if they don’t really know the brand very well, then they will need to come back and forth so many times. So, that’s where it’s very useful to all the time run remarketing campaigns to get this traffic to help us, yeah, with the performance.

Navah: So, one thing I’m actually very grateful for is that Google across the board, and I’m curious what everyone else thinks, has moved away from last click, Analytics being default last click, Google Ads being default last click. It’s actually really funny in the new GA for last click is called…is basically ads-preferred because it so often give the credit to the ad. I’m skeptical, healthy skepticism, about the data-driven attribution being the main driving force in Google Ads and then also in GA4. But I think it’s really interesting when we think about remarketing and what gets credit and how we set up campaigns. A, getting comfortable with the fact that we’re not gonna have perfect tracking and what those user journeys look like, but also helping our customers or our stakeholders understand there are fractional conversions. Like, this engagement that was valuable to us happened because of multiple steps, and if we’re remarketing or using just audience targeting…because, to be honest, remarketing as it was before is kind of dead, especially in the cookieless world.

Do we focus on overcoming the objections that someone might have had on an organic experience? Do we focus on, okay, that group just isn’t right? And so, we wanna focus on a completely different group and just understanding the page behavior. There’s a really great tool, Microsoft fangirl again, Microsoft Clarity. It’s absolutely free and it will actually let you see what users are doing on your page. So, if you’re really curious, are people staying on and reading the full blog? Are people trying to engage with your form but then getting stuck? This is really useful intelligence regardless of what industry you’re in. So, that user behavior intelligence is just as important as understanding what keywords to target or not, what audiences to target or not.

Becky: And I think the more granular you can get with understanding what the user has done on the page or where their next page was to put them into the right remarketing bucket is absolutely key so that then you’re putting the right message in front of them. And I think when we think of it as a journey, one of the things that our behavioral science team talk about all the time internally is about creating memorability because where we’re thinking about the fact that… And it really does depend what you’re selling, what your services, what your product is as to whether it’s got a short time span or a long time span to make that decision.

But for those longer time span, you need to be creating memories. So, you need to be evoking emotion because that’s gonna be more likely to create a memory. You need to make people think. So, that old adage that actually online we should not make people think, you should make people think if you want them to remember something. Like, they are more likely to remember it if they’ve had a bit of cognitive strain, if they’ve had to use their brain than if it was something that they could just look at and move on from.

So, we look at that as well from an ad content perspective as that kind of remarketing journey or also bringing them email marketing as well. So, how can we…? From an SEO point of view, if we’re driving people to a page and we can get them to give us their email address in exchange for some kind of download or whatever it may be, if we can then take them on an email journey and a remarketing journey where we’ve, again, paired the channels together and we’re thinking about the messaging, we’ve got so much more opportunity to build a relationship and to convert them.

David: Now, another way that SEO and PPC can work together, or I should perhaps say paid search can work together is on landing page design. So, traditionally or certainly in the past, it was quite common for paid search to drive traffic to orphan landing pages that didn’t have anything in mind for SEO at all. Nowadays is a bit different. And do our SEOs and PPC experts more likely to use the same landing page?

Navah: I have so many feelings about this. I really feel like I should go last.

David: Who wants to go first then?

Nadia: Maybe I’ll go first with that. I mean, if there are different, let’s say… It’s possible to have different landing pages, but when there is, like, let’s say distinct content between each page. So, if the keywords are very close together, then why to create a new page to talk about this specific content while the content is very close together? So, it depends on the case. Sometimes yes, it justifies having different pages, and sometimes, no, we don’t need that.

David: So, what about, for example, quality score? Is that still an important thing and did that not look at things like links within the page? And if it was an orphan page then that might reduce quality score.

Becky: Navah, you [crosstalk 00:35:52.560].

Navah: You go, Becky.

Becky: No, you’re probably better at this from a more detailed perspective.

Navah: All right. So, a couple of things. Quality score looks at landing page experience more than it looks at interlinking. So, if we’re worried about interlinking, like, that’s… Don’t worry about interlinking. The core of how to think about PPC landing pages is, does the page enable the user to convert? A lot of times, we PPCs will get frustrated with SEOs for better or for worse because by the nature of what SEO is, it has to have rich authoritative content to help it rank. Sometimes that sheer amount of content, especially if it’s laid out in a way that gets in the way of the call to action can be annoying to us, and we’re pesky and we’re like, “We want what we want and we wanna be able to test things.”

Nadia actually makes a point that I make all the time on the paid side. You do not need a lot of landing pages. You need a page that can prove its ability to get the user to convert. So, if you are going to test landing page design, that typically means that you have the page as noindex, nofollow, and it might either be on a subdomain of the main domain. And so, that whole thing is noindex, nofollow and it still has access to the ad bot to crawl it for quality score. So, that’s the bit that matters is that the ad bot can crawl it and see that you’re not hiding anything or what you promised on the page is gonna actually be there.

If you’re going to keep it on the same page or on the same domain, a few things need to be true. Number one, there cannot be any redirects. That will get the ad suspended. Number two, you need to make sure that the ad or the ad bot can crawl it for quality score purposes. Again, interlinking does not matter. Like, we don’t care. We care that if it’s a product page, it’s in stock. You should, too, because if you start getting the schema that it’s out of stock, that’s gonna be very sad for you because it’s gonna start getting de-indexed.

The other thing that’s actually very, very, very, very, very important is that you’re building out your paid campaigns for objectives, not sheer landing pages. So, yes, you might have that templated approach and you’re testing those things. During Google Marketing Live, there’s a new conversion tag or really container that’s supposed to help with page speed. So, hopefully, the SEOs in the room will not be sad at us when we ask, “Please, can we have our conversion tracking?” If you’re using Analytics actions, you ideally have that all sorted. If you’re using native conversion tracking, you’re using enhanced conversions, but yeah, I’m team subdomain so that we don’t have to have the compromising conversations where we can just have it noindex, nofollow as a subdomain, you have no navigation bar, you have your page.

And then the main domain is SEO happiness. But if you do need to keep it on the same domain like your e-commerce, and you’re not gonna create a whole separate other site, just make sure that you’re working in lockstep PPC and SEO so that there are no redirects, everything is in stock, and you’re not getting in the way of the path to conversion with those walls of text. And there’s my rant.

David: Becky, do you sit in…

Navah: And that’s why I wanted to go last.

David: No, that’s good. I was just gonna ask Becky. Becky, do you sit in team subdomain as well?

Becky: I sit a little bit on the fence from a cop-out point of view in that it really does… It depends. So, I guess back to what Nadia was saying that it depends on what the aim is. So, I think for those further down the funnel terms where we’re ready to convert someone, 100%. If we can get them up to the page without a navigation and it’s just literally do this, customer follow this through, it makes sense. But if we’re higher up the funnel and it’s more display advertising and there’s different reasons going on, then it might not make sense. So, all of it comes back to…coming back to who the user is, what are their motivations? And really answering that question, if they were to click on this ad, what do they want and need to see? And making sure we supply that and making sure that if it is an SEO page, as Navah said, that we’re not bombarding them with all of our lovely SEO content that maybe is a bit too much. So, it’s compromised and it’s come back to user first. Make sure that we’re following what they want, and then we tend to also be following what Google and the different platforms want as well.

David: Well, there’s just time for a final question. So, I’ll ask a final question, and then after each of you answers, if you could possibly just share your contact details, where people can find out more about you online or follow you on social media, whatever you want to share, that’s great. So, the final question. So, this can be either from an SEO or PPC perspective. What’s the most important thing that either an SEO can learn from a PPC expert or a PPC expert can learn from an SEO? Who’d like to go first for that one?

Becky: No one’s taking it. I’ll go. I think it is just that we’re both trying to do the same thing and that we both should be focusing from user first. So, it’s actually not my channel is the best. It’s what is best for the user and it really is having those open conversations and trying to remove yourself out of your channel and your own personal biases around what’s great and looking at it from a customer point of view, and remembering the fact that your customer doesn’t care what channels you market on. They just care that you’re there to be found at the right time when they’ve got the intent and the need for what it is you’re selling. So, yeah, that again feels like a cop-out on the fence answer, but that’s me.

David: And where can people find you, Becky?

Becky: Find me on LinkedIn is probably the best place or @BeckyReflect on Twitter. So, yeah.

David: Superb. Well, thanks for joining us. And Nadia, shall we go with you next? What’s your thoughts on that one? What can either an SEO learn from a PPC or PPC learn from an SEO? What’s the most important thing?

Nadia: I think I would need some more time to reflect on it, but to answer that short, I think PPC is very much concerned with conversions. When it comes to the page copy, I like to look always at the page copy from a PPC perspective and to apply always the best conversion practices on the page because I find it always useful direct to the point. For me, it’s always the exercise of collaboration and exchange because sometimes, yeah, it’s case-by-case, and then having the other perspective always is useful. And just, like, not to be fixated on one perspective, to be really inclusive of different angles. And finally, it’s always great to look at the performance of what the PPC work is doing. So, it’s always great to collaborate together.

David: And where can people find you, Nadia?

Nadia: So, best on LinkedIn, Nadia Mojahed, or yeah, seotransformer.com as well. So, my contacts are there.

David: Superb stuff. And Navah.

Navah: So, 100% agree, share, collaborate. One of the things I think not enough folks do is look at CRO as a really useful bridger between PPC and SEO. The more campaigns, the more brands that build CRO or conversion rate optimization into how they think about it from a technical standpoint, from a creative standpoint, the better the campaigns perform. So, if you do not have someone that looks at both and distills that data down, shares it, definitely need to look there.

Build in wild and crazy time. Have 15 minutes that are unmovable on your calendar to collaborate with the PPCs and the SEOs. And just know that we’re all human and we all are trying to drive sales, and profit, and happiness for the brands we serve. And we’re all in this together. And if it’s a technical faux pas, let’s find a way to mitigate that and to overcome it in a way that’s that much more innovative. If it’s a creative opportunity, like, let’s figure out which is the best channel to scale it. Just know that we’re not enemies. We’re empowering buddies, and it’s all good things.

And to preemptively answer your question, you can find me also on LinkedIn, Navah Hopkins. You can also check out my site, navahhopkins.com, where I offer consulting, speaking engagements. As I mentioned, I’m the “Ask the PPC” on Search Engine Journal. You can submit questions there, or find me on Twitter, @navahf, and I’m always happy to chat about literally anything, whether it’s digital marketing, “Star Wars,” puppies. The world is your oyster.

David: Building wild and crazy times. Love it. Great advice there from everyone. Superb panel discussion today. Much appreciated. We have this every single month, not just about SEO and PPC and how things can be more collaborative between different marketing channels. Next month’s discussion is on “How to Keep your SEO Clients Happy.” That will be happening on Monday the 18th of June. We’ve already got two great guests for that one, Jake Gauntley from Reprise Digital and Olga Tsimaraki. Sorry, I got that surname… There’s a bit of a challenge there, but from Zima Media. So, a couple of great guests. We’re gonna have another one on there as well. “How to Keep your SEO Clients Happy,” Monday the 18th of June. Sign up at theknowledgepanelshow.com to watch that one live. We will hopefully have Dixon joining us for that one and hosting that one.

In the meantime, Navah, Becky, Nadia, thank you so much for joining us live. Great episode. Much appreciated.

Navah: Cheers, guys.

Becky: Thank you.

What are some of the most effective technical SEO quick wins in 2022? That’s what we’re discussing on episode 22 of the Knowledge Panel, with Dixon Jones joined by Kara McClure from Mindshare, Sara Taher from PDFTron and Wilhemina Gilbertson-Davis from B-digitalUK.

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Want to Read Instead? Here is the Transcript.

Dixon: Hello again and welcome to the Knowledge Panel Show, Episode 22 and today is “Technical SEO” and quick wins. As you can see my background here, I’m actually doing the show from North Wales, from Snowdonia instead of my normal location but nevertheless it’s good to see you all. Hope that the internet connection holds up in in Snowdonia. We’ve got a fantastic panel today. Unfortunately, Sara couldn’t make it but I’m not too worried – well, I’m sorry for Sara, she’s caught away for an emergency – but Wilhemina and Kara, we were chatting before the show, and I think we’ve some absolutely incredible experience within the world of technical SEO, so I think we’re going to be in pretty safe hands today. So Wilhemina and Kara, welcome to the Knowledge Panel Show! Why don’t we start off by you guys introducing yourselves. Kara, why don’t you go first, tell us who are you and where do you come from as the show panel host says.

Kara: Cool, thank you and firstly thank you for having me, very honored to be here. So my name is Kara McClure, I’m currently at an agency called Mindshare as SEO account director a lead on a few big clients, Apple being one of my main clients. I think that’s everything.

Dixon: So I think we can’t go, you know, SEO for Apple, that’s pretty cool. Wilhemina, can you beat it?

Wilhemina: I absolutely can’t beat it you. I’m Amina, an SEO specialist at British American Tobacco and I work across the UK and highland accounts.

Dixon: It’s not exactly a small company either, so both of you have got some incredible challenges, both of you, different kinds of technical challenges, I would imagine. We were talking about age restrictions and things like that before we came on the show and you were talking about doing technical SEO in Python and things, Kara, so maybe we’ll come on to some of those ideas but before I do, I want to just bring in my producer, make sure that I have talked about all the things I need to do before we start, say hello and thanks for coming and stopping me from making too many errors, David.

David: The only one thing I want to say is you’re probably listening to the show on Apple podcast on Spotify, come and join us live next time, if that’s you. Just go to theknowledgepanelshow.com, sign up for the next show and hopefully we can see you interacting as part of the live chat for the next show and I’ll tell you more about what the next episode is towards the end of this one.

Dixon: Brilliant. Let’s get into the show and start with question one, which is, if people haven’t got to be got time to be around for the whole show, and we wanted one technical SEO quick win that you wanted people to take away, what would you go for? So one idea that people can go for to take away is a technical SEO quick win and I’ll go with Kara again.

Kara: There’s so much, I guess I would say, the main thing is probably quiet, maybe an old school basic one, is make sure your Google Search Console is configured in the best way possible, because that actually gives you a lot of insight that people kind of overlook sometimes and I think if there’s anything technically wrong with your site, Search Console is going to flag out to you and you’re going to be able to get a bit under the hood and be able to fix certain things so I would say make sure your Google search was configured correctly.

Dixon: So is that really just mostly about setting up the domains? Because the domains you used to be able to have different, I remember with my Majestic days, you had https majestic.com and then en.majestic.com and jp.majestic.com and every single version one under the sun, most of which did nothing but I had to put them all in. Is that still the case or they fixed that now?

Kara: It’s still the case to a certain extent, so you have to still configure it to whether you sit on http or https. Hopefully everyone should be on https now for obvious reasons, so that thing is fine but in terms of the configuration I was more referring to making sure it’s linked to Google Analytics, making sure it’s linked to any other analytics tools that you have, making sure the core web vital stuff is organized in the way that you need it to so if anything is flagged up then you understand it because search console will give you I guess the good visualization of how search engines are looking at you, predominantly Google, right, which is what everybody cares about so I just think if anything technical needs to be flagged before you even get to the fixing search console is one of my go-to’s all the time.

Dixon: OK, good tip. Wilhemina, what’s your one tip for the top of the show?

Wilhemina: One tip… it’s quite a hard one.

Dixon: I think we’ve seem to have lost a connection a little bit there. Is that me or is that Wilhemina?

David: I think it’s Wilhemina.

Kara: Yeah, I’m still here.

Dixon: We seem to have lost Wilhemina. We’ll carry on you and I, Kara, we’ve now got a down to two.

Kara: No pressure.

Dixon: Don’t worry about it, we’ll sort it out in post-production, don’t panic. Let’s carry on with the search console then. Because there’s also a Bing Webmaster Tools as well, which is kind of, you get a lot of people saying: oh, you should check out bing as well as search console, and then I don’t suppose many people do. I mean, do you? Does Apple?

Kara: I do use Bing Search Console, not necessarily for Apple, but I have used it in the past and I think obviously I’m not sure how much people will take note of the market share space particularly because a lot of laptops now that you buy and even from search for smartphones that you buy, some of them come loaded with certain browsers and within those browsers sometimes I know for Microsoft for a time they were giving everyone their laptops loaded with Bing and obviously if you’re loaded with Bing then people are probably just going to use that because people are lazy, right? So people shouldn’t necessarily overlook the other search engines, obviously their market share is obviously minuscule compared to Google but there still is a little bit of market share so I think Bing Webmaster Tools was also another one. I haven’t used it recently, if I’m being perfectly honest, but I have used it in the past and it does give you some good insights as well because I think I with technical SEO I think the main thing that you need to understand is understanding what is happening behind the scenes and webmaster tools or search console is going to tell you that.

Dixon: Excellent. Wilhemina, sorry, you seem to have a crash there, are you back?

Wilhemina: Yeah, mid speech.

Dixon: Nevermind, let’s go again, just jump in and tell us your tip.

Wilhemina: There are so many, but I would say, don’t underestimate the importance of the site map – that would be my tip.

Dixon: I guess on a large site that becomes even more important. I’m just about getting you there, so have you got any particular tools you like to use to generate site maps or are you lucky enough to have a CMS that does it all properly?

Wilhemina: Hello!

Dixon: I can hardly hear you.

Wilhemina: It’s frozen for me.

Kara: I think you’re still there.

Dixon: Yeah, you’re still here but I’ll pass it over to Kara for a bit. Maybe if you can turn off your video settings then we’ll get it all right for the podcast and stuff and that might save some bandwidth and perhaps can go on from there. Kara, do you guys use sitemaps a lot?

Kara: To be honest, when you asked the question, I was toying between search control or sitemaps but I think I’ll still go with search console from the essence of seeing what’s under the hood essentially. With sitemaps I think the good thing about sitemaps is again you’re still telling search engines what’s going on, you’re telling them every single page that you want them to look at, you tell them what they want to index and that kind of thing, and I know we mentioned WordPress before we jumped on live and the one interesting thing I found with WordPress, I haven’t used it recently but from what I understand you have to like use plugins for WordPress to be able to actually generate site maps, whereas obviously if you build it on a different kind of CMS you can auto generate an xml sitemap for example or a html sitemap and I think that’s probably one of the downfalls of WordPress not generating an auto-generated xml sitemap because I think it’s quite important. So I was actually auditing a site the other day and they just didn’t have a sitemap, you just couldn’t find a sitemap anywhere and it’s quite a large website and then I came to find that they were built on WordPress and that’s not obviously great for SEO.

Dixon: OK, but I kind of just I guess pushing back because there’s only two of us now so we’re just gonna have to just disagree, but so many people use WordPress that I would imagine, that the Google’s ability to crawl WordPress is incredibly easy. What advantages does a sitemap have for Google surely it can get through the content pretty easily. Because one of the things about WordPress and plugins is another SEO will tell me, every time we put another plug-in, you put a nail in the coffin of SEO for WordPress, because it just sort of slows the site down, although I suppose a sitemap plug-in wouldn’t necessarily slow a site down very much because it’s just creating an extra page but even so what are the advantages of having the site map do you think?

Kara: I guess WordPress is a bit of a anomaly within the fields but for me personally the advantages of having a site map is again it has a date, it has a time, it has a stamp, you’re literally updating search engines every time you’ve made a change, so using Apple for example whenever they launch new products on their site, which they do often, as I’m sure if anyone’s Apple fan they would know, it’s particularly around September or march when they’re releasing new products, we kind of auto push and submit all the new site maps so all of those URLs can be indexed straight away, and obviously if in fact like Apple is doing that, then you kind of understand how important it is because in the grand scheme of things. For me I think the technical SEO the standpoint is always you’re constantly communicating with the search engine bots and that’s the best way to do it for a technical aspect of making sure things are being indexed. But in saying that you do make a good point in terms obviously Google are good at understanding WordPress sites, calling WordPress facts then I guess it’s more about how well technically built is your website on WordPress so you may not necessarily have to rely on a sitemap. But I guess if you have it, it’s a nice to have.

Dixon: So if you put a sitemap and you miss out a bunch of URLs, does that recruit, does Google just then not bother with those or is it just going to still find those through discovery through cruel discovery and add that into the mix?

Kara: Yeah, I guess it’s not the fact that they wouldn’t bother with it, but it may potentially take them longer to find them. I guess it depends on what signals you’re sending. If you’re sending those of offsite signals and on-page signals then I’m pretty sure that Google will probably notice the euro at some point. Obviously depending on your caller budget, how often your site is crawled, it all depends on a lot of those different things as well. So I wouldn’t necessarily say if your euros aren’t in the site map they won’t necessarily be noticed at some point, but for me I think technical SEO is all about being able to be in control and I think when you have things like search console self properly and site maps you’re able to control a bit more. Of course Google always going to do what they want to do because, let’s be honest, Google don’t like SEOs, but anything that’s going to allow you to be in control, I would say, just get that under your belt just so you can try and influence as much as possible, because the other standpoint is making sure you’ve got strong optimization onsite and offsite, to make sure that your URL is noticed if it hasn’t been submitted through the sitemap.

Dixon: So sitemaps when in days gone by used quite a lot of I could use priorities in sitemaps, I don’t know, I don’t think that’s available now, so sitemaps are all about getting discovered and getting indexed in the first place really, there’s nothing in a site map that can tell you some priority tell a search engine a priority or your preference of one page over another these days. Because they used to be able to give a number between zero and one in the site map was to the priority but I think that was a long time ago but it seemed to never do anything anyway and that’s probably why they took it away. We’ll try one more time with Wilhemina – how are you Wilhemina if you’re online and fine give us a tip and just chat away if we fail again don’t worry about it.

Wilhemina: I don’t know why my internet is working against me today or in this moment actually, but I’m back on, I can hear everyone and I think you can hear me as well.

Dixon: Yeah, but give us a tip. Oh no, not sitemaps, we’ve just done sitemaps while you were off, so we can move on. If you’ve got another thought then we’ll jump on to that one though.

Wilhemina: No, we can move on, I’m happy to move on.

Dixon: That’s all right then. OK, so let’s go on to 404s. Well it kind of moves on from… we’ve lost Wilhemina, I think we’ll probably go without Wilhemina for now.

David: She should be still there, actually, but I just asked her to turn off her camera.

Dixon: OK, that’s great. So let’s go on to the consequences of setting up new site maps, presumably if you’re gonna put up a new sitemap, you’re also gonna in that time take some content down so you’re gonna start ending up with 404s on pages or if you’ve been cleverer about it, 301s, but I suppose with something like Apple, if you’ve got new versions of software or new versions of products, does Apple prefer to remove URLs for redundant products or redundant content or do they like to redirect it and whether that’s Apple’s view or your view. What’s your view, Kara?

Kara: I guess I’ll give my view on this one just because I don’t want to get too into the detail of Apple, because…

Dixon: Sure, I’ll stop querying Apple too much now.

Kara: I can’t share all of Apple’s secrets, but in a general sense I think again with the site maps I guess it depends how you manage it, whether it’s auto generated or whether you manually manage it and I guess also depends on how massive your site is. What I will say, which I think is quite a good tip, is depending how big your website is you should have separate sitemaps for separate parts of your website so you can easily if you understand that you’ve got loads of products, have a product site map, if you’ve got a particular loads of categories, have a category set up, maybe trying to segment it out so if you know that there is going to be an instance where you may decide to take a whole lot of products off your page for example, you can refer straight to the product sitemap and then edit that accordingly. So I would say if it’s manageable to edit the sitemap then yes of course remove them from the sitemap so Google can then in turn remove them from the index. But personally how I generally manage 404s is by redirects, because I think again with the site maps depending on how things are set up, especially if you’re an agency and you’ve got to get free developers and you may not have access to the site map, you might have access to the CMS, you may not have access to certain things, I think redirects is probably one of the still one of the stronger signals to send to Google to say hey this URL used to live here but actually it lives over here now and obviously the difference between a 301 and a 302 so if you know I use Excel as an example, a lot of my clients have been retail like e-commerce and they have sales a lot of the time, so it’s more their page may go down temporarily for sale, so we’d implement a free too, but then if we know that a page is permanently being moved whatever reason then we’d use a free one. But in terms of 404 is more than like you’re going to implement a 301 because it’s an error page and if you know it’s not coming back then you just send that signal and hopefully and what does generally happen is a lot of the authority, depending how long the page has been a 404 for, then you’ll be able to kind of I guess mitigate as much loss as possible, and be able to say for example if the page has been a 404 for two days if you implement a redirect you’re probably not really going to lose out, if it’s been a 404 for like a month there’s probably going to be a lot more that you would have lost so I would say implement redirects as quickly as possible for when it becomes a 404 and just manage that process and I guess just have a clear logical step of understanding whether you want to put a 301 or 302 and just things like that.

Dixon: And is Google Search Console giving you messages when you get 404s?

Kara: Yeah, it does. I guess the only thing that, well, I haven’t unless someone can tell me how, you can’t really set up alerts within Search Console and get notifications so you have to go in there but then it gives you quite a good understanding of server errors so even down to if you do manage your sitemap, if you submitted URLs within the sitemap that are throwing up errors, search console will tell you that. If you have 500 errors it will tell you that. It gives you a lot and that’s why I say search console is good. I think it’s just a good kind of bible to have with technical quick wins  because the other side is running loads of crawls and doing that thing which you can do as well but again depending on your site, depending on your server size, depending on your server logs, could slow things down, whereas search control is just always plugged in so it’s an easier thing.

Dixon: Wilhemina, are you there to talk about redirects, how you approach redirects?

Wilhemina: I am here, if you can hear me. In terms of like redirects and how we use them – like Kara was saying, when to basically use them, so people they are permanent redirects again something to use if this is where something is going to be permanently used. Again it depends on where you want to use it, so how do you want to use it, so just like in context and how do you want to use it.

Dixon: I’ve heard from a Googler, I’m not going to say which one, that they’re now treating 301s and 302s is as the same. Firstly, do you think they do, and secondly, do you think they should?

Wilhemina: I don’t think so, no, I don’t think they should be treated as the same thing. I feel like they should be kept separately that the way they are now, also kind of helps again because the whole point of this to kind of like figure out where that page is going, so if it’s a permanent then use it and if it’s not going to permanent then use it to keep those two things separate as well so it gives people that chance to use a separate than combining them both together.

Dixon: Yeah, I agree. Kara, you do think they should be different, they should always be different, there’s a real good reason for them to mean different?

Kara: What do you mean in terms of they should or shouldn’t be different?

Dixon: Well, the Googler was saying, that they effectively will treat a redirector to redirect regardless whether it’s temporary or permanent in for their search engines and I was surprised to hear that, it was a little while back. I was surprised to hear that and I was surprised that somebody else from Google didn’t come down and make that perfectly clear that these are different things and if they’re not different things, why on earth, there’s a good reason for having a temporarily out of stock 302, permanently out of stock 301, there’s good reasons for having different commands and I’m just surprised that Google treats it differently. I suppose from their point of view, all they need to know is whether to show it in the search results or not.

Kara: Yeah. To be honest, I have heard murmurs of that, in terms of it doesn’t actually really matter, you redirect as a redirect, but I’ve always been on the notion of I think it’s still important to set the status code because there are other redirect codes you can have as well there’s a 308 that people don’t really speak about. So me personally I would still do use the logic and the process that I have, which is either 301 or 302 if you know. I think obviously the balance between it is if you don’t know when a URL has come back just put a 301, if you do know that it’s a temporary then put a 302 but I have heard murmurs that it doesn’t necessarily differentiate but there’s nothing to really prove that at the moment. So I guess with most things in SEO to be honest it – I know you don’t want to hear this – but it depends. It does depend because it’s kind of like there’s no black or white, right, wrong. Obviously there’s a lot of things that we all do that are similar that we know not what to do within SEO and there’s some things that we know to do but in that sense it’s like there’s a lot of great areas around a lot of things because Google are never really going to give us a definitive answer because like I said they don’t like SEOs right because they don’t make money out of us. We are the ones to work out how they do what they do so we can manipulate for our client or if we’re in-house or whatever so I still stand firm that I think you should state the status code but I do understand where people are coming from they’re saying doesn’t necessarily matter.

Dixon: Fair enough. All right, let’s move on to duplicate content then. Wilhemina, is that something that you guys have to tackle a lot or you don’t have that problem, two URLs for the same content? I mean large websites must have it just in parameter, must be appearing all over the place. How do you handle or mitigate duplicate content, Wilhemina? You’re on mute. You’re either on mute or dead. Offline. Oh, there we go, there you go.

Wilhemina: So thankfully duplicate content isn’t something that we enter quite a lot. We try to make sure that everything all our content is different from the others. In some cases where I have experienced it, it’s… I don’t know how to really to mitigate it but to basically make sure that even if we do need to have the content in more than one place, they come from different places, we come from different sources if that makes sense?

Dixon: OK, and I guess also Kara did you guys use canonicals at all in content for example?

Kara: Yeah, Interestingly one of my other clients has got an issue at the moment with duplicate content because they’re basically acquiring a lot of content from another website and they don’t have the resource to rewrite the content so they’re essentially copying all the content from another website, totally different domain and one of the things I was discussing is usually I would suggest canonicals but me personally I’ve never had experience of implementing a canonical to a different domain, it’s always within the same domain. So because this is two separate websites, my first reaction is to implement canonical so let Google know that this is the more authoritative page that you should be looking at, but I’m not sure how Google are gonna feel about that because it’s two separate domains, so canonicals is kind of my go-to but I think within duplicate content and this is probably going to sound quite funny but my main thing about how to manage duplicate content is just don’t have it. It’s not very wise to have it, it’s just not best practice, it’s not logical, why would you have, you know… I always kind of refer to SEO as a book sometimes. When you read books you don’t have two pages that’s exactly the same thing because that messes up the story, why would you have that. So how I manage duplicate content is tell my clients don’t do it. But if they do do it then canonicals would be one and then the other is to… Sometimes they have duplicate content and they’re not really sure why they have it, so sometimes you can actually edit content to differentiate it from one another. So I recommend that as well, but yeah I think canonicals are going to be the best way or you can… I’ve done content audits before where I’ve seen OK you may have great content but how many pages do you really need, let’s actually do an audit and maybe archive some of these pages or redirect some of these pages, get rid of some of these pages and then re-optimize some of the other content as well.

Dixon: I see duplicate content happening a lot particularly on WordPress sites where people have put in a post and associated with more than one category and that automatically will create two URLs which are essentially have the same content and there’s ways around that well within WordPress I’m sure you can use plugins to stop that from happening or the best thing to do is not to put one article in two categories. But also recently I’ve been seeing probably not something that large organizations would like but I’ve seen people doing those kind of redirects on the Edge and on Cloudflare and these kind of things, so if all of a sudden a catrice turns up that you don’t that you that’s a sort of a an old category it’ll redirect actually at the DNS level which I’m sure would scare the heck out of some organizations but it’s quite a powerful way to do SEO.

Kara: Yeah, there is that, I guess it depends on the level of duplication and how aggressive, like you said, it would scare people. I guess it depends on how aggressive do you want to go with the duplicate content and that’s why I say my advice is just always just don’t have it because you alleviate a lot of issues. I get it from some standpoint, duplicate content sometimes it’s unavoidable. Again working on some large sites there’s issues where we have I guess a bit of a separate issue but there’ll be like loads of duplicate message descriptions for example because if they sell a mass amount of products but the only differentiation is the color or something they’re not really going to write a different meta description for every single URL just because they’ve got it in blue, red, black, green and yellow.

Dixon: So are you lamenting the Google Search Console dropping the parameter thing? So somewhere in the in Google Search Console you used to be able to say: please ignore any parameters that says color equals or whatever and they’ve dropped that. Is that something you lament or you think they get it right all the time?

Kara: To be honest with that I more rely on robots.txt for things that we want to be ignored or disallowed in the service and to be honest I guess it depends on how the parameters are rendered because some parameters just aren’t rendered in search because they’re quite ugly URLs and they’ve got loads of different characters and that kind of thing so I guess it depends on if you know for a fact that your parameter URLs are being indexed or they’re being rendered in a particular way where people are going to land on them then I would say then fix it but also disallow it in the robot.txt right because with Google doing what they did in search console and to be honest I wasn’t really convinced of how accurate that function in search muscle was anyway. I think for me I like to have a bit thing a bit more succinct and a bit more black and white and I think robots is the better way to go.

Dixon: I find Google ignore so many bits of robots.txt though and it was never an official system really was it, so it’s kind of optional for search engines really so it’s not ideal but we’re SEOs where nothing’s ideal really as you say. It is what it is.

Kara: Exactly. It is what it is and I think we with that going back to my point before saying not what you want to hear but it depends. It’s more so because even down to like meta descriptions, Google are now deciding what meta description they want to put in so you can implement a whole bunch of meta descriptions but actually Google may decide to go on your URL that you’ve written that meta description for and take a chunk of your text that’s on page and they think that’s the best message description.

Dixon: And they’re doing that a lot, they’re doing like 60% of the time or 40 to 60% of the time. I’ve seen a couple of different surveys and things so it’s huge. But when we looked at, when I saw a study, when they were looking at the change that they made, most of the changes were more sense with sensible changes so they were helping the user at the far end but it was a shock to the SEO community when they started changing your content on the fly which kind of I guess it would have been an interesting one to put back to Wilhemina because that might affect, she’s in a regulated industry so are there gonna be occasions where a search engine may inadvertently cause a some especially somebody in a regulated industry to be breaking the law because they legally have to say something in a in the description for example.

Kara: That’s interesting actually because I had the issue with one of my clients and there’s a restriction that they have from a dimensions point of view within particular markets. They have to kind of state the dimensions of the products and that because of Google doing whatever they wanted to do, we would put it in the meta description but it wouldn’t always show, because Google decided to take something else. But I guess, obviously I can’t speak for Wilhemina, but I’m assuming within her industry whatever needs to be put out there, they would have on site anyway so there would be some type of hope that if Google are pulling from on page then it would pull the right thing or at least pull something and that’s why I think being within SEO and I’m not sure if about the latest update the Google mum update which is all very wishy-washy as it always is, I think the more and more updates that come I think from a technical standpoint, it’s about just making sure that your site is technically and technically sound and the most accessible because that’s even though Google are never going to give you the clear answer, that’s exactly what they care about. They care about the user. All of these updates that are coming out, you know the update before was about the product reviews and there’s so much that they’re trying to do just to serve the user and give the user everything that they need without the user working too much or the person who’s googling working too much. I think anything to do with technical thing you just have to make sure your site’s built correctly and you’re able to understand everything that’s going on under the hood so things are accessible for the user and then I guess that kind of crosses over into CRA but that’s a whole separate conversation.

Dixon: Yeah but I think that comes to the heart of philosophy SEO as a potential problem for a search engine in the end, because – hear me out here, because this is old man talking here – but it’s like they’ve given us so many hoops to jump through like making sure that all your images are well tagged and all these things are done right, you’ve got schema on the page or you’ve got things in bullet points and you write the style and what’s starting to happen is that in most markets pages that are not optimized, that were not ever designed to be optimized, are never going to reach the top of the SERPs but the interesting thing for me is that the real authority on any particular subject doesn’t give a flying fig about the SERPs and they’re just going to write about life on Mars or whatever their specialist topic is and if Google doesn’t understand the author of that content or doesn’t know that they’ll never get to show that to the to the people so they’re actually shooting themselves in the foot by telling everybody to do CRO and UX because it’s only the ones that do it, that they show up in the SERPs and therefore you actually suppress the actual authority authoritative content. Is that old man talking or do you think I’ve got something?

Kara: I’m never going to call you “old man”, it’s offensive but no, I wouldn’t say it’s crazy what you’re saying, I think again it goes back to that whole point of it depends, because you’re gonna do depending on what you do, I think a lot of the time and I think the work because a lot of people ask me why do you even do SEO like there’s so much that’s just like it’s a long long-term channel gain, there’s so many factors that can impact things, Google can literally just pull the rug from under your feet any given moment but I think for me it’s about especially from a technical standpoint it’s think of technical SEO as like a house, like the technical SEO is the foundation that people don’t see when they come to your house, the brick work, the electrics, the plumbing, all of that stuff, the stuff that keeps your house structurally going and everyone just cares about the wallpaper, the flooring, the sofa, the TV or whatever but it’s about understanding that within that standpoint of if they are being told to do CRO if they are being told to do stuff like that, I guess it’s similar to how a builder would be told and architect would be told to how to drop a plan for a house because you’re told that to make it accessible. Because at the end of the day, everybody’s website if it’s an e-commerce website or if you make revenue from it, you want people to convert so it’s one thing to make your website discoverable and make sure your website can be indexed in the SERPs and on the first page although there’s a lot of studies now that even second page is the place to be but who knows.

Dixon: Really? OK.

Kara: Yeah, well as in people are getting more… I think searches are getting a little bit more inquisitive with their searches so if they’re searching for something and obviously Google’s changing the setup so much now with there’s so much above the fold, there’s map results, there’s feature snippet results, there’s people also ask results, there’s video results, there’s so much, there’s social media results, there’s knowledge panels, there’s so much stuff that can come into that play and I think people are, some people I guess, I don’t think there’s any stats that have come out about it yet but they probably will because we’ve been having a lot of discussions about it as to whether how far do people scroll now and you know there was that time when Google trialled the scroll where you didn’t even have to click on a page you just didn’t do that, yeah, exactly, you just kept scrolling, you didn’t know what page you were. You could be on page four but you were just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling so within the CRO I think it definitely goes hand in hand and I think I remember doing a project for salvages on conversion like just working with UX a lot more and I was like guys, we should probably work a lot more closely together because we’re the ones focused on bringing all the traffic to your site and you’re the ones focusing on converting people but if the two aren’t matching then it’s not going to work because I can drive a million visits to your site in a week but if you if your navigation is poor then no one’s going to want to convert.

Dixon: Then no one goes from there and I think there’s something, you might have something by saying that people are digging deeper into the search results because I I’ve been surprised recently at a couple of non-SEOs who said: “Oh, I never click on ads, I go straight past the ads”, so there and because Google has put so many ads up there now, you’ve got to consciously scroll down to see anything except for ads and a lot of the time so that puts people in the habit of digging into the results a little bit more so you may well be correct on that. I’d be interested to see those studies, I think. If we find one, we’ll put it in the comments on various podcasts, if we can or put it back on The Knowledge Panel Shows website at least. I just got to finish up I think. I wanted to talk a little bit about crawlers but I don’t think we’ve got time, we’ll actually maybe we’ll because we might have to do some editing because of Willemina technical challenges. So do you use crawlers much yourself, Screaming Frog or Sitebulb or Oncrawl or those kind of things and if so what do you what do you use and what do you like about them?

Kara: It’s probably gonna sound really sad, but I love crawlers because crawlers tell me what I need to know and Screaming Frog I guess is my main day-to-day that I would just call to check some stuff and I think for me I’ve got to the point of using the more advanced features of Screaming Frog that probably people don’t look at, so building regex, building x-paths, extracting a lot of different things that you need from it so Screaming Frog is definitely a go-to for me also use Deepcrawl. Deepcrawl have actually advanced themselves quite a lot and based on when I used to use the tool when I first stepped into the industry it’s definitely come a long way.

Dixon: And they’re really good for large sites, aren’t they? Not a (unintelligible) Screaming Frog for a large site.

Kara: Yeah, so if I want to do a large like a big massive crawl on a on a huge site, I would set the call for Deepcrawl and let it run overnight. If I’m just trying to find something really quickly, I’ll just grab it from Screaming Frog but those are the two tools that I would use and I guess slightly off topic a little bit but I think log file analysis is definitely a big thing that people don’t look into from a technical aspect and within that Botify is probably one of the best tools I’ve seen that do that.

Dixon: What do you find in log files that you don’t find in in web crawlers a lot of those 500 responses properly.

Kara: Yeah, a lot of 500 responses, it’s interesting because the log file analysis I guess it just gives you a more detailed view of how search bots are actually looking at every single thing that happens when it comes to your website crawls or your pages and kind of deciphers and I guess puts it in its own little database of whatever it feels. I think with the log file analysis you’re literally getting I guess deeper into the hood or under the hood of understanding how your website is being treated from a bot perspective and you’re being able to manage 500’s because even with search goings or stuff like that it will flag up 500 errors but I think log file analysis is a lot more real time so if you’ve had some 500 errors they may have and you’ve been flagged up in search console a day or two later whereas with log file analysis it’s a lot I think a log file analysis is a lot more reactive.

Dixon: The problem with a log file analysis on some of the customers that you use, you know, these big people, these Apples and salvages, they’re big files really, there’s an awful lot of data in those files so probably not so easy to go and have a look at last month’s log files.

Kara: No, the log file analysis that I have done has been on smaller sites for sure but it’s good to give that more detailed overview of what is happening because it’s important. But from a caller perspective I’d say Deepcrawl, Screaming Frog, definitely good to understand what’s happening. There are some plugins that people can use with Chrome as well, obviously they’re not exactly crawler plug-ins but they kind of give you top line over if you want to check some stuff and also Chrome Developer Tools – it’s not really a crawler but Chrome Developer Tools does give you some more insight in terms of the back end, the html, you can edit stuff, you can really kind of understand and see and you can change the device and see how things are looking from a responsive view so yeah there’s a lot of good tools out there.

Dixon: So I wanted to finish up with asking a question about how you assess. How you want and how you actually do assess the effects of changes that you make? What kind of feedback loops do you have at your disposal to so right okay we’ve made this change on a server or we’ve added the script here. Do you always have time to assess the change or did you just a lot of the time have it say well let’s fix that so we can just move on?

Kara: No, I do a lot of impact analysis and I guess because some of the work that I do is a lot more technical now so if there’s been a technical release that we fed into particularly and we say that if you do this release then it’s gonna give an SEO benefit of x or whatever, I would give it maybe one to three months, depending what the release is, it depends what impact we’re expecting and then I guess it depends. So I’m trying to think of one that was done recently. If we’ve made a massive update to like message descriptions for example or something we may look at click-through rate, I think for every release you’re going to have to understand what you think the impact should be and then that’s my first point of call but I definitely would say that with anything that I do, there needs to be some poor impact analysis otherwise it’s a bit pointless why are we fixing things.

Dixon: The difficult thing though with that is that it depends on the cadence with which you do releases though, because and of course the cadence with which Google does updates, but because you can make a change and then one to three months later potentially you’ve made a dozen other changes and Google’s done three updates and so does that does that nullify a lot of the impact analysis or is that just part for the course and you’ve got to go with it anyway because there’s no other choice?

Kara: I guess, I mean, if anything’s broken you gotta fix it right and I think it’s about sometimes there are fixes that just need fixing and you’re not necessarily going to see an impact but that if you don’t fix it the consequences will be more detrimental so something’s broken. Say if you’ve got loads of broken pages, it may not necessarily have a massive boost on performance but you just know it’s just bad practice to have broken pages. But if there’s a massive impact of page, let’s take page speed for example. Core web vitals are always going to be a thing, page speed is always going to be a massive thing, especially with the mobile index only and all the focus on mobile and things like that so I think page speed is a is a project that I’m constantly working on and I’m constantly reviewing, okay, cool we’ve done this now what’s the load time now on this page, how many seconds have we, how many seconds have we scratched off or etched off and things like that so yeah I think you just got to kind of do it case-by-case and understand what fixes you’re doing that are going to have an impact and if it does have an impact then it’s about what because I think with all the fixes that I put for you personally we always set a bit of a KPI of understanding what are we trying to achieve with this, there’s no point in suggestion to fix this if we don’t have a KPI and then.

Dixon: So you’ve got something to measure after the event, that’s brilliant. Honestly I know we’ve had some technical challenges on this one but this has been thoroughly interesting and I’d love to talk more and hopefully you don’t mind if I reach out on LinkedIn as well because you’re a very interesting person and if we’re ever at a conference I’d love to buy you a beer or a wine or whatever. David, what’s going on next time on The Knowledge Panel Show?

David: Next time we’re actually back to Mondays, we were broadcasting live on a Wednesday this time because it was bank holiday Monday in the UK and probably many other places around the world as well. So next time it’s going to be Monday the 16th of May. We’re going to be talking about SEO and Spanish versus SEO in English and we’ve got four great guests booked for that one already: Adelina Bordea, Filipa Gaspar, Gemma Fontané and Montserrat Cano. So just go to theknowledgepanelshow.com, sign up to watch that one live – if you can join us live that will be superb.

Dixon: OK and I haven’t spent any time talking about our sponsor, InLinks, so hi InLinks, thanks for being on the show. It’s allright, they can’t sack me, I’m the CEO. Guys see you on the next episode and thank you very much for coming along and Kara again thank you very much.

Kara: No problem, thank you for having me.

Transcript edited on 11th September 2022.