Transcription
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman and today I'm joined once again by Zack Blackburn. How are you doing today, Zach?
I'm doing very well. Thanks for for asking. How are you?
Yeah, I'm good. I'm I'm excited for this. This is this is number three, I want to say.
Yeah. of of our SEO series as master class where we're diving deep into a bunch of different aspects of SEO to make it hopefully so SEO is not this big black box that doesn't make any sense and some of these components can be a little bit more clear because you you and I were talking before this like so many of these components of SEO are stuff that like you don't see you don't notice right you hire an SEO company you pay them 10 grand and you look at your website and you're like well it looks the same what did I just pay 10 grand for right that's that's a that's a challenge that a lot of people have, right? So, we're trying to demystify this, kind of peel back the curtain, show you what happens. If you haven't caught our first two episodes on this, I encourage you to. The first one, we talk a lot about like just in general, how does SEO work, what are expectations, all that kind of stuff. And then in the second one, we went deep into technical SEO. Today, we're jumping into the topic of onpage SEO, which has a lot to do with content. It's it's basically the stuff that you see when you're looking at a page. And so it's it's one of the more visible components of SEO. So we're planning on talking about that pretty in depth. Before we get into it, Zach, how do you know? So let's just say I'm a business owner and maybe onpage SEO is my weak point on the website. How would I even know that that's the case?
Yeah. Generally speaking, I would look at where you're being found in. your content, your on page has a lot to do with the keywords you're being found for, has a lot to do with your placements, has a lot to do with the interactions that you are presenting to your potential clients. So, this is something that realistically you'd be able to look at your analytics, your Google search console, you'd be able to see, am I even being found? And that would be a a really big indication, is my on page where it should be comparative to maybe some of my competitors.
Yeah, that that's a that's a great point and and being found could even be like and you correct me if I'm wrong here, Zach, because you're you're clearly the expert, but let's just say you're ranking for the keyword that you want to rank for, but maybe you're number 50, number I mean, number one, like you want to be well, that shows at least that our content is getting us ranked for like the right kind of thing, right? So, in some ways, that could be like an on-page win. And maybe some other components of SEO, including better on page, could be the difference between that 50th page ranking and that first page ranking. But the fact that we're indexed and we're ranking somewhere for the right kind of keywords is like a really indication that HP pinch is going a good direction.
That's absolutely correct. I I think you nailed it right on the the head there. Where I believe a lot of the the value comes in is that that is one of the metrics that we use to determine growth. So you are relevant, you are being found. You're not necessarily right there yet, but you may have just barely started optimizing that keyword or it is something that you're building into because it's a new vertical or market that you're trying to break into.
Yeah. And I think I think part of what makes on page so powerful is it is basically like the keyword targeting of SEO. If you look at something like PPC, and if you guys haven't checked it out, I highly encourage you to look at our PPC master class that we've done. It's actually one of our most popular series. We talk all about like all the elements of PPC. The biggest ones being targeting the right keywords because your your keyword targeting is kind of what determines what sort of people you get. If you can target the right keywords of people that are searching with high intent, then you're going to you're going to find the right leads. And SEO is kind of fascinating though because at no point does Google ask you, hey, what would you like to show up for? Instead, they just kind of invite you to like be what you're going to be and then they look at that and then they tell they tell you, well, this is what you're going to rank for because this is what we've found you to be relevant for, right? So organic is a little bit different, right? You can't just like pay your way into certain keywords. You kind of have to earn your way to those keywords and you have to tell Google that you're relevant to those things in a way that their algorithms can understand, which isn't necessarily a list of keywords. So, so one of the most important things before you even get to the on-page SEO component is figuring out your keyword targeting. Like what keywords are we even trying to target? Do you have any advice on that, Zach?
Yes. So, one thing that I look at when I'm diving into the keywords is I look for what's considered a root keyword. So, it's the the trophy keyword as it were basically. So, in the REI space would be buy my house for cash quickly, some variation thereof, something like that. And that would be the root keyword and that would be the primary one for our location. So, I live in Salt Lake. So, it'd be buy my house in Salt Lake City for cash. some variation thereof. And that is a a great keyword because that is our market. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to buy someone's house. And we are in a qualifier. Salt Lake City, if you're in a major metropolitan, New York, Miami, Florida, whatever your region is that you're targeting, that is the primary term. And then you could break out a few variations of them based on some of your really the the motivations, the reason why people are selling divorce, death and the family of some capacity. It could even be as as simplistic as I just want to move. And just depends on your market. We we know a few verticals that that really fit in there, but that that's kind of the the concept. So the keywords always start with who are you targeting and then from there they will naturally be created.
Yeah, that that makes sense. And I can tell you look one of my one of my favorite just like really simple frameworks for this that a lot of a lot of people use is basically what you're looking for is relevance. It's got to be right kind of thing. and you're looking for volume, like you could find something highly relevant like like selling my my three-bedroom, two-b house in Lehi, Utah, fast for cash. And like if yeah, somebody searches that and has your buy box, like that's nice for the one person that searches that in the next decade, maybe you're going to show up on the search results. But that's not super useful, right? Because you need you need this stuff to be a little bit a little bit higher volume, right? So, you want the kind of ranking where there's a lot of people searching for it, but it's also highly relevant. One thing I love that we do Oh, I'm sorry. You go ahead, S.
I I was just going to add to that. I want to make sure that it's very clear. We start with the root keyword, but that doesn't mean that's the only type of keyword that you naturally are relevant for because Google reads your entire content and it finds other variations. So, you may get that one keyword in your local area, it's getting 800 monthly searches, but realistically, the ones that are going to bring you the big bucks from an organic perspective, they call it the longtail keywords is a variation of your root keyword. So, buy my house in Lehi for cash quickly today. Um, that's a long version of the root keyword.
Yeah.
And that is naturally going to occur from your content. So, and we always start with the root, but you will naturally find through the evolution of your content.
Yeah. Yeah. Fun a fun little nerd fact for you. I think a lot of people assume they're called like longtail keywords because they just like have lots of words like they're just like longer, but but what it really comes from is if you were to plot like imagine you're making like a bar chart showing how much volume each of these keywords gets and you were kind of ordering them from like most from most volume all the way to least volume. What you'd see is like as you go on the lefth hand side of the graph, like there's this big hump there, like tons of volume there, and then it goes down and you get to the point where there's just like just a little bit of volume and then there's a little tail to the chart that just goes on and on and on and on and on forever, right? And it's so easy, especially as a business owner, to look at and be like, well, I only really care about this one because this one's, you know, the one that gets tons of volume. But I actually graphed this out in this industry. What we found is that lawn tail, which we defined as stuff that in in PPC had only gotten one click ever for our clients, that lawn tail, if you add up all those little little bits of volume that all those things get together, it was actually 80% of the pie, right? So you look at any one of those individually and this is like really really tiny, right? This doesn't really matter. It's insignificant. If we ranked or didn't rank for this, it would make no difference to our business. but all of them added together that's actually way more significant than the keywords that have a significant amount of volume and I think that's what people that's what people miss right so there's there's value in that and you don't have to have like a page for each different longtail keyword stuff like that because like you said Zach like Google's built to deal with human behavior which human behavior is it's going to be most common to search a particular thing and there's going to be all these little variations of that thing that become less and less common but ultimately kind of mean the same thing right so reade it's going to try to determine do they mean sort of the same thing. If they do, then it's going to allow ranking from one of those to to to pass on to the next. So that's that's really cool. One other thing I really like about what we do, this is something that like no SEO company ever has data for because if let's just say like you just I just asked like the typical SEO guy like maybe Zack Blackberg before he worked at Bon Collective. Well, which which keywords should we target that are going to get us the best lead quality? What what Zach is left with doing is basically saying, "Well, I don't know. This one says like sell my house, but this other one says sell my house fast and you're looking for distressed people. Maybe the one that says fast is going to be a better lead quality for you. That's going to need more. That's why I tell you more of that stuff." And that's that's it, right? You don't have you don't have data, right? Versus and you would never get it. You would do SEO for this business and you would gather you would get clicks from these keywords and then you'd have the CRM data. But the thing with SEO is there's no way to connect what the person searched to the end results except for like what percentage of searches, Zach? It's like less than one. Google once upon a time gave you all this data and then you know slowly they whittleled it away and now we're left with like oh I got a thousand clicks. Two of them I know the search term. 998 of them. I don't know what the search term is, right? The data is like practically useless. So that's why it's actually like like I heard someone saying recently like, "Oh, don't do don't do SEO with a company that does PPC because they're not they're not as good at SEO." And and all I could think was like, well, you know, if the company hired the right people for SEO and for PBC, they could do a really good job. And how do you do SEO without PBC's data? It's really hard because what we have is a database of the person typed this into Google they ended up getting a they ended up converting at this rate they end up becoming opportunities at this rate they ended up closing at this rate and that data is so so thriving so by doing PPC what we've done is for each person that searches we're able to see what exactly did they search at what rate did they convert and then at what rate did they convert offline into leads or into into opportunities, into contracts, into deals, into revenue. And then you can reverse engineer that stuff to understand which terms actually have the most value, right? While everybody else is just kind of looking at it saying like, "Oh, this one looks kind of good. This one looks kind of bad." I recently talked about this in the interview I did with Steve Train. You could see on the YouTube video there's someone who's like, "Oh, that's what he said isn't right." Like home buyers is a is a bad keyword. Have the data like practically showing that the keywords that that person says are the best ones are actually worse than the search term home buyers. And is that what I would guess? No, that that's not what I would guess. I I wouldn't like I wouldn't say, "Well, this is going to be your best keyword." But the problem is everybody else in the industry, they're going based on gut. And there's actual data that suggests like what kind of people are behind different searches. It's not you always exactly accurate. Like there's there's a variety, right? There's going to be some people who are more motivated, less motivated than searching pennies. But the reality is there's some things that people search from. We know they're twice as likely to be a deal and others where we know we can get leads from those all day long and we're very rarely in a place to do it from from that kind of thing. Right? So that that kind of data is just really really important. So if you marry that kind of data then you understand what is the kind of thing that a motivated seller is searching based on actual data not based on their hypothesis but actually prove that you gather enough data to substantiate the claim that if they search this then they're going to end up being end up being a seller that's as good as their house chest. If you if you marry that with stuff that's getting a lot of volume and stuff that you can actually rank for because we understand the competitiveness of the different things, then you can actually have a really good scientific way of getting down to which keys make the most sense to target.
Yeah, most certainly. That's I I I believe we need to make sure that when you're looking at things, I always focus on the data, the the behind the scenes, the the why, the how, the what. And realistically, I think that's one way that we have a leg above some of our competitors there and how we bring that approach to your business.
Yeah, I think it makes sense. So, so let's just say, let's just say we start there. Now, we have our list of keywords, right? We know what we're trying to target. Well, how do you communicate to Google that you want to target those? Again, you don't go to your Google Ads account and plug them in as keywords. You're going to actually make content about those keywords, right? And as you make content about those keywords, then Google hopefully picks up the signal like this. This is the stuff that we're trying to rank for. And you know as well as I do, Zach, or better than I do, you're going to rank always for all kinds of stuff. Like I'm sure you look at our clients all the time. You're like, how do they even rank for that? Like Google will pick up some random stuff. Well, the key thing is we want to be there where it matters, right? On the stuff that's actually generate revenue for our business. And can you can you make that happen is is the the big thing. So that's that's where this whole realm of onpage SEO comes from. And that's that's basically the content. So So if I'm if I'm an investor and I'm looking at this, I'm looking at like how do you how you build the SEO strategy? I know what kind of keys are wanting to target. How do you know what type of content you need? Or or in other words, which type of content is actually going to provide the biggest lift? Do I want to like redo my homepage? Am I looking to to build subpages about different keywords? Am I writing blogs? What am I doing?
Yeah, that that's a great question. And so one thing that we have to look at is everything is backed by data in the way that we approach content. So we know from other clients that are in the same industry as you that your homepage is probably 75 to 80% of your actual business. Your homepage really serves that primary as a landing page from an organic channel. So that means they went from the search engines, landed on your homepage, and then checked out other things while they're there. But the homepage is what brought them in. And where we look at that, the content that matters is answering those types of questions that users are asking. If I'm a distressed seller because of a passing and I inherited a home, a inherited homepage telling us how your process works, why it's valuable, how we make it painless for them because they're distressed. They're dealing with a lot. We want to make it painless for them. So, we provide content that answers those concerns that that potential client has. On the homepage, we talk about our process. We talk about who we're who we are, why we're there to help them. We talk about some of the locations that we serve. So, we could tell them if we actually serve their location. We give them trust value. So, we we pardon me, trust indicators, so like your Google reviews, partnerships that you're with, testimonials, things of that nature. There's a plethora of content that really provides your users with the information that they need to know that they can trust you and you can solve their concern. Okay. Then another piece that we know just from data. One of the next biggest pieces is how we do it. So it is going into the process of you as a business owner. how you break down your steps, how it interacts with them, what they need to worry about, what they need to do, and then it goes through how and why you're trustworthy in this process. So, those are like the two major pages, your homepage and your like how it works, how we do this type things.
Yeah. And and I know what you're referring to here about is like the fact that we have reports for our clients that kind of show which pages are the ones that traffic lands on originally. And in in some industries, right, you take a company like HubSpot where they they've done lots of blogging about all kinds of topics. I bet if you look at their analytics or the way that their business works, you'd find that most of their traffic actually arrives on some of those other pages and then those ones end up feeding feeding the revenue engine, right? versus in this industry, it it tends to work a little bit differently. A lot of the most successful real estate investors, it's their homepage of their website that works. And your homepage automatically has a leg up compared to your other pages just off the start because Google knows whatever your actual whatever is most core to you is going to be on your homepage, your website. So the the question I have then though is like, okay, I have a list of a hundred keywords that I want to target. I have one homepage.
Yeah. And how do you go through this process of designing the content around the keywords that you want to target to communicate to Google what's important and rank for as many keywords as possible without diluting the the focus of the page so much that you end up trying to trying to carry a 100 bowling balls and you know you only end up with one.
Yeah, that's a great question. So one thing that we have to understand it's called keyword cannibalization. It's a big fancy word. It basically means that Google's looking at your content and your website and saying what is this page's main focus. So in most circumstances, your homepage is dedicated to your primary area. So if your location is Salt Lake City as an example, you would be looking at Salt Lake City, but the areas that you want to reach that are further outside of that area, that's where you would have dedicated landing pages for those individual areas. The next thing is understanding what keywords are going to have the biggest impact for your business. Is it the buy my house now? Is it the sell my house quickly? what terms are going to provide you the best value. And that's where the Cubid research really comes into play. In our experience, my experience, it's the buy terms. Buy my house today. Because we're looking at it from a user. A user doesn't say, "I want to sell my house." Because then they're going to go into real estate. That's where they're they're going to run into realtors trying to sell them all the time. But if we're saying buy my house for cash quickly, that's something that we're going to find an REI specialist, someone that is is able to help them quickly. So the 100 keywords as an example, we would break those up into their root keywords and define, oh well, this bucket of 20 fits on the homepage perfectly because of your location, your market, your keywords, and your business. What makes you unique in this industry? and then those other 60 80 keywords whatever the difference is we would find actual pages that are going to get you traffic maybe a location page an FAQ page or some variation thereof our industry has a unique aspect to where top of the funnel so that's keywords that have to deal with like who what where are question like window shoppers is kind of what I call it so window shopper oriented versus buy my house today for cash. That's what I need. That's the difference. And that's an ideology shift. And that's why a lot of our pages are very salesfocused, very heavy on this is how we work. This is why it works for you. the blog orientation of that kind of like with your your example there earlier is that blogs are going to really work for them because they have a lot of topof the funnel questions. We don't really get that.
Yeah. which is unusual for an ind you're looking at like well what kind of has the right type of intent and what gets a lot of volume you'll find these these top of funnel things have way like they're not quite as high quality but they have orders of magnitude more volume than the bottom of funnel stuff which isn't true in this industry actually in this industry it's the bottom of funnel stuff is better quality and it also gets way more volume so if you just go find like your your just like average SEO agency off the street and as if SEO agencies come off the street say and you just ask them like build the SEO strategy. They're naturally going to just focus on like a lot of that top performance stuff. It just doesn't work in in this industry quite as well as it works because it produces worse leads and in all industries it produces worse leads. But they might get 10 or 100 times the volume which makes it worth it. But in this industry it's like you'll get the same volume and worse leads which isn't worth
and understand the intent of the user. When a user needs to sell their house today, they're not going to research how to do it because they're going through a divorce and they have to sell their house within 45 days. Like they have to do this. There is no ifands or buts court ordered. So that is something that we have the opportunity to capture them quickly in that opport.
So if I'm understanding you right, what you're basically doing is you're prioritizing, right? and you're taking the highest priority keywords and putting those on the homepage and then you're building some of these other subpages that are going to target some of these other keywords, right? Because you don't want to like leave a keyword out of the strategy necessarily, but you you need to prioritize, right? Because if we try to rank for too many things, we're going to rank for nothing.
Exactly. You know,
where we're spinning our wheels when we're not actually gaining traction. And one of the things that we have to understand is that some of the the keywords, there's a a grouping of keywords that we have already done the research on. We already know this statistically speaking, it's roughly around 40 to 45 keywords that we we know work. Our industry that they work and it a lot of that and it's kind of bringing it back full circle came from PPC because we knew they worked on PPC. We tested them organically and they are bringing in leads.
Yeah, Absolutely. I mean, the search intent is the same. Whether somebody clicks on a paid ad or they click on an organic list,
the keyword tells you about the person, right? Yeah. much more than you learn from the fact that they clicked on a paid ad or or an organic listing. So, so that's what you do is you kind of you kind of build this like hierarchy of the site and you decide like what keywords are going to target where. Let's just say okay, so we started with our list of 100 keywords and now we've got kind of like this grouping of 20 that you know sort of can fit together like one, you know, a couple core ones and then some longtail stuff that that we can build our homepage around. So what makes the difference between great content and bad content when it comes to actually like writing it?
Yes. So Google has a acronym that they utilize to determine what is good and what is bad. It's an acronym called ET E A T. Expertise, authoritiveness, trustworthiness. So it is content that is unique that provides your user with an actual solution to their problem and you have some authority in this because you are the person doing this. So some credibility behind your name. So there is the the Google's approach. But how does that like translate on your website? Like well what does that turn into? What does that mean? Realistically, it comes down to quite a few onpage factors. So, there are things called your header tags. They are on the typically the very top of your homepage or any individual page. It is coded different to look different. It is typically bigger, bolder, typically catches the eye. That is a really great solid piece to include your keywords, include your location, include the purpose of the page. And every page should be different. So you shouldn't cannibalize each other. We're kind of using that same word again. The next piece is we have to understand the difference between the word content and the word copy. So little definition change. Copy is physical words on your page. Content includes everything. Imagery, videos like your trust factors. So like testimonials, uh, FAQs, things of that nature. So everything that a person can utilize on a page itself. This also includes your call to actions. Okay? So that is what separates bad content from good content is a good content structure to your page. You have a good keyword. you have some supporting text that includes our keywords and our major reason why we are in this space to begin with and then we also include some good imagery and where imagery comes in. There's a lot that kind of unpacks from this but one of the biggest things is having good geoqualified imagery instead of your typical stock imagery. So let me paint a picture. I live in Salt Lake City. We have the Rocky Mountains in our background. If I'm selling houses in Salt Lake City, I want a picture of Salt Lake City. Okay? If it's my team that's doing it, I want a picture of me, the people they're going to interact with, the people they're going to speak with. So maybe a receptionist of some capacity. It could be you directly. However that is broken out on your business, make sure that you show the human element to your website. you're human. We got to show that. And then the very last piece, there are some technical pieces that kind of come on the back end of this that has to do with ADA compliance. So people's with disabilities, so like screen readers and things like that. There are images that you can add alt image tags to, which is a piece of code that is keywordrich, adds good value to it. So you can add keywords, but it is something that when someone with a disability reads this and it screen reads it says image of and then whatever our keyword is for that imagery, which should be descriptive, should explain a mother and a father handing their keys to Joemo REI specialist, something like that. And that is a great way for you to be able to be found. That is what breaks out normal content or even bad content from good content. And something that really plagues our industry is duplicated content. We have tons of content that are all the same, maybe a few words difference because you go through the same builders and you buy the same packages or whatever the case is, and you end up with the exact same copy that five other websites have. 10, 20, 50, 100 other websites have on the internet. That is not unique. That does not affect Google's eat acronym. Expertise, authoritiveness, and trustworthiness. Duplicate content does not fit under those things. So, that's a lot, but it it is very important.
Yeah. And and I don't know about you, Zach, but I I've seen more duplicate content in this industry than I've seen ever anywhere, except maybe like some retail situations, you know, where you have the same like product description based with retail, but it's yeah, it's pretty bad overall. And there's places of your website where maybe that doesn't matter as much if you don't want that page to rank like if that page is just there to like, you know, assist with the conversion of somebody or something like that. But then like I mean I find people in this industry who have like duplicate content for like the first paragraph on their homepage hint like that's that's rough, right? Like it's going to be really hard to to stand out. And one thing I'm I'm just going to highlight about what you're saying there is you notice like if we're just asking anybody the question of you know what makes great content, you're going to get a lot of different answers. A lot of them are just around what makes really good content. But what makes good content and what makes good content for SEO can be two different things. And and what you want to find is hopefully the overlap between those things. You know, something reads well, that converts well, etc., but also that that has really really solid SEO foundations. Like stuff like when when Zach talks about the alt text on images and how that's created for people with disabilities and stuff, like I know half of you are thinking like, well, why does that matter? like how many people with disabilities are really going to be visiting my website? But it's not just about that, right? Yes, it's for those people, but why? But because Google cares about that, their algorithm cares about that, right? Keywords and what you say about that image. Like if you just if your all text about that image is what it is by default, like it's going to be like image_411 is like or description of of what this image is, not useful to the algorithm. But if your all text like included some of your keywords and stuff like that, that's one more signal to the algorithm about what kind of things your your your page is relevant to. Another example of this is like people will often find that like you know local pictures work better than than pictures from somewhere else. A big component of that is inside images there's there's a associated structured data and that structured data it's called the metadata includes oftent times GPS information like if you took a picture with your phone it would record in the metadata the image the the coordinates of where the image was taken and also a lot of cameras work that way and Google has learned well if if this website has a bunch of images on it that all have were taken around this area then we know this this website's relevant to this area, right? But then people go in and they throw an image on their website that has metadata in it that's from a different location, right? And that's going to help their their their search ranking. But that's not the kind of stuff that like like I'm not going to go to your website and think I'm I'm upset because I'm just not sure if you really work in Salt Lake City because you said you work in Salt Lake City, but I noticed that the metadata on your images says that you work in California. Nobody Nobody does that, right? But that that's stuff that matters to the algorithm.
Yes.
Vote.
Yeah. We have to appease two things. We have to appease users and then we have to appease Google. And Google is trying to appease users. So if we focus on the user, Google will follow suit.
Absolutely. Yeah, that that makes sense. But then there's also like still some of those components that like like your metadata and images might not like really change a user's life, but not for Google. But where people go wrong is they try to appease Google without appeasing the user. And that's where you see black hat SEO strategies that will like work for a period of time when they don't. Like if I was like like Google's algorithm used to work where it said, "Well, if this keyword is said more times on the page, then that one must be more relevant to that keyword than a different one." And that's how the algorithm worked. So you'd find websites where people would say stuff like, "Sell my house fast thousand times in a row with feeds and it would rank." And then of course that's a bad user experience. So people would say somehow it's passed a thousand times in a row in white text while the background of the website is white just to like so so like the bot sees like oh it's really relevant to this and like that's the kind of stuff where like people who were doing that stuff once upon a time like they shoot right to the top of Google but they don't necessarily stay there right because they're they're gaming the algorithm not creating a solid experience. So it it is it is built and we're not talking about everything that makes a good user experience here. There's a lot of different components that make that. We're kind of talking about like the overlap between that and what Google wants and the stuff that you need to do to be found by Google because you could have the best user experience ever on your website, but if if Google's algorithm is not going to recognize it as that, then you're not going to get the new traffic, which is goals. Let's let's talk about AI. This is a big topic right now in in this world of content creation because people are realizing like, oh, actually, I could probably post a new page on my website about a new keyword like every hour with AI if I wanted to be.
And if I'm doing like 10 times as much content, then that then I'm going to do better. And and there's people using AI on different levels, different amounts throughout the industry.
What's what's the the way that you're approaching that? Is AI good? Is AI bad?
Yeah. So I I don't think we need to look at it as necessarily good, bad, or other. We need to look at it as a tool. And tools are only as good as you utilize them. Does that mean that I'm going to go into AI and write a content and prompt a few things and then spit out a blog and then put it straight on my website? No. Never do that. Number one, we all know there's tons of information out there already. The AI sometimes makes up stuff, so you always have to proofread your stuff. The way that I view AI is it creates the skeleton of your content and then you go in and add the human to the content where it is. It could take your writing from taking an hour and a half to 20 minutes. And that's perfect. That saves everyone time. But if you're just cranking out content, there are checkers and Google looks at this because the way that if you were to just throw AI content on your website without any optimization, the best way to kind of look at it, there's an algorithmic view on this, it was called content spinning where you would take a piece of content, you would throw it into what tanamounts to a blender, and then it would spit it back out and you would just post it on your website. It's unique, but really you're saying the exact same thing as John Doe down the street. The only difference is you're saying it in a different way, but the meaning, the intent of the content is the exact same. So that is where we need to look at what is the intent of the content. And then the next piece is are we doing this just to and I love your example put putting a content piece out every hour. If that's the case, then you're not meeting your your audience where they're at, number one. But number two, you're not really speaking to them. You're not getting them involved in whatever it is that you're trying to create. If you're trying to build a location page for Salt Lake City and in you're trying to build another one for Austin, Texas, they should be different. The vernacular is different. the terminology, the the little slang that's used locally is different and you need to make sure that your content is relevant to each of those of those areas. So, is AI bad? No, I don't think it is. It's a tool. Is it the only way to write content? No. I believe the human element and Google and tons of the industry is already talking about this. AI content is a way to make things fast, but it's not the way to run your entire business as far as content's concerned. So, be cautious with it. Make sure you're doing it appropriately and make sure that you're editing that content because there is a lot of things that AI really messes up. The way I see is it's the end product that matters and there has to be a high standard for the end product and how you get there doesn't really matter. Yeah, but as of right now, we're like we've invested so much into AI contents >> and we can't get it super close. Have we been able to cut down the amount of time it takes to write this stuff? Absolutely.
No.
But have we been able to like make it as easy as a lot of people think it should be with AI content? Not really. And and the thing is it doesn't take like a super genius to just like look at the landscape here, right? You have a whole search engine that's driven on content and content just got ways you made with AI. the amount of contents on the internet rapidly increasing and it's all being basically spun like like you mentioned like the content spinner a lot of it's just AI just spinning the content but now the spinner is better than it used to right because AI can like can write a little bit better but also all of Google's tools for understanding what's content that's good and what's content that's bad are also leveling right so you're really just at this like this kind of unique situation where it's like okay if you had today's technology five years ago Could you have crushed it? Probably because the technology all around is evolving at the same time. It's not necessarily a competitive advantage that you use the technology that everybody else has available to them today. And what's the natural thing like I I'd like to hear if you have like a different perspective on this. I think the trend on Google over the past many years has been focusing more and more on quality of content. And I think that trend just continues more and more because with the fact there's so much content coming out that is low quality that is AI generated. That's I mean that's simply where the algorithm is going is like now now it's not just about volume of content. It's about quality of content and that's I mean that's been a 20-year evolution up to this point. Volume directings but the the ability for the algorithms to differentiate quality from from not quality is increasing just as fast as our ability to increase quality content easier is increasing. Honestly, I I'd concur with you absolutely that the content itself is so readily available. We we need to make sure that we provide the USP unique selling point or unique selling proposition that content provides in this area. If you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else, you're not unique. You everyone else is doing this exact same thing. So coming at this from a real enduser solution, how am I helping them? How am I getting them the the opportunity that they need? That's why they're coming to us is how am I helping them? And if we put that in content format on your website, you will rank. That's just the the way it works. Like if you're the best option for for an a searcher in your area, that is how you rank. So, make sure your content is unique and valuable and provides the enduser with the best possible solution.
Yeah, understood. All right, we're we're almost on time here, but I do want to ask one more question. It's probably one of one of the most common questions we get, and that is, do blogs matter?
Yeah, that's a that that's a big one to unpack. So, let let me explain this a little bit. We've kind of been alluding to it a little bit, but I want to make sure that we're we're speaking about this very clearly. Blogs matter if your industry needs them. And what I mean is that if they're part of the sales funnel, so if they're at the top where that's veryformational, very who, what, why, where, when, then yes, absolutely. Blogs for our industry, not as much. Our industry is not really at that point where we're getting people that are searching for us and taking 60, 90, 120 days to fulfill their their action. Most of the people if they're contacting an REI specialist, they're in it to to get that process started today. So blogs serve a great purpose when someone lands on the website and does something. if it's the landing page because it provides a lot of information. But what it also does there is some arguments to have blog content. It's not going to be good landing page area. So from the search engines to our website, but if we create good internal linking and from our homepage or our service pages or the distressed sellers pages and there's a little more information we want to expand upon, there are page views that we can get. So, someone's already on the website and they find a link and it takes them to the blog to help expand their knowledge, but they've already came to us because they're looking for an REI specialist in your area. Blogs matter, but not to the point where I've seen I've seen clients that have been with agencies that that's their major KPI. We produced four blogs a month for you for a year and a half, but at the end of the day, that brought no actual value, no true users that are getting them a deal, that there's no leads from that that turned into deals. Okay, that is in my experience
What I've seen with a lot of the clients that have come to us recently is that they were working with Joe Schmo and they have 200 pages on their website and 180 of them are blog content. And when you break out the data of this, those blogs over the course of a year maybe brought a couple users, but never a conversion. And that's something that I think we need to step away as an industry from. Blog content matters, to blog content is supportive, but it is not the major strategy.
>> Yeah.
>> So hopefully that all makes sense.
>> Well then it was fascinating because again, what you're talking about, why is this not, why is, why is, you know, in some ways, what's the quote? I think it was Stephen Covey who says, "Common sense is not always common practice." What you're talking about here is common sense, not always common practice. But why is it not always common practice? Because it's not common sense in most industries. In most industries, that is important, right? So, what you have is SEO professionals who've done work across a lot of different industries and they have found that this is what works. And then they come into real estate investment and they try to apply that strategy and it just doesn't work in real estate investment the same way it does in other industries. So, that's that's ultimately the the difference. Also, I think strategy is is suffering more and more even in other industries now with AI often solving a lot of those top funnel, rear >> and really the the the like down funnel stuff and what people are using of search engines more just across industries in in general. So there's there's an element to to that for sure as well.
I also still think there's a pretty solid element of like one thing we do use blogs for, advance is like internal linking that you mentioned.
>> Yes.
>> There. Blogs can be a really good way to build a good like what's called a linkable asset. And we'll talk about this when we when we get on to off-page. Linkable asset sort of is is like something that's worth someone else on a different website linking to your website for. So you can build that like solid linkable asset, build a backlink to it, and then use internal linking to flow authority from that blog page to other pages on the website, which can support support the website. But the idea like of just like make your website like bigger and bigger and produce tons of top funnel content, I think does work in some industries for sure, but but not this one.
I I agree. It it it is it is not the best for our industry and we end up wasting a lot of money, resources, time, blood, sweat, and tears to get to a point where this is where I believe a lot of people get like that sour taste in their mouth about SEO is that they, well, strategy A that I worked with another company did and it didn't work. Well, they may not have been specialists or know the industry like we do. And that's something that really puts us above a lot of those agencies.
>> Yeah.
I feel like if you invest in SEO for a long time and you know, you you invested 20 grand in SEO and you look at your website before and after, you're like, "Dang, it looks the same." But you've got like deals and it's like, "Okay, cool. I have no idea what they did, but it got me results." But yeah, the second it didn't get you anything. And and you can't tell what's real. That's where people that's why that's why I think a lot of people are are anti-SEO in this industry, which is which is so fascinating because in your average industry, people are like, "Well, SEO takes a long time, so I got to start that first." In this industry, it's the opposite. It's like, "SEO takes a long time, so I want to do all this stuff that gets me fast results first, and then maybe one day I'll do SEO." And people just never do it. They just kick the can, kick the can, can over and over and over again, or they do it half-heartedly. Like this happens even with us too. Like it irks my heart when we have clients that launch an SEO campaign and then cut it off after 3 months.
>> Yeah.
>> When like, you know, we all know we're not that like you do that, you're guaranteed to fail >> everything. So anyways, thank you for your time today, Zach. This is awesome. For everybody else listening, just to give you a brief brief summary of what's coming next. We talked about on-page SEO, which is we have a lot of stuff that you see that's on your website. Next, next time we do one of these episodes, we're going to talk all about what's with off-page SEO, the stuff that happens on other websites that ends up contributing to how well your website ranks. Again, it's another one of those things that we don't see, but it does make a big big difference to Google's algorithm. So, we dive deep into that. Hope you've been seeing value from this series. Again, we're getting we're getting closer to the end of the series. So, now's a great time if you do want to send us any questions you have about SEO that you might be addressed. I'd love for us to go over that. And unless there's anything else, I'll see you next week. All right. Thanks.