SEO Strategy for a New Website

Transcript: SEO Strategy for a New Website

This transcript of SEO Strategy for a New Website comes from the video's captions, lightly cleaned. Click a time and the set jumps to that moment.

Introduction

0:00 Welcome back to the David Quaid SEO show. This is episode 10. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the easy ways to get traffic to your new website. By far, that was my title of this show. Like I say, you've got a new website yourself or for a client. We'll be going through some of the ideas from David about how you could start the wheel moving, get that traffic pulsating. Should be a great show. Hopefully, we get some live questions as well that we answer at the end of the show. And I've got some additional questions about what's been going on in SEO during the week that I'm going to be putting today. And David had a bit of a I would say confrontation online, but he had an interesting discussion on another podcast. I'm going to be asking him about that as well cuz I thought that for the last third of the show was really interesting. All of it was interesting, but there were some points that came up in the last third that I really would like to discuss with David. He's got a noisy keyboard. He's hammering away. Dave. Hello Dave, would

Meet David Quaid

1:17 You also like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
Yeah, thank you so much for listening in. Really excited about today's podcast because Jonathan wouldn't let me get away from like, oh, do I really have to share how we build traffic? I think it's something that's always intimate to every SEO putting out of public bit. But it's also really important to if you're going to say you build in public, you're going to share, then you have to share. That's why I'm thrilled about it. What I also want to say is it's hard work. But everything I'm going to share, I've asked Jonathan asked Google to keep me honest here. They built websites with me and I want them to hold me responsible if I get keep anything.
That's fantastic. Should be a great show. Before we go into the meat potatoes, we got a short break. We will be back in a few seconds.
Is SEO dead? Has AI changed everything or is it all just noise? Welcome to the David Quaid SEO show. David has over 20 years of hands-on SEO experience and runs primary position, a New York City SEO agency. Every episode cuts through the hype to show what actually works.

2:35 From technical SEO to AI search with co-host Jonathan Denwood, you get straight answers to real search questions. Subscribe now and start ranking smarter.
Coming back, folks. So, let's start off, David. Why do new sites struggle to get

Why New Sites Struggle to Get Traffic

2:52 Noticed, to get traffic? What are some of the fundamentals that you got to understand about the game before you start in competition? David,
It's such a great question. Without getting into the ideology, you effectively content authority. Your content is just relevant. Yet, it's important to write good content yet important for information getting downstream. But to get ranking, to get traffic, you have to get into the top three rank position. And so, building a new site, that's where your focus has to be. You have to be laser focused on. So, you've got to do your preparation. And the longer you ignore topical authority, building authority, the longer this going to take. A lot of people think you start building it after month three or month two. And just coming back to a critical point, right? If you look at people who build really quickly, rack slides really quickly. If you look at the what's happening with Galile content, mount AI, mount AI, important piece of evidential credibility here, right? Yes, it's wrong and it's black hat. Absolutely. Those people aren't experiencing if you forget about the penalty of the crash that comes after which is going to happen no matter what you do. Sorry. But that buildup doesn't a month build up rapidly and you think that there's box newly domain have to sit around for a year.

4:25 It's completely wrong. The time
The time
Sorry go on sorry David I apologize
The time element of it the time it takes people to get authority so if you imagine a very long equation how much authority per topic click through history any of those points is zero let's just imagine it's a simple equation where every number is just multiplied by every number any point is zero The final answer is going to be zero. If you build a 100 pages and then a thousand pages and just imagine if we oversimplify for illustration that the authority is zero a thousand time 0 then you build 10,000 pages 10,000 0 unless it has data for all even if it'saneous trickle of data for every point of the algorithms in the ranking system nothing's going to happen and you're just going to sit there and I think that's what people need is dead. You don't have to build a great site. There's no requirement for building the most beautiful for building a brand any of that. That's what you'll end up doing. That's not the requirement at the this I'm going to got sub question based on what you've just said. What are like

What Google Looks For in a New Domain

5:47 Let's go for let's just go maybe less. Let's go for half a dozen fins. What are Google? What are the indicators that Google's looking for from a new domain, a new website that would allow it to start to build traffic and hopefully convert that traffic to some action that the person that built the website wants to happen.

The Cuppa John's Coffee Shop Analogy

6:15 Okay, let's take a real world example, right? A friend of mine, we'll call him Jonathan to a new city and he's in Nevada and he decided he's going to open up a coffee shop because there's lots of in his area who listen to his show on WPIC and he wants to give them a co-working fix. So, he opened up and we'll call it we'll call it Cuppa John. Papa John's cup of Joe Cup John's opens and Jonathan's got a really good friend called Kurt and Kurt rings up one day. Jonathan, how come you don't have a web? You've got a you've got a hosting company. You've got a web WordPress development. How come you don't have a website? The bottom of my list. I got to go build a website. Jonathan registered cup John.com. Now obviously a lot of people be coming in. Got small bit of foot. I think he's got he's trying to get his loyal fan base to come in every day. They do their work from home. They get breakfast there and they're going to be searching for a cup of Job because they're looking for opening times or maybe they want a phone and see if like a friend is there or they want to see if it's dog friendly. Can they bring a pet or they want to see what type of food is available? Should they eat? For a number of reasons, they're googling it already. When you register copy john.com the way Google knows that your that's your brand name it's irrelevant your domain to the keyword doesn't have a list of all the company the companies registered it just starts to notice that people are searching for cup John and then it starts to measure the percentage to cup john.com and okay people in this for that and click that must be the that must be what the domain is currently most relevant A lot of people call this branded that's fine as long as you know that it Google world for the most part that's just another keyword right for the most part as people are searching cup John you probably see you get like a 60% clickthrough rate for most brands it's probably about 40% but it's about 60%.

8:21 That gives you some authority but not a lot because it's only relevant to cup of jobs but at least you're now getting clicks right you're starting to get traffic and that's why EMDs are so important that's where I would go if you're looking at another business CRM business and you've got your branded domain EMD domain I think important is building the branded domain the outs if you want to build traffic because the EMD is essentially helping.
What does EMD stand for? Sorry.

Exact Match Domains (EMD) Explained

8:56 But EMD is an exact match domain. Another way of saying it's a generic domain. I think one of the things the whole planet has clocked on to be a growth package. We're used to building a branded domain like hubspot.com. Whereas if somebody wanted to build company to be acquired by Mark Hubspot or go into competition with HubSpot, they might call it sasscrm.com, right? And that's because they want to leverage that relevance of the domain to the primary keyword that they would otherwise have to buy or build a whole lot of backlinks for. And so I think anyone starting a business today that EMD is part of your strategy from day one because that's what Google's looking for. It's the relevant that also becomes also becomes a private blog network downstream that start getting clicked. Cup of John you're getting a lot of clicks for your brand name. Eventually people will search for Cup of John's coffee and your topical authority will spread out. It'll grow from John's to coffee might be co coffee Vegas. That's what Google's looking for. It's looking for relevant where it becomes difficult and where becoming competitive. There's very few indexes that are very few indexes you can just take on relevance anymore. And that's where authority comes into play. The next thing that Google's looking for authority, who links to them, what do they Do I trust the people that link to them?

10:34 And we use the word like trust. I think trust has become overexaggerated. But effectively pay gets back links, right? Who links to them? What do they say? What's the value of that link? I always imagine big city with lots of power stations and substations and you have all of these power stations linking to you. If you've got a couple of houses, that's fine, but if you build a big data center, you need lots and lots of power sources coming in. And that's where authority becomes a challenge. It's not just what you write. It's great if you write something and somebody manages to find it, but I think the fundamental problem facing everyone in digital marketing, SEO is getting those first people to find it, right? And they're the couple of ways that we can use relevant and authority building.

Local SEO & Community Building

11:20 Can I So, when it comes to the coffee shop, we're talking about local SEO, aren't we? When we're talking about assass but I think there's some overlap. I'll just put this to you when it comes to local business. Papa John's coffee.
Papa John's. Cuppa John's.
Cuppa John's. I like Papa John's. All right. Cuppa John's occurs to me is that it's been like being active in the community. It sounds a bit cliche, but what I mean by that is helping local nonprofits, helping community focused organizations that do have a website. And I think asking them they normally some agency or some individual that's maintaining their website. So, it's hard, but what it's what's best is to do kind of joint events and then hopefully you're going to get a backlink naturally because they're going to promote a joint event and you're giving coffee or you're doing something to support it and being and being really active in the community and trying to build these natural links. Am I on the right track?

12:32 Yeah. Going to market on your own the worst idea and nobody goes to market on their own. Microsoft doesn't do it. Google doesn't do it. HubSpot doesn't do it. They all have go to market strategy with part. So you're right on the money. Google and LM can only know real world relationship if it's somehow published online. If somebody sees something and doesn't write it online, no exist and no Google knows that it exist. And I think that's one interesting strategy. It's something I certainly deployed at the start, helping a charity build a website and do SEO for them. I'm not just building a website and lumbering them with technical debt. I'm helping them convert the web into a revenue stream. I put this really smart guy on LinkedIn, he's active on Reddit. He's very smart PPC manager and he learned PP, he told me by learning to do Google ads for grants. So where Google gives $10,000 a month ad spend to nonprofit and charity and trying to turn that to a continuous revenue stream with how he learned PPC. Picking a local company supporting the local community's kudos and then obviously those communities will want to link back to you. So if you build a website for a local dog pound and go down every day and take photographs and manage their Instagram, you're showcasing and building a profile as a web agency or an SEO or digital marketing agency that then result in link back to you and in branded search back to you. Absolutely. When we're

Parasitic SEO for SaaS

14:01 Talking about SaaS, I think I'm going to use this term and it's got some bad baggage, but I don't mean it the old way it was used, and that's parasitic SEO, but I mean it in the more modern context that you're you're using other people's websites, LinkedIn.
Exactly.
YouTube, that's forums. You're a growth hacker. You're trying to get people to talk about your product to talk and you're going on to these different platforms and you're producing content and you're trying to you're trying to get compensation growing about an awareness and through that you hope and by building relationships you hope then to get natural back links to the SaaS website. Am I on the right track there as well?
That's a good start. And you want to make sure, for example, you when you're sh your b about us that you have a link in. Help the person know what to link to and what page. And don't build everything to your homepage. Build it deep inside your site. So if you're talking about your product, link to your product page. But I think like I think most people will see a difficult strategy as well. Yes.

15:20 Not for everyone. It's a good one, right? And it's an organic one. But there are other organic plays. I think coupled with that again no man is an island product is an islandp that target everyone's trying to target them. That's why they cost money to run ads. But there are other people trying to talk to them. The other thing is that from a Google point of view and an point of view, it doesn't matter if it's the customer talking about you or if the service provider that serves your business is talking about you. I think before I used the example of for example somewhere in Austin going to market with a an electrician because they're targeting the people they both have to deliver good quality service etc. The same thing happens in SaaS, right? You might have your built for a hosting company. That hosting company might be a specialized hosting company does hosting for other SaaS products. You could be a guest on their show on their podcast talking about what you're doing. And I think what a lot of people do is they expect show somehow will manage to create views on its own. You can help that show by sharing a cont by doing keyword re by helping that show work. If you look at a very successful SEOs who build affiliate marketing, who are in very complicated niches, they don't just go on a podcast, they try to figure out how do I get the topic this podcast will rank better for. How do I make sure when I share this again with parasitic SEO?

16:55 For example, if I put this show on my LinkedIn page, how do I make findable and gets published more and gets more eyeballs? When we did our show about Google Search Console, I shared it as GSC performance. If we do what about local SEO, I think I ranked it for local news and local SEO performance. And I'm thinking about all of these different ways showing Google and LLMs how I'm active and who's talking about me. I don't have to worry about building lots and lots of get posts on random websites. Yeah, I get you. I want to point out if you join us live, folks, we and you got any questions, any SEO questions, we will have a spot at the end of the show where we will answer anybody that's joining us live and we will answer their questions. We got a couple people with

Low Competition Keywords

17:48 Us already, but if you got any questions, just put them through LinkedIn, YouTube, and we will try and answer them if you're part you're with us live. Let's move on. So, low compet competition keywords are shortcut. I suppose this is where the art and science of SEO meets, isn't it? Because low competition normally means you're not going to get a lot of traffic. But on the same way, if you choose the right keyword phrases, they're going to I'm looking for the right phrase, they're going to be more relevant.
It's
There's a lot of people who used to concentrate on high traffic keywords and there are some that high traffic and still have high relevance, but normally, yeah, I'm waffling now. What's your take on this? So, I think keyword research is really step one. If you're planning to launch in January, now's a really good time to start that keyword research. Here's why that keyword research is important and here's how to do it.

Keyword Research Strategy

18:54 Firstly, you want to make a list of all of the most relevant high buying terms. That's going to be the end of the road map. The high competition, high keywords that you're going to need a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush that or Google ads data and you're going to need to realize that those high ter by the end of your road map you're going to be starting at the really at the other side of it right being able to do keyword research and the best place to do keyword research that people never think of is to get all of the free spreadsheets that have links to send open up the spreadsheet. They say, "Oh, we'll get you a link from here today and we'll get you a link from here." That's not where they're getting you links from. That's just what they're advertising. And then tell them you're interested in getting links for your niche, right? So you're building a new test product for bee colon like queen bees manage all of their bees all the all those worker bees and tell them you're looking for links to the pages that rank that there links the easiest to do keyword research. It's already done for you. Those people know how to build documents that are ranking that in Google. If they're not ranking, forget about them. Just walk away from it. But you can leverage that as free re what most people delete and disregard as spam is probably the best way to start your keyword research and it's completely free. They've done all the hard work, right? They have to make sure that their link farms are ranking in Google otherwise the backlink will have no value. And then you can take that domain name over to Bing Webmaster Tools and see who the king and then you can see all of the keyword that they've got and that's one of your first sources of keyword research because it more evolved form of keyword re published a few times. They already started with low keyword difficulty keyword and they've arrived at a good combination of document name page title and they probably republished a few times. They probably started from scratch.

21:11 You're taking a huge shortcut by analyzing the document names for your own ranking purpose. And even if you don't outrank them, you'll probably rank to them. That's a really good place to start. Good place to start is to look at your competitor names, go to Google ad and campaign, type in their brand name and start seeing what competitive information starts to show. Start looking for the domain name, competitor, alternative, pricing, or the name like location. If it Google [clears throat] local, if you're looking for a coffee shop, you're really looking for matcha tea because you're on a health kick and you perform better with matcha than caffeine. Maybe you'll see people searching cup and matcha. That's a keyword that you should absolutely go after. Yeah, Jonathan's all about the coffee. We're all about the matcha tea because nobody else is ranking with the freight. John's shop, right? Cup of John. You can start targeting that traffic and people's brains will look for something like matcha tea coming up in the second or third position. And that's a great way to get not just free traffic, but free bottom of the funnel traffic because there's almost no such competition and it's not going to show up in.

22:42 And I think those are two things that people don't think about. But your competitor actually by being successful automatically to bleed the sort of road map to copy them and just bait them.
Yeah. All right. Long tail over head terms. What do you reckon about this?
I think long tail is crucial. If you look at this, people also ask hack. This is like a five minute people have come to me on they were devious but they tried it. The results were phenomenal. Long tail, low keyword difficulty. Those are different keywords you want to do. And you want to think about it from three different ways, right? Only do you want to use that in your website and website content and make that your starting point but you also to think about I'm going to do a video about this why I just have written content I can also make a video that matches that keyword that's going to rank in YouTube because YouTube is the world's second biggest search engine and in that after that video people are going to go and search for you if you're relevant so you can literally the same keyword difficulty cause machine learning and apply it to YouTube and then take people searching in YouTube where you don't have as much competition and convert that to Google

Do You Really Need Backlinks?

24:04 Search.
Yeah. Yeah, I follow that. So, let's go last one before we go for our mid break. Do you really need back links to start? I think we have been working on a couple of domains that have taken off just because of EMD and because a lot of AEOs are just really terrible. A lot of branding expert geo experts and fundamentally SEO experts. Unfortunately, so many of their company names are similar that exact match domain in the AEO space is just free money. If you know how to use and create relevance and do your keyword research, you could start picking up 300 clicks a day with almost no backlick and that's going to disappear as more and more competition picks. But yeah, at the start you need backlink, but I don't think this scale of backlinks that people think they need. I think there's a much easier way to go about it and I think we'll talk about that after the break. But you do need backlinks, but you don't have to get Microsoft level backlinks here, right? There's a couple of really good ways to do it.

25:17 All right, I think that's a good place. Got a cliffhan area here. David will give us some more knowledge in the second half. We're going to go for a quick break. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

Mid-Show Break

25:30 Is SEO dead? Has AI changed everything? Or is it all just noise? Welcome to the David Quaid SEO show. David has over 20 years of hands-on SEO experience and runs primary position, a New York City SEO agency. Every episode cuts through the hype to show what actually works. From technical SEO to AI search with co-host Jonathan Denwood, you get straight answers to real search questions. Subscribe now and start ranking smarter.
We've had a feast of knowledge from David, the king of SEO, the goat of SEO as I call it. It's been a great first half. So, we left it at do you need back links and we left it at cliffhanger. David, you were going to give us some advice about Yeah.

Backlink Strategy & Google Business Profile

26:21 So firstly, you could buy.com profile for $89. That's the only link I buy. I don't know if the value has that much value anymore, but you can just Google ink value inc verified profile $89. It's enough to actually get you in Bing. Bing, by the way, will also display an error. If you buy a brand new domain with truly no back, it will give you an error and say you have no you don't have enough authority. Go and get more valuable things to your I don't know if they still show but then after last time I checked was three months ago they were still showing it unless you're in an area you can rank your Google business profile right if you're doing local I apologize to people who aren't doing local I will come back to you in a second but if you're doing local you can rank Google business profile up to a certain degree without backlinks you can Jay Cunny I think confirmed that as well on when he joined us Google Business profile is more about proximity data. What you want to do if you can if you're allowed to get a Google business profile absolutely get one because it will help you can rank the same day if you can get verified the same day and that will help you do organic. You can create all kinds of in your profile. You don't have to use the ones that Google give you and you can expand on them.

27:42 What you shouldn't do is mix with products. But what you can do is create all if you're a web designer, you can add and you can look at all of the different keyword keywords you picked up and you can start with the low keyword difficulty one. And if someone happens to be in your local area, they might up on a map just because you've taken one of those keyword low keyword difficulty keyword and put it into your profile. And it's very easy to do. You don't have to go and create a whole entry and image it and look. You just have to build it into your profiles relevant and that'll help you get traffic from day one. If you're SaaS, the keyword research will help you by reaching out and part and asking other people who are building sites, who are building podcasts, who are building hosting companies, web design companies, whatever. And instead of widening profile and just having your profile on yet another site, you could do keyword research for them. So I was talking to this really lovely businessman on Monday who called me from the UK and he did [clears throat] it was really nice. Did a video on how it operates me a YouTube link and said I really want to get some of your advice. Can you help me build and scale my business? You're doing some really great things. You know a lot more for a person in your business because why don't you grab people in your area that down the local are carpenters of Dway and say look I'll build your website for you using Claude or using Gemini or whatever and I'll help show you what I've learned and I'll manage your website for you maybe I'll pay you a couple hundred quid or whatever but using your keyword start looking what keyword have and what keyword where you have map over to each other. For example, painting in slow commercial painting in slow maybe it was like moving or delivery services.

29:51 Those keywords are 50% relevant because of the word that even though you're in a different industry, you've got the word conjoy. How you can building pages on their talk about differentes that can link to you. As long as you're helping them rank and you're helping yourself rank, you're helping Google understand the relationship between you, that's how you need to think about link building.
I add that you mentioned Jake. I had a couple long discussions with Jake. Thank you for gracious to give me a fair bit of his time and he's he's a big p he's a big pusher of using trade magazines and trade publications and being then almost all of them have got websites and getting articles on the websites and it was one key ways that he built his own agency and he's advised me to do that myself and I've been doing. I've had a lot of things I've been doing this week. I can't believe what's happened. But one of them is he gave me some resources to study and I have studied them and I will probably be going forward with that myself. That's writing all new content.

31:13 So where do you see tra most niche businesses, niche sectors have trade magazines, have trade publications? Do you think that's still a really good idea to get if they accept guest articles, contributors? It's a cuz Jake says it's just a tremendous way of targeting your audience and building credibility and authority. What's your own thoughts

Trade Publications & Connectively

31:43 About
It? Is especially if you've got data and information out there. One of the easiest way to do this to with connectively and build a profile and again as you're building your profile you if you've done your keyword research you've got your look you got you're building the keyword into your profile because maybe your profile can rank which is how parasitic SEO work once you built your profile you'll start sharing question other bloggers and online authors have and it'll even start creating AI answer just delete AI answer just go right in your own and share an insight that you about your industry that nobody else knows or give them access to data or information that other people don't have and respond. Try to set yourself a goal. Respond to five or six of those a week and see if they get it. But Google doesn't really care if it's a trade publication or someone else's website, right? If you're you look at the web industry, a lot of web agencies run their own podcasts, right? There's a lot of speaking events. There's a lot of There are so many places that you can showcase yourself as an expert and get a profile badge or you could hey could you host my site and then call yourite after whatever your keyword have. That's why your keyword research is important. You only use it once in your domain. You can use it on everybody else's domain. You can use it on LinkedIn. You can use it on Reddit. You can use them on YouTube.

33:17 If you know what those are, you're helping Google focus. Most of this I see online are people use the entire title. How to enjoy a wonderful day out like Como in Italy. Italy is redundant. A lovely day out is redundant. Just focus on to Ko. Google knows where KO, right? So if you have if you can make it for Google to squeeze you into indexes, it will and it just becomes a numbers game. So as you start building out content that you make sure you have a link in your slides to yourself, even if it's a PDF or a PowerPoint, Google can read that.
It's funny you I'm probably going to go a little bit off topic here. It's funny that you brought up Lake Como because the podcasts I've been listening to the adverts. There's been some adverts from the Caesar Hotel Casino, they redeveloped it in Lake Tahoe and they've been pushing audio adverts that instead of going to Lake Como, come to Lake Tahoe. It's much easier. I'm not too sure about the strategy. I can follow it in one way that they're aiming for very high rollers, very pretty wealthy individuals that but I think I understand the concept but I would pitch it a little bit lower myself but who am I? It's funny that you brought that up. But get back to Jake. He gave me an example.

34:55 He said when he was starting out building influence by pitching to these trade magazines, one of his most successful initially articles was cuz Jake is a friend of I would say he's a friend or somebody that I really like and David really likes and they've got agency that him and his co-founder have agency that specializes in the lawn care landscaping industry. So he one of his first really successful articles was that you should do marketing eight marketing tips for the winter because a lot of in that industry it dies down. It's seasonal but really you should be doing your marketing in the winter because that's really going to affect your sprint. And he said he pitched that to about half a dozen editors and he did get one of them take it up and it really did make a difference to getting his agency started. I think it do you think it's still got strong relevance now using
Absolutely and the same thing happens right across the board right when Microsoft was launching Azure and they started identifying the different industry sectors like networking security load balancing they suddenly needed content and applications from people that were competitors and return they offered things like press releases and blog articles and mention on social media. And again, if you've got your keyword research done, you're doing outward re, you can tie your top to the keyword that you think are easy to rank for. Not only are you helping the article, coming up with ideas for the article, but you're also making sure that the article rank that more people will see it. The same as we did press releases not ago.

37:01 Again, what you want to do is root your press releases not in like your name, but in the keyword you want to rank for because that's what people are searching for. And you can start doing that from the out. You need to do if you look at say you pitched out to half a dozen editors, you might pitch to half a dozen tradem pitch to half a dozen charities, half a dozen coffee shops. It's all a numbers game. If you just keep trying one thing and then giving up every time it fails, you're going to go nowhere. You need to you need numbers. One idea will work for one person, which means you've got to share it with 10 people. Look at trade publication. Look at Connectively to help do that. But also look at communities. Wouldn't be a part of community. The worst thing that moderators on Reddit tell me is that when CEOs turn up, when their product is beta and starting into community, they come test my product. You're wandering into at party of people that know each other. You're the outsider and now you're demanding that everyone comes and buys your product or comes and if you're launching a product or service, you should join the community very early on.

38:22 Become respected community. Pay it forward. Help other people first long before you ever think about going to a community to ask people. That's why CEOs are getting banned all the time. They're coming in with this attitude that they've done everyone a favor. Whereas what they're actually doing is looking for a favor, but you could communities online don't have to be the end user. They could be competitors. They could be people that are in a Jason space. So they need a tester. They want to give feedback. They want to practice a they want to get on a podcast. You can build these things out with people at a

Communities & The Numbers Game

38:57 Smaller scale. You don't have to be in the New York type single type.
I want to move on a couple news stories and have some time to answer some of the questions that the people that are watching us live or put in. I think a new story that came on my radar a couple of days ago that's goo Google is poisoning backlink tools or making it much harder and they're poisoning

Google Poisoning Backlink Tools

39:24 Results. So there's no cons there's no the results that you see aren't what somebody else is seeing in a way they make what's all this about do you think David? So it's a number of things. One, retaliation against s API for scraping their results and making it a lot of money and Google thinks that obviously a lot of publishers are upset because they think Google's been doing that to them forever and they don't get any money from Google and they always get the raw end of the deal. So it's an interesting dynamic and then Google's attitude to open AI the why should we give you our quality index that we spend billions of dollars of effectively other people's money based on other people's hard work and you just have a chain that's starting to break down and so the question is will Anthropic and Open AI be able to build and have they stolen enough data from Google to you that to reverse engineer PageRank themselves to come up with a quality control because their face is being as terrible and Yandex isn't much better or are they still going to have to that content? I think Google's building a bigger mode. Part of the sort of friendly fire or accidental damage to that has been that tools aren't as accurate. Also, hyperpersonalization is creeping in because more and more people are logged in. If you keep visiting your own website, you're going to see it rank more. If you that you're going to see them rank more. If you're using a SER tool does the same searches or stops after a report, it's going to get good results as well. And then there's hyper rotation testing. Every hour, Google is just taking that normally rank almost per them faster. And if you act, if you get a reading at that time, it looks like your site's fallen off a cliff. Or you get a false positive report where you're showing but you're actually only showing for an intermittent period of time. And so I think this idea of knowing that you're permanently what is disappearing quickly.

41:33 Right. Let's go. Thanks for that Dave.

David's Debate on the Edwards Show

41:35 Let's go on to your recent guest appearance on the Edwards show where you were in debate with a gentleman called Paris childness
Childness. Thank you.
Basically, it I would say it got really heated. Some people said it got a bit heated. I don't think so because
I think that's a cur curioity of American society cuz I'm English. I like a good strong debate myself and I obviously you're South African but you live most of your life in Ireland and I think Irish people in general like a good debate as well. But what interested me was I thought it was a good discussion. I think you got a little bit frustrated because you didn't think your questions were being answered that effectively. But the main thing was in the third the last third of it where you brought up that Bing has some really good tools when it comes to fan out. Can you give

Bing Fan-Out Tools & AI Search

42:40 Us some more information about Bing and its fan out tools? Yeah. So, Bing has two very good tools. One is the AI performance report because it's one of the only ones that share a share of voice like a digital competition and that's something that's missing from all of the other AI tool but how much how many other times this prompt or query fan out being used very important
That data felt is very valuable. The reverse edge part is a little more complex to describe where you effectively have to take all of those query fan out and figure out what you're missing for. Again, that comes back to keyword research and how you do it. And that might be something that you can build a skill for in an LLM. In SEO, it's a little bit easier because we tend to think that we get a list of keywords and we can we have tools that rank them in authority order and in volume and in cost per click value and we get that from Google and that information isn't generally available but it is right if you look at the totality of all the keywords in your organic data grounding queries the result of the query found out and then you start drawing a map around all of the competitor names and all the other way asking and to evaluate compare you could start to build a map of where you're not visible and then you could start to build content to target that and then you can see what percentage of that I don't think a lot of people think that way that's how I think about it yeah because I think obviously the large learning models when they do a fan out they're adding there people say I don't know how true this is that on average they're sending out like 20 results per fan out and they're adding key words

LLMs, Perplexity & Hyper-Personalization

44:35 That they're long-term phrases basically which they send out and then they get back the results and they using the technology they put a result but it's it's different every time you do the same prompt you're going to probably get a slightly different reply. Do you think that's right or is it more? So I think this is the crux of the confusion in a way people have about all this, don't they?
So it's getting more complicated that it was 12 months ago.
Yeah. NLB chat tool is turning into more thick client was the thin client. I don't know if you remember the terms from main
And there's a lot more of your local history being vacuumed up as part of that and I think this is one of the disappointing things about debating people about versus geo is that none of them were able to articulate what the functional differences were. They always seem to focus there's a big bigger budget out there and I can go for it if I pretend that I'm a geo expert and then whenever people ask question about how does geo work always this that if you just build a good brand they will find you and I just as an engineer I just cannot deal with that advice going to small businesses because small businesses take on a lot of risk a risk and feeding these with a non-starter so that they're forced to hire an agency just doesn't sit well with me. And so that's why GD debate and that's why they're important.

46:19 That's why I get so passionate and worked up about it. But that wasn't the question you're asking me. The question from talking to you. So I before that I recorded a quick video with Javez from Edm Mastery and listening to some of the research that he was doing. Ryan Jones posted his deep study of Perplexity photon which is their project effectively whenever are getting the answers from these query they're storing them locally right you have an inbox that the pages come in from the web from the result of these query factor and so they already have copies of them and you have an index of sort that's called a cat and then as you build a bigger index and then you're building an index for your training which happens large flying but then they're augmenting that training as it goes on it makes sense to cash that for the first time they have wheeled out how they do it at the top and bottom right basically you have a prompt there are only a few a handful of index like common crawl Google Microsoft which isn't very useful in it because it's just a list of websites the website pages where machine is an example as well but not a utilization and how they arch where they put their load balance how because they've got to do this quickly you're asking a question you demand that it syncifies the 10 20 block David myself and James Dy worked out a long time ago they're not doing this in real time it looked real time most people don't have the benefit where they can publish something now and get quoted in 10 minute, but I know that I can publish now, get quoted in 10 minutes, but I'm not being quoted. I'm just being and I can start to see that there's actually latency popping in and build a mode to avoid spam or to avoid they're trying to make things more hyper personal where brands aren't being mentioned all the time or a brand is being mentioned because it was discovered in the citation the current citation giving rise to a whole lot of dangerous theories about being baked in and things like that you still need to the quality control like it or not or wish for change or however people want to do it PageRank is the only objective way to measure content and common crawl I think James Dy said I'm going to get this centralized harmony or something Google call the nearest seed.

49:09 And so you have all of these academic ideas about how content should be sorted and built and you have lots of mathematical modeling that have been transferred into code models that people share. But then companies like Google and Perplexity and Open AI build their own interpretation of it. For example, without a doubt, Google have ignored the schema large degree from what I can see. Your view building schema. However, their own system might use schema to transport data. I don't know, right? But they're not taking from view publishers schema and call yourself cup John that they're going to go and create an entity graph for cup John, right? But if they see people searching for cup, they'll create an ent. And so at the top and at the bottom, all the fuzzy middle part, how many pages do we bring back? How many pages do we and which pages do we think that started to change then Google building this wall against it problematic I par paraphrase you called 3D ranking where you now have to consider what keywords you're ranking for how many you're ranking for and when you'll rank that there's a new appearing on the block. We're moving from 2D chess to 3D chess. And that's understanding that depending on where the person searches and their search history even if you're cited or ranking in the query found out hyper local results you may be excluded because the person for example keeps referring to Microsoft and the LLM then resorts to using a Microsoft search excluding anyone that Microsoft doesn't talk about if that makes sense. But it's the same thing but very different.

51:12 So the key thing is hyperpersonalization, isn't it? They're going to have cuz there I always it wasn't quite I'm not quite right in saying this, but there were they never wanted you if you're using a large learning model interface. They never wanted the results to totally pan out the same as if you went into Google because that would defeat the result of you choosing a large learning model, wouldn't it?
Extent. It's still more convenient in some ways maybe. I don't know.
Absolutely. It's more convenient. And I think there's three things to consider. Consider one, it's more convenient because instead of reading 20 pages, it gives you one page, right? Undeniable. The second thing is if there's only company, the 20 company in the world, and you're the CMO, a big order supplier, and I'm a CMO at a big restaurant group, and Kurt's the big at a music record label. I don't know why I made him. He's the guitarist or something, right? He's a musician.

52:24 Yeah, I think he is. I don't actually know. He's got musical. Yeah.
All right. Let's pretend he's the musician CEO of the group. It doesn't really make sense. It recommend and forgetting about CRM being for vertical. It doesn't make sense if it recommend Marketo to you and HubSpot to me and something else to Kurt. If we've got this user base and the number of seeds, it doesn't make any sense. And I think it's a trade-off the have to make between is there is there such a thing as objectivity the best or subjectivity the best. Is your background information more useful? Is it more useful to come up with a different recommendation each time or that we recommending something based on your history more valuable? I think that the number the problem that people fall into with this is thinking that people just do once. It's amazing what happens with an the minute you start pushing back and they have mistaken I don't agree with that and it capitulates and yeah you're right Jonathan I was lazy I took a shortcut or whatever and eventually changes its mind and it does this all the time. So what are the expect do with customers? Get them to or if I'm doing a call with thermal and I'm trying to help them understand things get them to ask how SEO works to go into chatp and say write strategy in 15 points and then don't even read it because I already know what it says. I would say go read the Google SEO starter guide and rewrite the strategy.

54:01 Inevitably, it'll come back with, "Wow, four of the things I told you were completely wrong and complete and I'm sorry about that. I won't do it again." And it will. It'll wake up tomorrow and do it again. And I don't know problem where the youth can see this and don't fully and truly understand their position because something else that we know actual practicality and why we still don't worry too much about AEO something that Jay had said to me which is buy always comes through Google search and Google ads or Bing and Bing app. So even if they're on ChatGPT or even

Q&A: EMDs & Private Blog Networks

54:44 On the purchase happened on Google and we don't know why that is.
Yeah, we have to see, won't we? But I follow you. Let's have a look. See, we've got some questions here. Basically having the main site and a couple named after high value terms as the names of a couple other site. Are you following what he's asking here? He's lost me.
Okay. Adam's a great guy. He's always great for asking good questions on LinkedIn. And thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate it. Really appreciate you asking today. So yeah, what do you think? If you have your branded domain and you got to build other EMD, are you essentially building a PBN or link farm? PBN just mean private blog network. I think sometimes people think of PBN like upscale link farms, but that's effectively what he's asking. And if you're not careful, yeah, but potentially I don't I don't think Google has enforced idea where company has one domain. I know a lot of company follow the Microsoft route where they have the English Japanese version on the same domain. A lot of other companies eat Amazon actually have Amazon.com, Amazon.ie in Ireland, Amazon.co.uk in the UK. And that's because it's not just the language difference. For example, in Switzerland, you've got German, Italian, Romanian, and French and maybe even this one to one thing doesn't happen very much. And if you just build the content out and you're just building it as a PBN, sure, the way we do it, we build them with a purpose.

56:25 The purpose in life could be as a news site. We want we don't want to share news branded domain but maybe we'll share news here or the domain is a collaboration between two companies right maybe it's an airline and instead of the two airlines they build a
Can I interrupt I forgot the lady's name I think she's Polish she's well known as a SEO and she was on Edward's show I think last week and she was or it might be in another podcast I was listening to and she was saying it was to do with they were talking about a well-known SEO personality that had a lawsuit and they buried it using reputation techniques and she was talking about when she had one she was pushing she developed one of these networks and she was just about to go on the floor of a large SEO conference and her network got destroyed by Google, got bealized by Google, and it what and it was all on Twitter like 2 hours before she was going to go on and do a presentation and Google destroyed it and it took her years to re to come back from the damage. So Google doesn't like these if it's not done in the way that you describe. They don't like them, do they?

57:58 If it's too manipulated, yeah, you're at risk, right? For sure. But
I can see we don't build EMD covert operations where we're trying to surreptitiously the market or to pretend that we're doing providing information or aggregator. Normally we're very clear up front because we for example it we might build them asation and that's something Google does all the time. Google in order to build Google Cloud has a very big free certificate security or if you want to become a cloud architect, you can get free certifications from Google that could otherwise cost you 10 $20,000 in student fees and that can be a very good high paying job in the workforce. It makes sense to have a dedicated domain where you sell that. How Google will often sometimes conflate domains and turn them into subdomains or subdirectories and do whatever it does for it branding purpose but that's for a branding purpose I don't think EMDs are if you start EMD to just do backlinks that's not the point and that's the point of a PBN the point of it carve yourself out and put yourself realize that your new money is coming from generics and to help answer generics and that's what it's for if you're using a just backlink that's not going to work. What I mean is I think people you asked me a question earlier do backlink count and this sometimes where I get in trouble by not explaining this. Yes, backlinks count but you don't have to go buying a 100 backlinks. I would argue that people at the bottom of the scale the 80% of the backlinks are dying off within a month of purchasing them and that 70% of them had no value anyway.

59:48 And I would say that same thing at the higher end of the scale. I a lot of people that come to me I look at their backlinks just out of curiosity. I don't know why people think that they can eyeball the backlink but people seem to think that we can that humans can somehow do that. But a lot of them are losing as many backlinks as they're creating. Right? But if you create a backlink with a partner and they're getting value from that p and you are that's not going to disappear because that the that lays the golden egg. If you look at how much authority comes from a page right with 99 we flew to an conference tomorrow with IRL or Brighton or master 99% compet still be driven by DA domain authority. Okay. Oh, I got a DA 92 or a DA9. That doesn't matter. I can I've seen a DA of 70 where the traffic is at, but the DA is calculated over two months because they're having to do all of these mathematics line with the number of positions they have and the amount of traffic they need to get to try and balance the DA across all of the domains and keywords. It's just such a wrong it's such anated way of doing it, I think.

1:01:04 And I think our last question is about this one.
I think that's the last question. You need to go back one.
Oh, do we? All right. Oh, yeah. You've done it again.
Yeah. I think that's the only one that's been asked actually,
Is it?
One question. What about press releases? How soon after you go live do you tend to push that?
Oh,
I really think that when building traffic to a new domain name, you start months in advance. Go build your community. Go online, tell people what they're doing. Ask CEOs for input.

Q&A: Press Releases

1:01:38 People feel like they have buy in. Don't be afraid to ask for help. You can always make up to people. You can always pay them back whatever way, shape, or form that comes. And as you're helping them and they're helping you, you can start building anticipation and excitement for this. You do a press release the day it launches. You can build any profile before it launches. There nothing you there's no Google secret domain watching committee that out there got Jonathan built a press release before he his shop opened that's not how it works if you do that you're going to hurt yourself because at this people are going to go to your website and it's not there you can do this as soon as possible for me the value in the press release the back the value of the press release is new coffee shop taho because that's what people for not problem is people will start it with Cuppa John where cup of John is the
Yeah it's fant you do it
I've already purchased that domain name actually do that really
Oh god I've got enough on my plate so I

Wrap Up & Outro

1:02:54 Think it's been a great show David I think we've covered a load of stuff. What's the best way for people to find out more about you and what you're up to? David,
Come join us today. Talk to the should be easy to find, right?
Yeah. If you want to support the show, folks, give us a fivestar review on iTunes or Spotify if you're listening to this. If you're watching us, go to the David Quaid YouTube channel and subscribe to David's channel. They're the best way to support the show. We will be back next week with another great discussion, internal discussion, or we have a guest. We'll see you next week, folks. See you soon. Bye.