Deep Dive into SEO with Expert Insights with Joshua George

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast, where we explore the intricacies of digital marketing and help you transform browsers into buyers. I'm your host, Andy Spliekel, and today we are going to take a deep dive into the evolving world of SEO with some pointed questions that get to the heart of creating effective SEO strategies. Joining us today is a seasoned SEO expert who has been instrumental in shaping successful SEO campaigns across diverse industries. A big welcome to Josh George. Hi, Josh.

Josh George:

Hey, Andy, thanks for having me.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, thanks for coming on. Now, let's start with this. I mean, everything seems to be changing. So today, what are the key factors that influence Google's algorithm for ranking websites?

Josh George:

Yeah, so there's two types of things, really. There's two components, I should say. The first is relevancy and the second is authority. And what I mean by that is Google's only going to rank a website if it deems it to be one of two things, right? Number one, relevant to the topic of the search phrase, that's where relevancy comes from. And number two, authority of trustworthy, which is where the authority essence comes from. So I guess it's kind of interesting if you look at it from a customer's perspective or even Google's perspective. Google's ultimate goal is to return the best search result to the user. So if you can convince Google your website is relevant to the topic of that search phrase, it's going to show your website, right? And on the flip side of things, if you can prove to Google your website is trustworthy and authoritative, it's going to show your website to the user.

Josh George:

Now, the brands that are winning and making the most amount of money organically from SEO are the brands that could do both, essentially convince people they're relevant and also convince them that they are formative as well.

Andy Splichal:

So how does a company decide which keywords they want to rank for?

Josh George:

That's a great question. So they should target essentially every term that is related to their brand. So we typically have two types of keyword brackets we target for our clients. So the first is transactional keywords. So imagine you've got a men's grooming brand selling men's razor blades, right? A transactional intent keyword would be men's razor blades. Right. Someone who searches for men's razor blade is most likely a man who is looking for a razor blade. So those terms are from users who are ready to make a purchase.

Josh George:

So they're like a bread and butter of the keywords we want to target. But there's also other keywords which users aren't ready to purchase but they know about the product. For example, an informational keyword could be which Razorbait is the best. Right. And if someone is searching for which Razor blade is the best, you still want to get your brand in front of them. Again, you don't want to send them to your category page, but you still want to capture that user, maybe for a blog post, and then filter them through to your category page once they're ready to make a purchase. So again, you want to be targeting transactional keywords and informational keywords too.

Andy Splichal:

Now, by device, is it the same results that appear on mobile devices as desktop?

Josh George:

No, it actually used to be like back in the day. But Google, as you probably already know, is changing literally every single week on week. So there's a mobile first index now, which essentially means the mobile version of your website is considered the primary version, where back in the day it was your desktop and then it was a mobile. Now, 60.6% of all users are actually accessing websites through mobiles now. So mobile is literally the main thing you should be focusing on. And when we speak of a lot of ecom brands who just recently get their website redesigned, they're always designing it for desktop first and then tweaking it for mobile, when in reality you should be building your website and designing it for mobile first and then tweaking for desktop. And that way you're optimizing your website for the core function of Google, Google Mobile.

Andy Splichal:

So you had mentioned mobile first indexing. How are the strategies, are they different on trying to get ranked on mobile then?

Josh George:

It's essentially the same strategies because Google uses the same algorithm both for desktop and mobile. It just crawls your website first on mobile, ranks it and then assigns a ranking for desktop. Now, it's also the reason why, like when we're taking a lot of Ecom brands, you'll notice they'll be ranking really, really high on desktop, maybe like number one, number two for the keywords, but you carry out the same keyword search for mobile and they're ranking like number twelve, number 15 on page two. And it's because the website is not even built for mobile. Like the menus clashing with the product, you can't really scroll. It's all glitchy because they just built it for desktop first and then tweaked it for mobile. So again, it's kind of a backwards strategy really.

Andy Splichal:

So I know last year, or maybe it was here before, but Google updated their algorithm to include page speed insights. How does page speed affect your SEO? I mean, what bucket is that? The trust bucket that, that falls into and how important is it?

Josh George:

Yeah, again, it goes back to Google's ultimate goal is trying to serve up the best website to a user. So Google did actually confirm this and we have a general rule of thumb that all websites should load within 3 seconds. And if it doesn't, you can actually experience a negative impact on your visibility. And it does go back to trust, but it's more of a ux kind of thing. If Google ranks your website number one and people click through your website, through Google and it's taking 15 seconds to load, people aren't going to be happy with Google, right? They're going to go to Yahoo, you're Bing instead, and Google's going to lose its market share. So it's not just directly affecting SEO in terms of the SEO algorithm, it's more about affecting your users. And I think a lot of brands these days and even some SEO agencies completely overlook the users. They're just so tied up and just doing SEO, making my website number one.

Josh George:

But if your users aren't happy and the page is taking 20 seconds, hello, they're just going to bounce. And all that does is send a very clear signal to Google that this is not what users are looking for and you lose all that visibility that you just gained.

Andy Splichal:

So how should a site owner check their page speed and how often should they be doing this?

Josh George:

Great question. So there's two main tools that we use is Google pagespeed Insights, which obviously the bread and butter, and also another one called gtmetrix which is pretty good as you can plug in a website URL and check the page speed from different locations. So if you're an EcOM brand and maybe you sell in the UK, US, Canada and Australia, you can check how fast your website loads in all of those different locations. As what typically happens is when you create a website and you hosting, you build your server, the server's in one location. So you could have a us brand that has a server in, I don't know, let's say Chicago, but they've got users in the UK trying to access their website and what it has to do is that user then have to ping to the server in Chicago and then come back to the London to serve up the, basically the result. So I would say in terms of kind of measuring it, you want to be checking, I would say ideally every quarter.

Andy Splichal:

So that's interesting. I mean, you brought up a point there. If you are selling stuff to countries other than the US, are they getting different results on their SEO based on.

Josh George:

Where they're searching from for most keywords? Yes. For example, is obviously english, british spelling, then there's american version. Right. So if you're targeting both countries, you kind of need to decide what kind of terminology do you want to be using of english grammar across the website. And naturally it's going to be very hard to rank number one in the UK and US for a term. If you have different businesses in the UK and US that just maybe only sell in those markets, target in the same terms. And again, it just goes back to Google's ultimate goal, right, to serve the user the best result. So if I go back to the original example of maybe men's razor blades, imagine you've got a brand in Canada that just sells men's razor blades.

Josh George:

Like they are dominating Canada and they are the brand to go to in Canada. Then you've got a company in the US that does exactly the same thing and they dominate the US, but they also sell in Canada. Google is not going to show the US brand over the canadian results in Canada. It just doesn't make sense for them.

Andy Splichal:

So let's talk about, I mean, you can't have an SEO conversation without talking about backlinks. I know they used to be really important, then I heard they're not and now they kind of are. I mean, where are you with backlinks?

Josh George:

You know, interesting enough, we've actually seen from our own data, right in house campaigns that backlinks are actually going from strength to strengthen. I believe it's because AI is just becoming more and more popular. And what that means is people are using chat, GPT, they're using claude air, all of these AI tools, and they're just producing content at scale that's never been seen before. So if everyone's producing content and the content is somewhat quality because they're spell checking, it the proofreading it, the fact checking it, who kind of stands out, right? If you've got the hundred blogs, he has 100 blogs, she has 100 blogs. The difference typically is going to be what site has the best backlink profile. And link building has always been one of the most challenging parts of SEO is there's so many nuances involved in it. So if you can really nail down your link building, get high quality links and high quality sites, that typically is going to be the deciding factor as to what site ranks above the other. And you know, it's always like anything in life, it's always about quality over quantity.

Josh George:

And one high quality link is worth way more than 1000 low quality links.

Andy Splichal:

So how do you do that for your clients? What kind of backlink strategy do you implement?

Josh George:

So the two we typically stick by is guest posting. And there's a lot of people out there that do guest posting. And I think the reason why most of them don't get results, which is probably why you was kind of under the impression as well that link building doesn't work or it doesn't get results, is because everyone's just reaching out to the same website. When we do link building for our clients, we always kind of have this rule of thumb or this golden rule we follow. The harder it is to acquire the link, the more value that link has, because it's harder for your competitors to replicate that. So when we would link for our clients, we follow five criteria. Like number one, the domain we're getting a link from should be 100% relevant to the client site. Number two, the domain should be high in authority itself.

Josh George:

Number three, the site should also have a solid backlink profile itself. Number four, the site should have lots of real organic traffic. And most importantly, number five, the site you're getting a link from shouldn't have been hit by any previous Google algorithm updates. And if you don't follow those steps, you're just going to get the same links that everyone else gets and kind of undermine the overall SEO campaign and the other half of it. As I was saying, digital pr. Again, this is more future proof. In our clients SEO, we want to acquire links that the competitors are going to take months and months if they even can replicate them. And again, just makes it a lot easier for our clients to get results and a lot harder for them to be pushed out of the market as well.

Andy Splichal:

So you identify who you would like to link to you. How do you get them to link to you?

Josh George:

Outreach. So we don't take on like any client that comes to us. We had some really interesting leads over the years from econ brands selling all different types of products in different niches. And if we know the product is maybe a little bit shady or there's not really any USP, they're not doing anything crazy or anything insane out of the ordinary, then it doesn't matter how many websites you reach out to, they're not going to link to our client site. Sometimes it doesn't really matter, like I said, because you can pay your way and you can pay these sites link to your client site, which in reality, I'll be honest, a lot of these link exchanges are typically, hey, you own this website. It's relentless to my client's website. I want to get my client featured. Here's some money, again, just like sponsored ads really.

Josh George:

And they will go ahead and link to your client. But there are some sites that it doesn't matter how much you pay, they will not link to the client site unless it's an exact relevant match and if it supports their brand as well. So yeah, if we can work with a client that is great in the industry, they've already got some authority. Maybe they're running meta ads, Google Ads. It makes our process a lot easier to pitch that site to all of these other websites as well.

Andy Splichal:

And how do you find, I mean, is there a tool that you use that you're finding relative websites that you would like to link to your clients or. How dare you? Even identifying them to start with.

Josh George:

Yeah, so we do it all manual. I think there's a reason why we get such quality links. And if you use tools, which I won't name any, but if you use all the most common tools out there, you're just going to do what everyone else does, which means you're going to be getting the same links as everyone else. So a good example of what we do to find relevant sites is if we take on an ecomm brand that maybe sells electric bikes, right? What we typically do is we search for an information related keyword. So maybe something like the pros and cons of electric bikes, right? And typically sites that are writing about electric bikes. And that topic is somewhat related to electric bikes. So just by carrying out that search and looking at the first ten results or first ten pages, sorry, the first 100 results on Google, you're going to find lots of relevant websites. Now, again, not all of them are going to say, yes, I'll feature your client and write about them, but this is where we have four people full time doing outreach, sending these messages, and we don't just email like most people, we email, we call, we message on LinkedIn, sometimes even x as well, like Twitter now.

Josh George:

So it's just about taking a multi channel approach this to make sure you're increasing the chances of getting as many high quality links for your client as possible.

Andy Splichal:

And what's the success rate on your reach out to how many people answer you and say, okay, that'd be great.

Josh George:

It's a good question. So I would say if we email a thousand sites, again, it's going to vary per niche, especially in the price point of the ECom stores we work with as well. We email a thousand sites, I think probably get sponsored, about 30% of them. So about 300. And then out of that 300, I would say maybe 10% at 30 links, I would say, because a lot of sites you spend literally, I kid you not, weeks going back and forth on the topic. Again, some sites you can close within an hour, say, okay, my client write about this, here's money, get it featured. But yeah, I would say 30% out of outreach. Then out of that 30%, 10%, we actually get a link secured.

Josh George:

So yeah, we send thousands of emails every single week. It's actually insane.

Andy Splichal:

So, and when somebody comes to you guys, I mean, you mentioned they need to have a unique product, a unique selling proposition on their product. But I mean, what do you say? Okay, you'd be a fit for our agency. What do you look at to start with? With an SEO audit?

Josh George:

Yeah, that's a great question. So typically we always carry out audit on the first month of start an SEO campaign. And the core things I see across most EcOM brands is they have really poor optimization of the pages HTML heading structure. So if we use an example of an EcOM brand maybe selling golf clubs, right, they haven't really optimized a page from an SEO standpoint because they don't really care if Google knows they're about golf clubs or not because they're maybe running meta ads or Google Ads, right. They're paying for that traffic. So when it comes to trying to rank organically, there's literally no relevancy whatsoever. And it touches back to the first one I mentioned. Relevancy is so important.

Josh George:

If Google doesn't know what your page is about, it's never going to serve up your results. When users are searching for keywords relate to the products you sell. So optimization, no h one, no page title, no meta description. The core basic things is what so many brands overlook. And we run an audit and we basically look at all the page structures h one s just per day the first month of the campaign. So we find this stuff very quickly. Another issue I see a lot of Ecomm brands making that we always pick up in the audits as well is if it's a Shopify website, they have collection pages, right? If it's a standard, maybe ecom brand, they've got category pages. And category pages are notoriously known for being very thin.

Josh George:

This is my category page about golf clubs. And here's 50 products, all the golf clubs I sell. But that is not enough content on that page for Google to understand, hey, this page is about golf clubs. So again, we can quickly come in, add some content on the khaki page, below the products, below the fold, and straight away Google understands this page is about golf clubs and then increases the ranking. So again, I see a lot of brands going wrong. And the third one I would say is brands don't have any, like, I would say a content calendar structure in place at all. Most econ brands we take on either, number one, are not publishing any blog content at all, or number two, the publishing blogs. But that is the whole SEO strategy.

Josh George:

Just blog after blog after blog. And you know, blogs are great. That as I touched on earlier, that's only going to acquire information related traffic. So when we're auditing these type of clients, you know, we say to him, like, have you done any SEO? Like, yeah, yeah, we published 100 blogs last month. It's like, okay, that's great. But like, what's happened? Yeah, our traffic's gone through the roof. Like, oh, wow, okay, cool. Like, have you made any more money? No, traffic's gone up, but our revenue is the same.

Josh George:

It's like, yes, because you just acquired more informational related traffic. Right. The goal is not to just generate traffic from SEO, is to make actual more organic sales on the traffic you're acquiring. So again, I think the content calendar and the content schedule is what say something so many brands actually overlook and go wrong?

Andy Splichal:

Well, I mean, you have a lot of information there. One thing I wanted to touch on real quick is on the category pages. I think I heard you say that you put that content below the full, below the products.

Josh George:

Yes.

Andy Splichal:

Is that because that information, I mean, it's really written for Google?

Josh George:

Yeah, it's a bit of both, really. Number one, if someone is searching for like maybe golf clubs using the same example, right, and they land on your category page and all they're seeing is content about golf clubs, that's mismatching. The search intent, like someone's ready to buy a golf club, so you should show them what they want. Golf clubs. And then the content is below the page to support it and increase the relevancy. So it is predominantly there for Google and SEO. But we don't just like write any content, it's more of a buyer's guide. So like what to look out for when buying a golf club.

Josh George:

Maybe the length, the different type of golf club. So users who scroll that far down the page, they're probably not ready to make a decision yet. So having that content there then builds more trust and also increases conversion. So it's kind of like a double whammy, so to speak.

Andy Splichal:

And then the other thing you mentioned is somebody might generate a lot of traffic but no sales. I guess that is the biggest thing with SEO is it's a lot more difficult to track success than it is with a pay per click. Because they click, they go there, they buy, they don't buy. But you can instantly tell the roas. How do you track success with an SEO campaign over time?

Josh George:

Great question. The free KPI's that we track for our clients is keyword ranking. So whether website ranks for a keyword then organic traffic. So the higher keyword ranks, the more organic traffic you can get. But only the third and the one that we kind of live and die by is organic revenue. And typically what you see is we start a campaign, the keyword rankings go up, they're now more visible on Google, then the organic traffic goes up. And as long as the organic traffic is relevant for the right keywords that make the money, organic revenue always follows. So I think, again, like most ECoM brands and a lot of agencies are just so tied on, like, we're ranking number one, we're ranking number one.

Josh George:

Traffic's gone up. But brands don't care about that. They just want more money. They're not hiring SEO to see vanity traffic going up in Google Analytics. They want more organic revenue.

Andy Splichal:

So when you take on a client, how long does it typically take before you start seeing results?

Josh George:

This is a great question, again. So it all varies on what type of site it is and what's happened. In the past, we've taken brand new EcoM brands from zero to 100k, literally in three months. It all depends on the budget as well. As a general rule of thumb, we always tell clients budget for six to nine months. But as we work on a rolling 30 day basis, we obviously try our best to get results a lot quicker than that. We have had results for clients literally in 48 hours. They're really big authority.

Josh George:

Websites have done SEO in the past, but they're just missing out the basics and they're able to optimize in some aspects. So our team can come in quickly, make some tweaks and modifications and already rank in number one.

Andy Splichal:

So let's talk about the budget. What, I mean, what budget are you talking about with a client that they need to know.

Josh George:

Sure. So our fees start from 3000 pound per month, which in dollars is about 3600. I believe we're going to change all the time. Right. And that would allow us to target up to three to four different category pages on the website. So the way we price our fees is kind of tied into where we work, right. There's no contract, so we only price and what we know is going to generate results. And again, it all comes back to the same strategy I touched on initially with.

Josh George:

Your first question is relevancy and authority. So we know we can increase the site's relevancy by publishing more high quality content and we know we can increase the site's authority by acquiring more high quality backlinks. So at 3000 pounds that would provide us with enough resources to work on up to three to four category pages. We do have some occasions where clients will say, hey, I've got a budget of 3000 pounds a month and I want to target 20 different category pages. It's just like, hey, we don't have enough resources. We're going to be spread so thin. You're just not going to build that relevance and authority and pretty much just throw money down the drain.

Andy Splichal:

So do you focus on just three or four categories pages for the full nine months? Do you work on a few pages, couple months, then switch. I mean, how does your focus go on those?

Josh George:

Yeah, we typically are dictated by the client. You know, sometimes we'll rank number one for a keyword in the first two months and the client will say, I don't want to increase the budget. Let's move this free k to another free page. Let me just kind of move that budget around. Some clients will say, wow, I'm ranking number one in two months. Let's double and go for another six pages. Right. And it isn't just free pages we kind of focus on.

Josh George:

We actually optimize all the category pages. So we do the content, h one internal links, all the technical stuff, but we just use the blogs and links to support those free pages, kind of make sure we're not spread too thin essentially.

Andy Splichal:

And when you move on to a different page. Do you find the rankings come back down or do they stay where you get them?

Josh George:

It depends how fast you pivot. So we always recommend maintaining the number one spot for a minimum of six weeks. Because if you rank number one, that basically means you've told Google you're relevant and authority on this topic. Right? And by doing that, you've sent Google loads of positive signals. So if you just remove those signals too prematurely, you will lose the ranking. So yeah, six weeks is kind of what we recommend, a month and a half.

Andy Splichal:

And how is AI affecting SEO? And are you guys using AI in your work?

Josh George:

Yeah, I would say AI is definitely affecting the industry more than I anticipated and I think it's having more of a negative effect on SEO. So we don't use AI to write any content. And the reason why I stay clear of that is we offer a premium service. And what I've noticed from all of our tests of running AI chat, DBT, and even more complicated tools like Kapla Sh, for example, is it doesn't really produce any unique content. It's just kind of regurgitating what else is on the Internet. So if everyone's using AI, everyone ends up with the same content and AI isn't really optimized for SEO at all. It's just write me a blog post on golf clubs or men's razor blazing people just take that, upload it and you know, half the time these pages aren't even getting indexed, so they actually add in no value to your SEO efforts whatsoever. We do use AI for our blog briefs, though.

Josh George:

So when our team is writing a blog, maybe our on page SEO team will create a brief, send it to our content team and they'll use AI to kind of fast track the blog brief creation process. But then we have an actual human that writes the content.

Andy Splichal:

So with your agency, what type of customers are you currently serving and how can they contact you for more information?

Josh George:

Yeah, so we work exclusively with EcOM brands who essentially who are looking to become less reliant on paid ads and want to scale the store more organically via an organic me like SEO. So yeah, that sounds maybe someone like you. If you're listening to this call, you're an EcOM brand, then obviously I would invite you to book a free discovery call with us where, you know, we're happy to show you where exactly you're going wrong on the call. And we can also explore your brand's potential for organic growth as well. And I mean, if it makes sense to work together, great. If not no hard feelings, you know, we'll leave you with more knowledge than you had before you joined the call.

Andy Splichal:

And are most of your clients us based? International? Where are most of your clients at?

Josh George:

Yeah, fun enough. We're actually a UK agency, but 70% of our clients are in the US. I would say like our least amount of clients are probably in the UK. I feel like brands in the US, there's just a bigger market, there's more money to be made. So yeah, I think that's probably why majority of our clients come from there.

Andy Splichal:

Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap it up today? Josh?

Josh George:

Yeah, I would say if you guys want to stay up to date on what's working in the ecommerce SEO space and obviously feel free to follow me on Twitter. Or should we say x? I'm very active on there, always publishing case studies. My x handle is Joshua SEO.

Andy Splichal:

Well, this has been great for listeners. Don't forget to check out Josh by going to www dot clickslice dot co dot UK. Thanks for tuning in and make sure you subscribe for more insights on mastering the ecommerce world. And if you enjoyed this episode, please go to Apple Podcast and leave us an honest review. That's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I'll talk to you in the next episode.