---
title: SEO 101
date: 2019-01-29T06:00:00-05:00
author: Sean Smith
canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-5/seo-101/"
section: Podcast
---
<!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Guest Luke Stevens
Web designer/developer/analyst who loves building sites and measuring how they perform.
[ ](http://twitter.com/lukestevens)
Season 01 Episode 5 – Jan 29, 2019
1:0:41 [Show Notes](#show-notes)
## SEO 101
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[](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-01/05-Luke-Stevens-SEO-Master-final.mp3)
A discussion with Luke Stevens talking about the basics of SEO including advice on how to improve your SEO as well as what to avoid and how to choose an SEO specialist.
### Show Notes
In this interview with Luke Stevens we discussed SEO. We began with a definition of what SEO is and then some general ideas on building your content and expertise to improve your results.
We also talked about E.A.T which is Expertise, Authority, and Trust.. Luke also talked about technical SEO, how to improve your search results appearance with more details and appropriate meta data.
Other talking points include:
- Improving CTR (Click Through Rate) is easier than improving your ranking.
- Structured Data
- A/B Testing
- SEO Myths
- Content Marketing
- How to choose a good SEO Agency
### Show Links
- [Toku (Luke Stevens)](https://itstoku.com/)
- [Google Search Quality Guidelines for SEO](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf)
- [Dominic Woodman Slide Deck](https://www.slideshare.net/DominicWoodman/19-lessons-i-learned-from-a-year-of-seo-split-testing)
- [Moz](https://moz.com/)
- [Google Search Console](https://search.google.com/search-console/about)
- [Google SEO 101 Guidelines](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en)
Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology.
**\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Welcome to the latest episode of the website 101 Podcast. I'm Sean Smith, your host. And today I have special guest, Luke Stevens, out of Australia. And his company is Toku. Luke, could you introduce yourself and tell us where in Australia you're from?
**\[00:20\]** **Luke:** Sure. So thanks for having me, Sean. I'm from Melbourne, in Australia, originally from sunny Sydney. And yeah, I'm a freelance developer and consultants. I've been building websites for more than 15 years now, I guess. Probably longer than I'd get to admit.
**\[00:45\]** **Sean:** Yeah. That is about 100 years in internet, internet years. That's right. 15 years, that's a really long time. Your company name is a little bit unusual, Toku.
**\[01:00\]** **Luke:** What does that mean? So sort of changed direction slightly with my business recently. I made it to come up with a new name to freelance and consult under. And I'm a big believer in data and in not overthinking things. So I think it doesn't really matter what name you call your business. It matters what meaning you give it. So I just wanted to come up with something that was kind of making that point that was kind of random. And I went with a Japanese word that sort of loosely means kind of healthy profitability, which is what businesses
**\[01:44\]** **Sean:** should aim for. I like that idea. Do you speak Japanese?
**\[01:50\]** **Luke:** Only about five words, but my wife is studying Japanese. So yeah.
**\[01:57\]** **Sean:** Fascinating. So Luke has a lot of experience and knowledge in SEO, which is our topic for today. And we're both active in a slackroom for Crafts CMS. And in that slackroom, Luke went in and gave a long explanation about how he approaches SEO. And at that point, I asked him if he'd like to be a guest on the podcast. So that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to jump in, have a number of questions prepared. And hopefully listeners and myself, we can learn a lot and come away with more knowledge about how best to use SEO to improve our search rankings, businesses, and make more money. So Luke, what exactly is SEO?
**\[02:53\]** **Luke:** Yeah. So SEO is such an optimization, which many people are familiar with vaguely, but maybe get a little bit lost in when it comes to the details. And there's kind of an idea that SEO is kind of magic. It's black magic. It requires secrets. It requires gurus. It requires high priests that can appeal to the Google gods.
**\[03:27\]** **Sean:** I am entirely behind that. It really does feel like voodoo magic.
**\[03:35\]** **Luke:** Yeah, definitely. And so people on the small business side, particularly, and large businesses, too, of course, really need good SEO. Their businesses often depend on it. But the SEO industry and people that make websites, sometimes, how do I say, sometimes can either get lost in jargon or can tend to bamboozle with a lot of technical details that isn't really helpful for small business owners or people who have a website that plays a role in their business.
**\[04:23\]** **Sean:** Yeah. Well, the technical aspect of it, I don't think a lot of business owners are going to want to know how to do all the technical part. That would be up to the web developer. But also, how can we do good SEO? Like, I've heard this term black hat and white hat SEO. Can you talk about that a little bit?
**\[04:52\]** **Luke:** Sure. So let's back up a little bit, though, just before we get into the differences on, say, black hat and white hat. And the way I like to think about SEO is people often jump into the ranking side of things. So I want to be number one in Google. What can you do to make me number one for?
**\[05:17\]** **Sean:** I want to be number one, too.
**\[05:19\]** **Luke:** Yeah, right. Everyone wants to be number one. And so there's this desire to jump straight to the kind of optimizing and the tricks or the quick fix that you can do. But I like to think that before you get to search engine optimization, you need to do some search engine understanding, if I can put it that way. And I feel like that.
**\[05:45\]** **Sean:** S-O-S-E-U search engine understanding.
**\[05:50\]** **Luke:** OK. Doesn't have quite the same ring to it. But to me, that's a very helpful place to start, whether you're the person working on the website, on behalf of a client. Or if you're the business owner or a site owner yourself, if you can start by understanding your users, what they're searching for, understand the search results that you want to play a part in. And look at what Google is giving to users to show what Google thinks is relevant to users who are searching for this query. And then think about your own site and where you might fit into that understanding of how search is operating for your market or your users or specific query. So I think that's kind of a really good place to start. And kind of gives people a better grounding than jumping straight to the tips and tricks.
**\[06:56\]** **Sean:** One of the things you said was understanding how Google thinks that your search query is all about. Can you explain that a little bit more? How can I understand what Google expects from a search query?
**\[07:12\]** **Luke:** Yeah, sure. So often, again, with SEO in general, there's this idea of ranking. How is Google ranking you? And how you understand that can be quite difficult. That is a black box to everyone. And that's why you should always be a little bit skeptical about SEO gurus who claim they've got the secret, because the level of technology that Google uses to rank websites and the number of factors, maybe a couple of hundred factors, go into ranking websites. That's hard to understand. But the flip side of that is to understand what users want is more straightforward. It's not easy, but it's straightforward. And so if you go to the search engine result page or Serps in SEO jargon, that's what Serp is.
**\[08:22\]** **Sean:** Search engine result page. OK. Yeah, I know.
**\[08:25\]** **Luke:** That's right. Yeah, you can get a feel for what users might be searching for. And there's been some really interesting work done on search intent. And you can kind of group the results you might see on a search engine result page by the type of intent that might be there on the user side. So that might be a research or informational intent where users might be asking, what is this service or product? It might be a commercial intent where people want to buy something. And you'll see Google will surface retailers, in that case, to satisfy that particular intent.
**\[09:09\]** **Sean:** Is intent determined by using question words? Like you said, what is some product name? Or how do I use this product name? Or can intent just be used with just general terms? So for example, maybe I'm looking to, oh, what am I going to do? What do I want to do? I want to do some home innovations. And I'm not sure how to paint my house. What if I just search for house paint or painting house instead of how do I paint my house? Is Google going to know this sort of thing?
**\[09:51\]** **Luke:** Yeah. So that's an interesting example where there's several different ways that my daughter might be the technique. You might want information on how to actually do the painting. You might want information on products, specific paints. You might have sort of regional specific questions. You might be interested in house paint because you live in a very sunny area and you don't want the paint to fade very quickly. So Google, in the way it organizes its results, pages, will tend to try and satisfy often multiple kind of intents on the one page. So if it's a very specific query, then obviously, you're going to get very specific results. But for more general things? And searching. Yeah. For more general things, which is where the volume tends to be, the volume of people searching, you can sort of try and group the results you see by those types of intent. And that will give you clues into where your website might play a role and where you might fit into that kind of little ecosystem of search results.
**\[11:07\]** **Sean:** OK. That's very interesting. So intent. I've spent some time looking at my site and thinking about how I might fit into these results. How could I optimize to improve my ranking? Sure. And you said they're up to 200 factors or more because we really don't know exactly what Google is doing. How can tweaking or focusing on intent or any other one factor really improve my ranking?
**\[11:45\]** **Luke:** Sure. So this is where I like to think sort of through the whole business process as well. So people have a kind of simplified idea of what their website might be. And they might be thinking, my website is my homepage. My homepage has a very specific, well, not a specific, a very general kind of content might be aiming for general keywords, but where your customers are and what they're searching for might be more specific. And it's worth understanding your customers kind of buying journey and that kind of funnel that they go through in their buying process. So when you understand both where they might start with a kind of search intent and then where they finish when they're getting closer to making a purchasing decision, you can then figure out, OK, I need to rank for maybe some broader informational terms at the start. And then some very specific terms later on in their buying journey where they might be closer to making a decision. So that then informs the kind of content you might want to produce that gets people, that basically helps users in that journey and helps them achieve what they want to achieve. And that's what Google wants to see as well. They want to see content that helps users not that's optimized to death just for search engine ranking.
**\[13:30\]** **Sean:** Right. So content that's useful, this could be, for example, a blog post about how to paint an exterior wall or how to remove the paint. So you're providing guides or helpful information for people related to your business.
**\[13:51\]** **Luke:** Yeah, that's right. And a good way of thinking about what, like in SEO terms, writing quality content is a bit of a well-worn cliche. It's not very helpful necessarily. But for my point of view, it really helps to start digging down into the specifics of what your users are trying to achieve and what they might want to know. And a common occurrence that I've seen a lot of with highly sort of, and perhaps poorly, search optimized content is you'll be looking for a local dentist or something like that. And you'll go to the website. And the website has the entire human history of dentistry there because they think that information is what users want. And yes, you can fit in a lot of keywords, I guess, about dentistry if you include the entire history of dentistry. But it's not necessarily helpful.
**\[14:58\]** **Sean:** But that's not what I want to know when I go to a dentist site. I want to know, are you a general dentist? Are you an orthodontist? Do you do pariodontics, surgery? What time are you open? Yeah, exactly. What's your phone number? I want to make an appointment.
**\[15:16\]** **Luke:** Yeah, definitely.
**\[15:17\]** **Sean:** I don't need to know the, I could go to Wikipedia if I wanted the history of dentistry.
**\[15:24\]** **Luke:** That's right. Yeah. So when it comes to quality content, to go back to the house painting example, when you get people are hungry for information, they want to know what it is that they can do. And it's common, I think, for businesses to think, well, say, where are we painters? We do house painting. We don't want to tell you our secrets for the way to do your house painting, because then you'll just go and do it yourself, and you're in higher hours. But I think often the reverse is true. When you can educate people on what is actually involved, and what all the little things are that you need to watch out for, then the more people understand what it truly takes to do a good job, the more likely they are to actually want to hire you to do that good job and not sort of wing it themselves.
**\[16:35\]** **Sean:** You know, coincidentally, this morning, I was listening to a podcast, and I believe it was with Jonathan Stark. He's well known for doing business podcasts. And one of the things was mentioned is, right, you give away your content, and it creates a social obligation to work with you or provide something back. Now, it's not like you have to, but it creates this sort of intent in the visitor that they want to return something back towards you. So providing a how to guide on how to paint your house or how to take better care of your teeth. It's kind of counterintuitive, because you're giving away some of the secrets of the trade, but I'm gonna go to you because you clearly have demonstrated your expertise. And I want to get more of it.
**\[17:34\]** **Luke:** Yeah, definitely. I think demonstrating expertise is the key there. And yeah, it doesn't matter how kind of routine or every day you might find your work or what you do, or the type of things you're doing, to the person looking to hire you or buy services from you, it's new. It's new to them. There's lots they don't know, and there's lots that you can teach them. And that's another useful tool for thinking about what quality content looks like, is how you can educate and teach users as well. And just to segue slightly, I thought it was worth mentioning that quality content, as far as Google is concerned, isn't a mysterious sort of secret entity either. They publish guidelines about both, what you should do as a website owner. And when Google themselves are assessing the quality of their search results, they use these humans. It's not all algorithmic. They use humans as a sort of...
**\[18:46\]** **Sean:** I did not know that there was humans behind search results. So they're adjusting the waiting somehow?
**\[18:54\]** **Luke:** Well, there's not humans in how it ranks originally. That's obviously, algorithmic and there's a lot of machine learning there. And a lot of engineering goes into that. But for the actual results, the outcomes, whether engineer's going to see, did our changes or our updates have the desired effect, did they increase the quality of results because that's all Google cares about really, is delivering quality results? They use humans to go through and check the results. And those people who do that work follow Google's search quality guidelines. And they're available to read yourself. You can dig them out.
**\[19:40\]** **Sean:** I will definitely add the search quality guidelines into the show notes.
**\[19:46\]** **Luke:** Yeah, awesome. And so something that's just very quickly that has come up a lot recently has been Google's focus on EAT, which is expertise, authority and trust.
**\[20:04\]** **Sean:** We touched on expertise already. Yeah, that's right. It's providing expertise. Exactly, yeah. And so... What is authority and trust? I mean, since somewhat obvious, but let's clarify it.
**\[20:17\]** **Luke:** Sure. So, yeah, I mean, there are things that, depending on the, the niche you're in or the market, you're in, might look a little bit different in terms of kind of, you know, content and the way you write, for instance, how to paint your house might, have different sort of requirements for sort of authority and trust compared to, you know, the appropriate treatment for a specific type of cancer or something like that. There you're looking for...
**\[20:50\]** **Sean:** It's a completely different field, so...
**\[20:52\]** **Luke:** Yeah, definitely. Right. And so that's when issues where authority and trust come into play. And so, you know, it's worth reflecting on why someone who's reading your content should trust you, not just for helping, you know, deliver quality results to Google, but because the user themselves, the user themselves are going to, you know, be making a decision about whether they take action and that decision hinges on whether they trust you and trust the content and authority you have. And so, you know, things like experience, things like sighting specific examples and really drilling down into the need of gritty of what it is you're doing and what you're maybe educating your users on or writing you how to information. I feel like digging down into specifics and so trying to get away from just the general marketing blah is really helpful.
**\[22:02\]** **Sean:** We don't want to be marketing Mark, giving all our jargon and something like a used car salesman.
**\[22:10\]** **Luke:** Yeah, definitely. Yeah, but there's like depth, you can imagine, you know, the sort of depth and comprehensiveness that your quality debt, your content demonstrates. That in terms, in turn helps demonstrate quality, which, you know, may in the long run help you perform better in set rankings.
**\[22:32\]** **Sean:** Okay, well, so we want to demonstrate authority and trust as a small business, how can I build up my authority and trust, like let's take a look at painters, house painters again. So there's a number of national chains probably that go around and they'll paint your house. But what if I'm a new startup and I want to run my own house painting business, how do I demonstrate that I've got the skills and the authority and that you should trust me? How can I do that on my website? And I realize it's not going to be something that would happen overnight. It'll take a little bit of time, but what would be the good approach?
**\[23:21\]** **Luke:** Yeah, sure. It's really interesting in SEO to sort of consider the sort of small scale versus the large scale stuff because they can operate quite differently. And so with a small scale business, you know, a painter that's just starting out, the authority and trust and these kinds of things, and trust specifically is going to be really in like user reviews and those kinds of things. When people search for you, they're probably not searching for a chain. They're searching for someone local. And they're looking for a good feedback where you've done a good job and people have really been happy with you. And they've left the review, they reflect the work you've done. And so in that case, that kind of local SEO kind of functions quite differently to your more large scale SEO. And from a local point of view, you might get involved to develop kind of trust and visibility in the community. It might be really simple things like sponsorship of local sporting associations and those kinds of things. That is inherently a good thing to do for the community. It gives you a bit of visibility there. And it might give you a link back from a very local website to your very local website, which is how you're going to be starting out. And then from an SEO point of view, you're not really looking to crank up the rankings at that point. You're more looking for just being visible at all and say that might be having a good Google My Business listing, having your details up to date on platforms like Facebook where people might trust. Facebook pages more than actually trust your website because they think people are more likely to update their Facebook page than their website.
**\[25:24\]** **Sean:** And so there's that. That is very interesting. I had not thought that some people might find Facebook more trustworthy than my website.
**\[25:32\]** **Luke:** Yeah, right. And particularly at this local level, where you never know how old or how frequently updated this website might be. But that kind of search engine optimization is not necessarily Google specific or it's not Google ranking specific. It's how can you sort of have visibility across those different platforms. So yeah, people can just get the information they need. From you, see that you've got good reviews, then they might find their way to the website. And then you might demonstrate your expertise with some in-depth content or educational or how to content on your site.
**\[26:13\]** **Sean:** A little bit earlier, you mentioned Google Business listing. I have one, which I set up a while ago, but I haven't really looked at it in some time. Can you talk about that? Because I could definitely see how that would be helpful for, especially for businesses that rely on local people to grow their business and make money.
**\[26:36\]** **Luke:** Yeah, sure. So I personally don't do a lot of small business SEO. I sort of focus on the bigger sites. But SEO is such a broad category these days that people do operate in specific niches. And so local SEO is one of those where there's people and agencies whose the career and their work is based solely around local SEO and helping you cover all your bases there. But yeah, I think the same kind of rules apply where you need to just think through that user process. Like it's really knowing who your customers or visitors or users are and what they're doing. And like literally walking through every step that they take from the moment they open a tab in their browser and type something in. What do they type in? And then what do they see? And do they see social results that are out of date or do their social results are missing? Do they see your website for those terms that they're searching? And then your reviews and those kinds of things do they see positive reviews because you've actually been doing a good job, which is always the most important thing.
**\[28:02\]** **Sean:** So off, of course.
**\[28:04\]** **Luke:** It's just about covering your bases there.
**\[28:06\]** **Sean:** I'd say. All right, well that sounds really helpful. When we talked in Slack, you said it really helps to know what kind of SEO you need. What are the different types or kinds of SEO? You just mentioned local. Presumably that's one kind. What are some other types of SEO that I should be aware of or thinking about with my business?
**\[28:35\]** **Luke:** The stage that your business is at will really determine the kind of SEO help you need. And therefore the kind of SEO consultant or agency that you might like to work with.
**\[28:48\]** **Sean:** So what do you mean by the stage of my business?
**\[28:53\]** **Luke:** Sure. So essentially the scale, the amount of resources you have to dedicate it to that kind of marketing you want to do the kind of reach you want to have, whether this is a local business or something that operates in a national basis or internationally. So yeah, one of the things that makes SEO interesting to me from a sort of practitioner's point of view is the kind of, well the different niches that exist and the types of SEO that exist. So everyone from your local house painter down the road to your gigantic billion dollar tech companies that generally need good SEO. And so the way that I like to think about this, there's no sort of hard and fast rules, but some SEO practitioners focus specifically on these areas and some do multiple, but there's technical SEO where you're looking at the site itself, how it's crawled, how it's indexed.
**\[30:02\]** **Sean:** So the technical SEO is more about the code, what your website is capable of, not necessarily your content or how you're presenting it.
**\[30:13\]** **Luke:** Yeah, absolutely, and there's a bit of overlap, but yeah, you might be looking at site migrations because the site has migrated from one platform to the other. You might be looking at internationalization where you want to have your English content surfaced for your English speaking audience, but your French content or Japanese content or whatever else ranking well for those specific geographic areas as well. And this is more of a concern for your biggest sites too. Obviously, all sites need, that definitely sounds
**\[30:51\]** **Sean:** at very enterprise level.
**\[30:53\]** **Luke:** Yeah, it can be like that. All sites need decent technical SEO, but where it turns into its own kind of specialty is definitely at the largest scale. And even things like having appropriate metadata on your site so that if you're a view site, you might see a little star ratings appear or if you're a recipe site, the sort of recipe information appears in the search results. So it's covering those bases, and that's more the on-site side of things.
**\[31:28\]** **Sean:** Right, I've seen when I'm searching, sometimes some results have more detail or options listed below them than other websites. So that's something that's enabled by your technical SEO?
**\[31:42\]** **Luke:** Yeah, Google has specific types of data it looks for on the website that a developer can implement. And that can be helpful for improving your click-through rate. So often when we talk about search engine optimization, we think ranking, I wanna be number one, but ranking is difficult, it takes a lot of work and isn't necessarily within your control to make a significant difference in a sort of short-term period. But one thing you can improve or at least work with is the actual click-through rate you get from the search result pages where you appear. And things like metadata, in some niches, might give you somewhere between 5, 10% boosts to people clicking on your results than if you didn't have that metadata.
**\[32:41\]** **Sean:** 10% boosts sounds pretty good. So what would be a good way for me to improve my click-through rate?
**\[32:52\]** **Luke:** Yeah, covering your bases with metadata or structured data, as it tends to be known, is a good place to start. One of the really interesting things on the bigger size sites, your big end of town, has been the use of AB testing in trying to improve click-through rates especially and make some of these technical SEO changes on your site. And to me, as a bit of an AB testing nerd, it has been super interesting. It has been so fascinating to see some of those.
**\[33:35\]** **Sean:** I'm aware of AB testing for landing pages and marketing in general where you might change some of your copy or change the color of a button or a call to action. But I wasn't aware of AB testing for SEO.
**\[33:55\]** **Luke:** Right, yeah, it's something that has emerged over the last few years. Pinterest is probably one of the major companies that kind of kicked it off. Again, operating at that enterprise level, they wrote about it in early 2015. But one thing that I saw just a few weeks ago that I would really encourage everyone who's interested in the technical side of SEO to check out was a slide deck by Dominic Woodman at a SEO conference this year where he talked about his year of running AB tests on technical whole year. Yeah, technical SEO changes. And this is things like title tags, metadata, and things like that. The beauty of AB testing, the thing that I really love about it is you'll get success where you didn't expect it and you'll get failures where you didn't expect it. The fact that that happens and that you know that means you've got far better insight into how your SEO changes are working and you're not flying for it.
**\[35:17\]** **Sean:** You're not just guessing anymore. You can make informed decisions about how to proceed.
**\[35:24\]** **Luke:** Yeah, you don't have to sort of argue it internally and try and figure out or try and just guess the best way forward. But as exciting as that is, the sort of advice that Dominic gives for example, was that you really need about a thousand visitors coming through organic search results to the group of pages you're testing every day. So that's a substantial number that it's obviously not going to be available to everyone. But if you are operating at that level, then there's a huge traffic.
**\[36:05\]** **Sean:** It's definitely something worth checking out. So AB testing, is that something that I could do by myself or is it something that I would probably need to hire a web developer or an SEO expert such as yourself?
**\[36:20\]** **Luke:** Yeah, at the moment it's at the point where you need both the resources in terms of the people to implement and run the tests and the resources to pay for the software. So there's a couple of software options out there at the moment and I think I run from sort of a few hundred a month to a few thousand a month and probably up.
**\[36:44\]** **Sean:** This is not for the thin wallet. Yeah, that's right. This is where you need to have a little bit of a bankroll.
**\[36:51\]** **Luke:** Yeah, exactly. But when you're operating at scale and you know, 10% boost to your search traffic means 10% boost to your bottom line, then that can be a really nice return if, you know, and that will, you know, happily cover the money you're spending on people and tools. So yeah, if you're up there, it's great. But if you're not, that's no problem. There's still plenty of things you can do. And when you're operating at a smaller scale, you're not really looking for an incremental sort of 5% change here or a 10% change there. You're looking to like, you know, really significantly grow your search traffic over the months and years. You're looking to like double or triple or, you know, whatever your traffic that's coming in. And that's where you don't necessarily need either to be doing these kind of small tweaks to your site. You need to be making big bold changes and being sort of strategy decisions to sort of get the wheels moving to get that search traffic coming in.
**\[38:05\]** **Sean:** So what are, I want to change, change topics a little bit here. What are some things that everybody knows about SEO, but it's wrong? Like two or three myths of SEO that knowing that it's incorrect will help our listeners to not make those mistakes and improve their SEO by not doing that.
**\[38:35\]** **Luke:** Sure, that's a really excellent question. SEO myths are almost so prevalent. It's hard to come up with a, you know, the key myth or anything like that. But I will say this, the key SEO myth is still that there is one, if you've seen those, there's all that's the one we had tricked that's going to help boost your rankings, zoom you to this top of Google. I feel like that, that whole kind of guru approach is in and of itself a myth. People with real expertise.
**\[39:16\]** **Sean:** Sounds like a fad diet.
**\[39:18\]** **Luke:** Yeah, exactly.
**\[39:19\]** **Sean:** If you eat only this thing, you will lose like 200 pounds.
**\[39:23\]** **Luke:** Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, people with real expertise don't, don't need to make outlandish promises and don't call themselves, you know, gurus or anything like that because they can have a much more realistic approach and deliver real results, which kind of speak, speak for themselves. So in terms of the myths and the things to look out for, I would say that's a prominent one. Another one is that if you just install the right tool, that's going to make a difference. And so, a classic.
**\[40:00\]** **Sean:** So install the right tool, you mean like a plug-in for my website, like for WordPress or Drupal or Craft CMS or whatever, I need to, I get that right plug-in and somebody's waved a magic wand and all of a sudden I'm number one on Google.
**\[40:19\]** **Luke:** Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of kind of pretty low value approaches to SEO where everyone wants to have the tool that will solve the problem for them and save them from doing the actual work of doing the keyword research, doing the user research and writing that content. And so tools always seem appealing because they can, hey, if I just install this thing, it will solve all my problems for me. And I'm sure the people who made this tool are very smart and they know what they're doing and they're making all these promises. But you see this a lot with WordPress world as well, where there's a tool called Yost, which is helpful and all as you...
**\[41:04\]** **Sean:** I've heard about Yost. I've heard it's really powerful.
**\[41:08\]** **Luke:** Yeah, I mean, all these tools can do a lot of cool things, but do them to what end and to actually move the needle requires a much more kind of like use a focused approach, not just kind of trying to sprinkle keywords in here or there and then expect. The Google Farrier is going to bless you. So traffic and money.
**\[41:32\]** **Sean:** This tool would help you do what you want to do, but without the background knowledge and the finesse, it's just a tool.
**\[41:42\]** **Luke:** Yeah, absolutely. And so... Yeah.
**\[41:46\]** **Sean:** And you've mentioned Yost and WordPress a couple of times. I think WordPress has this reputation that, wow, you've got Yost, I can have the best SEO. What about other CMSs such as Drupal, another popular open source CMS or Craft CMS, which is one that I really like, another CMS that I've used in the past expression engine. Do other CMSs have similar tools or do some of them have limitations that make it more difficult to do technical SEO correctly?
**\[42:25\]** **Luke:** Yeah, so, yeah, I obviously really like Craft CMS as well. And we've sort of come from a similar background with expression engine and I have worked with different CMSs. And at the end of the day, that CMS is just putting content on the page. And any CMS worth its salt is going to have some ability for a developer to add the appropriate information to the page. And sometimes that will be packaged up in a tool as a convenience to the developer. And Craft certainly has an excellent SEO plugin for that. That helps you cover your bases.
**\[43:13\]** **Sean:** Yeah, there's two or three SEO plugins for Craft. And then there's probably the most popular one being SEOmatic.
**\[43:21\]** **Luke:** Yeah, that's right. And so, they're excellent places to start, but they're bad places to stop. And I don't think the people who make those plugins would have any disagreement with that approach. So, they'll help you enter the right metadata that Google will use in the technical sense. Your information will end up in the right spot on the page. But what that metadata actually is, what your content actually says, what it's about. That's where you still just got to roll your sleeves up and do the work. And stick at it. Like SEO is hard. It takes a long time. It requires persistence. It requires research and writing. And all these kinds of things, which a tool is certainly helpful for, but it's not going to take you much further than a good start.
**\[44:20\]** **Sean:** All right, so it sounds like basically, almost any CMS is going to give you the tools to get your SEO out there. But the key is for you to write content that is going to help with your search engine, result pages, or getting your intent and providing useful information to the end user of your website. Is that correct?
**\[44:48\]** **Luke:** Yeah, absolutely. It's about meeting the kind of users that are obviously interested in buying your products or services or using your website. And so if we sort of tack back a little bit to the different types of SEO, we talked about technical SEO. And another technique that's been very popular the last few years and kind of running to the ground to be honest, is the content marketing approach, where the sort of approach put very simply is, the idea that when Google is looking at your website and what websites it should rank, there's sort of way back in the day, the very first kind of major insight that was behind how Google worked was the idea that rather than just looking at the content on the page, we can look at the links from other sites that point to your site. And those links kind of act as a boat for the worthiness of your site in search rankings.
**\[45:56\]** **Sean:** The authority or the trust of my site? Yeah, right. Part of the eat formula?
**\[46:01\]** **Luke:** Yeah, we get back to the eat formula. Yeah, that's right. You know, things like trust and authority. And that was implemented in a sort of simple way to start with, you know, 20 years ago. And obviously 20 years of very dedicated and informed engineering by some of the smartest engineers in the world has made things a little bit more complex these days, but the general principle still stands. These days you want to get very relevant links, not just any old garbage links to your site, if you can, if it's appropriate. And one of the ways to do that is this idea of content marketing. So, okay, I want links to my website. I need to give people things to link to. And so in that spirit, people will make resources, they'll make guides, they'll make little tools or other forms of content. I mean, infographics was ones that was really popular and just played out. And I run absolutely into the ground. But those sort of approaches are another type of SEO and a type of SEO in which certain agencies will specialize solely in that. Wear content marketing agency.
**\[47:29\]** **Sean:** That's what we do. Wow. Well, we've gone a little bit over time, but I have two more quick things that I would just like to ask. Sure. And then we'll wrap up. So, very important, I feel, for listeners is they want to hire somebody to help them with SEO. How do I vet or choose a good SEO person or agency? Like, I don't want them to be doing things that are going to punish me. You mentioned, you know, I could be aware of outlandish claims or the person who claims to be an SEO guru. How do I, how can I see that they can demonstrate their own authority and trust to me and that I can believe it?
**\[48:24\]** **Luke:** Yeah, I mean, I would love to say that, oh, it's just as easy as, you know, griggling for SEO in your local area.
**\[48:33\]** **Sean:** I think we should all trust Luke Stevens, but there's going to be other people out there that might be more informed about my industry. How do I choose that person and know that they're going to do things the best way?
**\[48:51\]** **Luke:** Sure. So, I think it's really important not to go into SEO optimization if you're hiring someone. It's really important not to go into that naively because if you don't understand, you know, in an ideal world, sure, you were just handed off to them and they would do a good job. Your business would improve and everyone would be happy. But so often over the years, there's a lot of low value or no value or even actively harmful work that has been done on businesses websites, which might have produced a small kind of sugar hit of traffic, but then Google clamped down on whatever, you know, ethically questionable technique that they were using. Right.
**\[49:39\]** **Sean:** How do I choose a developer that's not going to not developers or SEO specialists that is not going to do these ethically questionable approaches?
**\[49:52\]** **Luke:** Yeah. So I think having it as good understanding yourself of what kind of work you expect. And so this is going to require a little bit of homework on your part. Besides like mods.com, M-O-Z.com for Americans.
**\[50:13\]** **Sean:** All of these links that Luke is going to bring up here. I'll be putting in the share notes as well.
**\[50:18\]** **Luke:** Yeah. That's like the classic site for sort of the introductory information and they introduction information to SEO. And they have a tool as well that a lot of agencies use that can generate a report on your website. Unfortunately, a number of agencies will just go to that tool and generate that same report. So good starting place is just to generate that report yourself so you know what that looks like. And then when it comes to talking to a consultant or an agency, you can drill them for specifics and really try and drill down into the exact techniques they use and the techniques they don't use. And this gets back to this idea of white, hot and black, hot SEO. And you want to definitely steer away from anything that is sort of quote unquote black hat. A good sort of tip for the main technique that people use these days in the black hat world is private, blogging networks or PBNs. And that's not some real industry secret.
**\[51:35\]** **Sean:** It's something that has been honestly, this is the first I've heard of it, but I'm not I'm not big into the SEO world like you are. What exactly does a private blogging network do?
**\[51:48\]** **Luke:** Right. And I mean, it's kind of funny how I found out about this too. Just as a little side note, I was listening to a podcast about digital agencies and the guest was someone who ran a local SEO agency and the host asked him, oh, so do you do like mostly white hat techniques? He said, oh, yeah, yeah, always, always white hat techniques. Okay, what kind of things do they look like? And he said, oh, we use private blogging networks. Oh, okay. And what is that involved? Well, we will buy expired domain names. We'll put up some content there and we'll put in bad links in these sort of dodgy expired sites.
**\[52:38\]** **Sean:** We all know what these these expired domain pages look like. Right. They're just a page of links. A lot of it would be like pharmaceuticals or stupid stuff like that.
**\[52:54\]** **Luke:** Yeah, absolutely. And so it looks like spam, right? And that's how Google sees it too. And you know, sometimes these things can work. Like the reason people do them still to this day in some ways is that they can work, but they can work for for how long? And what effect and what's the consequence? Like are you going to bet the future of your business on some dumb short term dodgy?
**\[53:23\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I mean, even if it works in the short term, what happens when Google catches on that you've built these link farms or private, private blogging networks, PGNs. And they unrank all of those links and then you disappear on to page 47.
**\[53:45\]** **Luke:** Yeah, that's right. And if you have it possible to come back, we don't know. Yeah, exactly. And it's really kind of silly because the thing that will be much better for you as a business is just to together basics, right? And it's to be doing a good job to get a positive reputation to build your expertise. You'll be delivering more value. Your customers will be happier. You'll make more money that way. So this whole short term and quote unquote black hat approach is quite counterproductive for anyone with any shred of integrity or long term interest in their business. And I say this just so, you know, if you are someone who is looking at hiring an SEO consultant or agency, you can ask them to use private blog networks and see what they say. And that should give you a clue into how honest they are about whether they are actually doing white hat SEO or not.
**\[54:55\]** **Sean:** All right. So private blogging networks. I think that's quite possibly our key takeaway from today. The last thing. Could you provide say two or two or three websites that you would recommend to somebody who wants to do a little bit of a do it yourself approach to SEO because maybe they don't have a budget right now. And so they want to do a little bit on their own. Where could they learn the best ways to do this? To start. And then you know, ultimately they would probably end up paying for somebody in the future, but not everybody has a big budget at the very beginning. So what kind of a website could I learn this sort of thing on?
**\[55:34\]** **Luke:** Yeah, sure. I mean, if you're really just getting started and maybe you're looking after your in business, a great place to start is just familiarizing yourself with what Google says it wants.
**\[55:49\]** **Sean:** And again, trying to get away from that would that would be the the link we talked about near the beginning, the Google. I forget what it was. It wasn't.
**\[56:00\]** **Luke:** Yeah, that is maybe a bit more in depth, but Google has guidelines on what they want. And we can ask the one. Google guidelines. Yeah, we can drop a link to that. And later, so people can follow that up. And I would say as well. In terms of just the most bare basics free and straightforward kind of things. Google has their search console tool, which has search analytics feature, which will show you exactly what major keywords your rank, your ranking for how much traffic you're getting for them. And you can filter that by geography or page, which pages there.
**\[56:48\]** **Sean:** Is this part of my Google Analytics or is there something else?
**\[56:53\]** **Luke:** It's something you can link to your Google Analytics, but it's a separate, separate service and separate tool Google provides. So it used to be called Google Webmaster Tools. And these days, it's called Google Search Console. And you can have a dig around there and just get to know the data that is available. And get to know your own site because there's so many tool, like tips and tricks kind of posts out there. And if anyone knows how to turn out content, it's the SEO industry. Like these are the people, like if there is any angle or niche or anything, they will have written an article about it. So it's worth just educating yourself and reading up. But you can get lost in just the forest of SEO content that's out there. Where really you want to start with your users, your site, your keywords.
**\[57:55\]** **Sean:** So if it's on page one and you're looking for SEO, how to do SEO, they've probably nailed it.
**\[58:02\]** **Luke:** Well, yeah. I mean, a funny story. For particular SEO content, I saw a post doing the rounds just the other week, which was an agency that had written a piece on how to do SEO for lawyers. And you can see the appeal lawyers have deep pockets usually. They're making a lot of money. So it appeals to the SEO agencies to go after these types of clients. So they had written a post that covered comprehensively what SEO for light lawyers might look like. And that ran to 21,000 words. So that is a short book of content that is just one page at 21,000 words.
**\[58:53\]** **Sean:** Yeah, you could self publish that and sell it for 10 or 20 bucks a part.
**\[58:58\]** **Luke:** Right. But yeah, that's what I mean when the SEO industry is a big writing wants to go all out on some topic, then they will do it very comprehensively. So yeah, there's plenty of resources out there. Happy reading.
**\[59:13\]** **Sean:** Okay. Well, Luke, I really appreciate you're coming on the podcast today and your time, your expertise and all the knowledge, especially the big takeaway of the day. Private blogging networks. Yeah. Don't do them.
**\[59:29\]** **Luke:** Don't do that. That's the takeaway.
**\[59:32\]** **Sean:** Yes, don't use them. And if you hire an SEO guy, make sure that they're not doing that and stick to the white hat topics. Yeah. So thank you so much for coming out.
**\[59:43\]** **Luke:** Thanks very much for having me, Sean.
**\[59:44\]** **Sean:** It's been a pleasure. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe and share website 101 podcast with friends and colleagues. You can find me at website 101podcast.com on Twitter. These are named at website 101 pod. Do you have a question you want to ask a topic suggestion or a guest host recommendation? Send me an email, Sean, S E A M at caffeine creations dot C A or visit website 101podcast.com slash contact and fill in the form. You can find me personally online at my company website caffeine creations dot C A C A F E I N E C R E A T I O N S dot C A on LinkedIn with username caffeine creations. Hope you enjoyed this episode. See you next time.
Close Transcript
Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact).
[](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 01
- 1 [ Introduction to Website 101 Podcast](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-1/introduction-to-website-101-podcast/)
- 2 [ Planning, Structure, Goals](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-2/planning-structure-goals/)
- 3 [ Web Design Shortcuts You Should Never Take](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-3/web-design-shortcuts-you-should-never-take/)
- 4 [ Websites Benefit from Continual Development](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-4/websites-benefit-from-continual-development/)
- 5 [ SEO 101](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-5/seo-101/)
- 6 [ Unlocking the Secrets of PPC Advertising with Dan Wood](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-6/ppc-101-pay-per-click/)
- 7 [ PR & Marketing](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-7/pr-marketing/)
- 8 [ Designing Effective Landing Pages for High Conversion Rates](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-8/what-is-a-landing-page/)
- 9 [ Accessibility: Why Your Website Should Be Easy to Use for All](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-9/accessibility-why-its-important/)
- 10 [ DIY Vs Bespoke](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-10/diy-vs-bespoke/)
- 11 [ Season 1 Wrap Up](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-11/season-1-wrap-up/)
### All Seasons
- [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/)
- [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/)
- [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/)
- [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/)
- [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/)
- [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/)
- [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/)
- [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/)
- [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/)
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