James Dooley & David Quaid: The SEO “Best Practices” We Ignore

0:00We're joined by two of the biggest legends in SEO, James Douly and David Quaid. This is so epic. I'm just going to start. I want to just start with like a really fun question, which is what are SEO best practices each of you ignore? Let's start with you, James. We ignore um this straight into a loaded question here. Um, I'd see I don't really I don't I don't look at best practices. I just do what works. Um, so I kind of don't listen to the noise. I think it'll be better for David to maybe start with this and then I'll maybe debate him or monitor areas

0:42that he ignores and I might say, "Oh, we use it for X, Y, and Zed." But I don't really listen to the general public of what we only deal with inhouse testing. what we deal with inhouse testing for certain sites we might do things and for certain sites we might not like I've seen one or two things where David doesn't um like eat for example and schema and stuff like that so we can negotiate certain things on that but I my issue is with this is I'm going to try to debate David on certain stuff David's a lot more intelligent than me right is one but two is that I think I

1:15resonate with a lot of things of what he says so when I'm debating something I'm just debating eating it just to play devil's advocate. And I think the same the absolutely the same way. And James, I've actually been a a big quiet fan of yours. I actually even said to Edward, I'm not going to say what it was cuz I think he wants to bring it up later, but um huge fan of yours because of exactly what you just said. We do what we do and we repeat what works, right? So it becomes predictable, reliable, repeatable, right? And I think that one of the the big problems if if if we had to pick

1:49somewhere to start um is that the idea of best practices, right? That is that is the problem in SEO, right? And the problem with best practices is where people get lost. And I would love to get into the why people get lost, right? Because I think that's much more interesting is that um people seem to think that SEO is putting everything into into something, right? the more the more SEO I do, the better outcomes I'll do. So, what are you doing? What's in your list? What's in your list? And running around and then looking at their competitors. So, saying, "Look, their competitors go to this page, a money

2:21page, a pillar page, an access page, an airplane page. I need all of those pages." And then they introduce cannibalization. And then they do this, this, this, and then they go like, "It's not working." They get frustrated. They give up. They stop trying. or worse, somebody says, "Yeah, you just need to put in a schema or put in an image or add a table or add 5,000 words." And then they give up. And that's what worries me, right? And so when I look at the type, so a lot of the my sort of like frustration, especially when I'm on X and I'm like and I come on and I go

2:55like, why are people still pushing this or pushing that? It's because I see a hundred people or I've spoken to a hundred people. I I give up about 20% of my time to people who I help for free. And so I met this one person who's hopefully going to be a guest on the on the Edward Sterm Show. Um she thought she got hit during HCU. She's actually gone and turned from like a proper bricks and mortar business and vibe coded an entire e-commerce site that takes money and she built it in Claude, right? A non-coder, non-technical, non non SEO, right? and this is like her

3:2810th project and it's so impressive and I've helped so many people just try to navigate between the disinformation and I spend so much time on initial calls with teams and sometimes like I just do um very hard practices like for example um the content structure that you have to follow a particular structure idea and sometimes what I'll do with teams is I'll swap I'll go to the web ticket and I'll swap the content that they've written for the content brief and I let the web team post the brief and I let it rank and I'll go, "All right, we just close this argument, right?" Or the rank

4:05math uh green lights, you know, 100%. You've got your keyword, right? So, if I had to make a list of of what what what I think are myths, I think the number of things that you need in a page are actually very minimalistic. One, you just need a page. I actually learned that on the um Google official product support forum is that Google will just index a page as long as you have authority. What I've realized is that the whole word authority has become taboo and talking about it in certain circles is just it's it's just a magnet for chaos, right? Like people hate the idea of

4:43taboo. I still see um web engineers talking about crawling as if it starts in the homepage and then the spider goes along reads all the pages and then comes down and then reads all the p and comes down and that if this page is nine pages away from your homepage and Edward and I are big Matt Cuts fans for example and we know that well actually if this page is going to get indexed it's because it has to be important right and I think and I and I think with almost everyone I've spoken to on X there's still this idea that Google can one day appreciate

5:19quality which I think is just a never possibility right because it's so subjective and and I think people jump to things like well I just wrote an article about what is the capital of France Google can see what the capital of France is and I'm like okay right how often are you writing an article about the capital of France and the history of France and why bother right but how often are you writing like an SEO strategy Because I guarantee you every person that's been on this show is a fantastic SEO and has had at least a 10 to 90% difference with everyone else on the show. All of their content is

5:56indexed, right? I'm sure I've made lots of mistakes in predictions about SEO, but what I want is someone to give me a road map to test or proof. And what I end up getting is, yeah, I've got 10 years experience. And I'm like, okay, well that [laughter] yeah, that's just a nothing statement. I'll tell you I will let's kick things

6:17off, right? I've got a good idea, right? And I can even give a domain. So there's a domain called Get Your Tips Out, right? It's a sports betting, horse racing, and um football tipping website. What a great name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To be fair, I only bought into it. The two lads that owned it, um they Joe Norris and Dave Potter, they're the ones that set it up. Now, I got brought up um that there's four pillars of SEO. Technical SEO, good good quality content, debatable what that means. Topical authority, and back links, right? And people used to talk to me about the four pillars of

6:53SEO. You get them four pillars right, and you're on to a winner. When I when I bought in to get your tips out, right? It had an unnatural links penalty, right? You can't get any worse from a backlink profile in the fact that it's got an unnatural links penalty in Google Search Console. The content, all that they ever used to write was here is Monday's tips, here is Tuesday's tips, here is Wednesday's tips, and they listed the tips. There's no topical authority. There's no internal linking going on or anything like that. And technically, it was one of the worst. If you put it into Screaming Frog, I think

7:26it had something like 4 and a half thousand 404s. There's 301's going all over the place. Everything that you would say about how to do SEO was wrong. Everything. However, when I wrote an article on that website, and this is what made me invest in the business. When I wrote an article on that website, because it kept popping up in Google News. So, when I wrote an article in that on on that site, it jumped in in position number two for best horse racing betting sites in the UK. Now, that is a 20,000 a month keyword. if you're ranking position number one for it jumped in in position number two and

8:03I'm like what like this is strange now this was about maybe about seven years ago or something like this and I always followed back then the four pillars and it's always I've made good money from doing the four pillars however it opened up my eyes to realize an unnatural links penalty technically rubbish no content no topical authority but what it did have was branded search it was in old Google news and it got a lot of traffic from Twitter that came through to the website. Now, I'm like, well, wait a minute. This this is completely re reinventing the wheel of what does good SEO look like? And there's a big

8:42emphasis in my opinion on brand and on traffic, not always about the good quality content. I've got one more example and then obviously we can talk about the different stuff is British Racecourses.org, right, was another one back back in the day that we had. Um, it actually started to get negatially old and it's down now or or just just doing bits. It's not doing anything like it used to. But back in the heyday, we started to build out um pages on there and I probably went too wide. Like there's a you've got topical authority on certain topics and if you keep just expanding, you can end up harming a

9:17whole site. And we I thought I could rank for anything. And I wrote a page and this is how dumb at times I am. I wrote a page and it said the H1 in the title tag says bet 365 free spins. Now if you someone goes and searches that term it's a it's a difficult term to go after and it said bet365 free spins and the words on the page all what it said was Mark who's my brother can you reword this page and I put a link to a competitor and I pressed publish. Now what I shouldn't have done is I should have saved it as a draft and told Mark

9:50or sent it in Mark here's the URL here's the title can you reward it? I published the page and within four hours it jumped in and ranked in page in in position number one for bet 365 free spins and it all what it said was H1 bet 365 free spins. Now everything else that comes with it was on a positive um ranking state. Google loved the site. Everything we published was generally good. But I just did that page and all it said was reword this page mark or mark reword this page and a link and it ranks in position number one. So at times you can

10:23write bad content but be on a good website and it can still work. Now obviously you don't want to overstep the mark and just churn out loads of crap. However, right from the word go, let's throw in some caveats to how SEO works, if you get what I mean. I just wanted to throw them out at the start. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept using it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of

10:57pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords landing page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer said, "We spent nearly$18,000 in the last year and a half on marketing and SEO through different agencies locally and that did nothing. We decided to take the leap on the compact keywords course. We're now getting about 6 to eight calls per day on a good day, which is just unheard

11:33of." Another customer said, "Give it to a junior employee. Have them follow it exactly as Edwards laid out. You don't have to do anything and you're going to gain a six-f figureure SEO level employee just by having them go through this course." Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at

11:59compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. That's a that's such a great um it's well two great uh stories there. And and funny enough, the last one you mentioned, Ed and I did it on a podcast and someone I forgot about it and I actually hit publish on a blog post that I copied bullet points from Claude and after the podcast came out, someone sent a screenshot next saying it's ranking number one. [laughter] And

12:27so I've done it so many times, right? And so um I think that there are particular cases when content can matter, right? But the but the overall problem of content is as I you know I keep I keep sort of like thinking about this probably overthinking and spending too much time thinking about it. Like if Google knows all of this and we went through a global pandemic where countries were rushing out a co COVID vaccine and Google knew everything and it sat in its hands and did nothing. That's bizarre, right? U also how did Google buy 3,000 brands and bury them all? Like if it knows if it

13:06knows everything, right? Um we we can see that LLMs know nothing, right? Like if you go to an LLM and ask it a specific thing and it and it again it comes down to like I so when chatbt first came out I asked ChateBT tell me about chiropractic is it backed by science and he was like oh yeah there's so much science like it started off really bad and now there's so much science so I'm like well tell me about some of the science oh there there's so much where do you want to start so then I went over to NIH's website so I went back to Google I did a search for is

13:38chiropractic based on real science and the NIH site came up and I copied that article, put it back in and it was like, "Oh, you know what? Chiropractic's not based on science. It's it's very fluffy." And so, the first time I played with a neural network, I was 15 or 16 in high school and a friend of mine gave me um a neural network and I had an IBM 386 SX25 and it took an entire day to train it to recognize the letter A. Right? That's that's how long it took. Just the letter

14:12A. We weren't getting like the word and. We're just getting the letter A. And I thought this was really brilliant, but also like it just it's we don't have the machine power. And so the problem is that the NIH and the CDC and Google are not going to write 10,000 articles re reiterating a position or a point of view. But if you have a lot of people that are very enthusiastic about a topic, they're going to produce a lot of pages. And so when you go to ask an LLM, it's giving you the consensus and the vast majority. And I'm actually okay with this because it generates a ton of

14:49work for the SEO industry. I'm not okay with it because I think it generates a ton of malinvestment for people who have to follow it. And I'm not saying to people you can't use it, but I think I think Ed and I said this or Ed said this, you actually have to know SEO in order to know if the advice you're getting from the LLM is good enough, right? Um, and and that's that's the problem I'm coming from. So, sometimes it sometimes it sounds like and I want to step back and say I don't want to say that good content isn't important because the Google is the vehicle, SEO

15:19is the vehicle, but your content is the package. So, if you're going to deliver content, eventually that's going to poke a stick and bounce against you. But if you're going to start a new website or you're trying to grow your website, if you just do new good content, that's not going to grow you, right? that that's the the system systematic thinking that I'm trying to get straight. And so I definitely don't want

15:42to say that good content doesn't matter. I've seen, for example, I've done a lot of blog posts, a lot of linked articles. I've I did a lot of podcasts, but it wasn't until I got on a show like Edwards that my name took off, right? And so because his content was consistently amazing, right? Um and and that's Thank you. That is the perfect demonstration. But in in an SEO world where relevance is so important because you you've got to look at the ecosystem and I think another mistake that people make apart from the checklist SEO is that they look at like a sort of a relationship between them and Google

16:20that that I don't think exists and they look at it going well I've done this this and Google won't reward me. they but I never see them going well actually I'm trying to rank for cloud and Google Microsoft and AWS rank right because then anyone could tell them listen buddy that's very very you know optimistic and ambitious of you but maybe bring it down a little right because like it it doesn't matter what you do you're not outranking them and then I I just see these things of like people assembling lists like you have to have a table you have to have a page you have to have x

16:52amount of paragraphs which is a Simrush report from three years ago uh which I think just rubbishes their brand for doing that. Um yes, they're generating clicks. Yes, they're generating new traffic for the blog post and they're generating uh interest on X, but they're rubbishing their brand, right? Like they now have become a joke. So many SEOs are like, "Let's just wait for the latest correlation report from Semrush." And I think they've just absolutely, you know, destroyed their name as as experts. They're they're just a polyglot of of of nonsense, right? And um I think for for newbies which makes up the base of SEO and the

17:27base of insect because everything in life is a pyramid, right? You have the the the top royalty or the top billionaires or the top pop stars and and everyone else is kicking stones down here. And for those people it must be incredibly confusing because you can't start to test until you till you start getting clicks. And so probably right there's no point in in starting with bad content, but no one can define good content, right? Like Eid is not a is not an objective definition of good content, right? It's a it's an idea, right, of what people might look for. It also only applies to YML, which

18:00always gets left out conveniently, but so let's come back. I think that that when I've asked a lot of people like what is an objective quality standard I get depending on on who I'm talking to because there are tribes in SEO maybe I recognize that maybe I'm polarizing the community and I don't definitely don't mean to do that but there are people who think like oh well Google can look at grammar it could look at spelling and like okay well that's a great idea but what if the world's foremost engineer on jet engines happens to be from Germany and his English is not his first language

18:34and he's leading the American industry in rocket propulsion and he goes to write and it's a lot better than my German would be but he's going to make mistakes. Is that not good quality content? Of course it is. Right. And and then there's Reddit, right? Like before Google started massindexing Reddit to replace HTU sites. Um all of the rubbish that's in Reddit, right? So you literally have five comments that agree with the post and then you have five comments that disagree with the post, right? So the there's there's so little factchecking, grammar, spelling don't make good content. Like when when I went to to university, ad copy had to be

19:16perfect, right? You there were no typos. If you look at the US market, and I think it's it's it's it's come over the pond, right, to the Irish and UK market, um, where brands that are targeting younger generations intentionally have typos, right? Like, get your tips out. If you'd gone to school in 1988 at Oxford College, right, and uh, presented that as a you would have you would have had a chat with with one of the deans, I imagine, right? Um, in South Africa, I'd have been picking one of those uh whips and choosing which one I was getting

19:48lashes with, right? Um, so, so, so that's my take on content. Like, absolutely go write good content, but when when I look at people talk about my site's not ranking, I'll see 90% of people replying, "Well, your content shit." I'm like, they don't they haven't put up their website, right? How how have you jumped to it? And and then the other side is like, it's just write good content. And it's like well by whose definition? So it's not a it's not an objective case to start. That's that's my um my challenge. And then another interesting thing you brought up is that yes penalized sites the funny

20:24thing about penalized sites is that they remain crawled and they remain indexed. And it's it's an aftermarket throttle, right? So you have the search indexer that doesn't seem to have changed very much that returns the results. And that's why cannibalization still exists because Google still cannot deal with two entries in an index from the same

20:40site. And so yes, you can publish content and it can go up. And then discovery, discover is a completely different system because it's not ranking. It's picking content for sending out for recommendation on the discover app or sending out in an email or sending out. And so the spam system hasn't caught that and put a a 55 point drop on the page because those pages still fluctuate. They're still ranking the index. They go through the indexing system because it'll slow it down too much, right? They're they're ingesting so much content. I I've estimated it takes about 0.01 seconds to index a

21:16page. Yeah, there's that's not enough time for anything. Yeah, for sure. Um, with regards to like so I've seen one or two I've I've looked up one or two things of what you said and with regards to EAT, um, what's your thoughts on what EAT is and and why it's not a thing? because I just want to go through a couple of things and you're saying it's only in your money your life partially agree but just to add a caveat onto that is it's also Google news and that can be in any market not just your money your life um and I can show you some examples

21:52of that um on on eat for that but I I I definitely do agree that all these people that jumped on the bandwagon when they got hit with a HCU update and just decided to start putting an author box above the fold and that's now going to sort the problem out. And everyone came out with like I'm now an EAT expert and they all selling this this dream that it's a big ranking factor. I definitely

22:16agree it's not a big ranking factor. However, from the principles of what EAT is, I like the idea from only from internal training but from like let's say they added the experience part to it. I like the idea of when I'm when I'm training the team as a concept as a I love working in frameworks. So I do use the EAT framework for training staff to say you need to be touching upon that you've got the authoritiveness, you've got the trust, you've got the experience and when I'm talking about the experience I'm going on about like case studies, awards, reviews and I'm going down that road but I'm explaining look

22:53even Google's saying this is a thing just because at times if if I just keep tell them well the data says this and at times the even existing staff when they're trying to challenge you all the time you're like look just follow this framework but we've changed the frame. I don't know what the general public say what EAT is but when you look at EAT for me it's good quality content build the experience which is the reputation the firsthand experience the information gain have the trust of the brand and the authoritiveness of building links so we just call it the eat framework which I do believe is a good way of point

23:31otherwise I'd have to call it something else so I think I think e can be a great framework what what I think is there were three things that stood out in in what you said that I think I'd love to underline. One is it's a framework you like and that's perfect, right? Because that's that's your framework and you've got that framework with your team, right? And you've got your here's the here's how it fits in. Here's why we're

23:53doing it, right? What's really interesting is that your framework definition would match mine and the ones that I have on online, right? like with say Ryan Jones for example which is you said it's about backlinks it's about building authority it's about people understanding and coming back and are people coming back to the site and I don't know that Google differentiates about branded search maybe we can kick that can after this but um yes I I I I I can subscribe to all of those here here's the problem doesn't say any of those things right the eat framework doesn't mention backlinks it doesn't mention anything about like return visits maybe it says

24:31would you come back to this website right I can't Um it doesn't what what what eat has become and if we go to any LLM and the users any user can do this even if you're listening on Spotify is just like jump over to chatbt at at the very end of this podcast obviously not before um and you can say uh what is eat and it'll and how do I put EA in and it will recommend an author bio and making claims and all of these things right and so someone came on to me on LinkedIn the other day and they didn't come in in I

25:02hate disingenuous arguments, right? Disingenuous arguments are trying to prove an ideological uh feeling because it hurts their ego, right? What you're doing is saying, "Look, I'm trying to find something tangible, objective. What do you think?" And I think that is the how SEO needs to be debated. And that's why I'm thrilled that instead of us just talking like a vacuum chober, we're

25:22getting into the meat of these things. The the problem is that so many people just think in straight lines, right? I've got good content X. I've done this X, Ergo that. And I think that it, you know, if I had to start every blog post with I have X money years experience. I worked at D. I worked at Microsoft as an SEO consultant. I spoke last week at this conference. It's just unnatural. I mean, neither of us started this podcast with our resume, right? Yet people are

25:51saying that's what Google can detect. And so this person came on to me and gave, oh, Google can detect AI content and Google can do this and Google can do that. And it's just an aspirational list that you can't you is impossible to debate. It's the same as when people come with anecdotal evidence like you

26:04said it's just a nothing story, right? So I I think first of all there's I I can't see why Google would not rank that content, right? Because I think it will rank what you presented. So I think of course it's going to work. So if if someone thinks that they've gone and put Eid into a page and they went and ranked it and if that's what they want to attribute it to, that's what will get attributed. That's how we work. If I believe that a good image is important or a picture of a lucky rabbit's foot's important, that will work. And I'm I'm not trying to in any way reduce because

26:32I think your framework is an important framework. The the problem is that if just read there's one document was written by search engine round tables, my favorite document in the whole world after the SEO starter guide, which no one ever shares, right? And the SEO starter guide debunks the the four most fundamental myths which are like duplicate content and is eat a ranking thing and it's just like no thinking eat is a ranking algorithm. No it's not right. It's which I think is the engineers are saying this is so comical we don't get it right but I think Google has made a big mistake in scrubbing

27:07authority or link juice or page rank out of its systems right except the SEO starter guide. Um, like if if you want to find out what version of page rank we're on, which is page rank ns or near seed, you've got to go look at blog posts from more than 10 years ago, I

27:21think, or from 2016. Yeah, 10 years ago. So that that's really sad, right? I think all of the Matt Cuts videos where he was talking about shaping authority, building links in, building links deep, how crawlers work, that crawlers don't crawl your whole site, they crawl it in bands depending on how popular those pages are. All of that knowledge just seems to be wiped out, right? And I think that's very sad. And and so now people are because I talk to newbies every day as I'm sure you do. I'm sure a lot of people reach out and say, "James, I'm so stuck. I used to have this

27:47website. Please help me. What can I do? I'm desperate." Um and and this idea has gone out and people say like, "Oh, it's technical SEO. It's hygiene. It's this." Right? And and and I I just struggle to see how those are tangible inputs. So I don't think Google will ever not publish something because you've tried to build eat or because you're looking at a big picture about a brand and people coming back. not sure that it's the brand that sustains it versus the volume of traffic from your brand. Like if you've got a high amount of branded traffic, especially to deep pages, let's say like you're selling posters and you

28:19got big posters, small posters, flyer posters, um and you you start typing, I want I want duly posters or duly big posters and that brings them to different pages. Those pages are that authority is going to be magical. Why I think it is rubbish is because anybody can make up a claim. I can say that I have 24 years experience in LLM research at Harvard and I challenge an LLM to prove me wrong. It can't just LLM

28:46can't prove me wrong. They don't know. They haven't come to interview me. They don't have access to Harvard's records. I think we we fooled ourselves into believing that we have the worldwide web and it's the it's the biggest library mankind has ever built. Absolutely. It's the biggest library of mankind's ever built. But is all of the deep knowledge in there? Is everything every um study that the medical journals have put out there available? No. Are are they in consensus mode? In other words, for every article about people doing research into chiropractic or a new any new therapy, let's not beat up chiropractic. Is is there a 100 peer

29:22studies on it or is there a hundred articles on the New York Times, joeblogs.com, right? giving an opinion on it that the LLMs are also reading because they might rank if Google reads it or what if somebody posts a read an article on Reddit goes like I I just don't like this and I just don't want to believe in it. Right? And and and so that's where eat starts to just crumble for me. Right? And then if we go back to the article about from New York search 2024 when Matt sorry when um John Miller was talking about he's like so many people come up and say we put Eid into

29:55our content and he just reminds people it applies to YM. I think YM is extremely broad, but people tell me, someone told me the other day that YM includes lawyers because you might hire a legal team that might cost you a million dollars. And I'm like, that is that is stretching, right? We're now stretching pizza dough, right, into into uh McDonald's fries here. Um it's just so bizarre. I I've I don't know why people claim everything is in Y. I don't know if they're just hoping for like an extension or trying to say like, look how good I am. I'm ranking in YM. I found one or two projects that I can put

30:31my finger on and why I'm well. And I have hundreds of of GSC. I' I I I do a lot of answers on Reddit on X and people say, "Here's my my search console. Can you tell me what's happened? I've been penalized." I'm like, "No, you're fine. You're okay. You just you just have too many pages talking about this or

30:45whatever. You're fine. Just go fix it." And one of the one of the nicest person in the world and just was getting beat up on Reddit saying like, "Your content's terrible and stuff." She and didn't even put up her the page. And what we found is it was it was related to um COVID vaccine technology and it was a company that made an input and there were seven websites on the entire worldwide web that matched this particular search. And if you searched with the brand the other ancillary pages and press releases that they put out all all came up. If you took the brand out

31:16just the other six competitors came up. And then we started to look into what was in the backlink infrastructure. And these guys had big backlink profiles. It took a while to go through and then we realized only the parent domain had the authority to rank for that phrase and we couldn't move it to the subdomain. We couldn't move it to an EMD or anything like that. We had to keep that content there. And we tried that on my site and other sites that were in the medical industry. And with the branded search, you could find the the name of the protein. Without it, not a hope. And I

31:47was like, "Oh, now I get YM." So YM says it must be to the detriment like of society. I don't think picking a bad lawyer to the detriment of society. That's not something I think Google can advocate on, right? And it's stretching it. And so just just no problem with Eid. Mhm. Yeah. Just to go through a couple of the things on the EAT framework just to try and go through a few other bits. So again, I'm I'll I'll challenge you a little bit on the branded search and you said you can kick it you can kick the can down the road and stuff and we can

32:20have a thing. I and and maybe I'll just do this internally again to the team. Um I'm a big advocate that if you get more branded search, your your site ranks better. Now, now this is could be an indirect ranking factor. So what we're trying to get the whole team to do is try to do social media campaigns, image ranking, video ranking, and it could be you could say it's the third party corroboration. It could the back links and stuff like that. But anything we can do to try to get more brandable search leads to better rankings. Now this there always seems to be a direct factor of

32:56the minute the increase of branded search the better the rankings of the website. Now, I also do know a few people in in blackout shady industries that just do CTR and they don't do anything else apart from just start to run on existing sites like 10 monthly searches, branded searches, then they trickle it up to 20 monthly searches and then the whole site starts to lift. Now, it could be the the dwell time because they spend quite a long time on the homepage and they're clicking through different pages. So, it could be that that could be any sort of search. It doesn't have to be the brand, but they

33:31do it religiously all the time and it and it does seem to like literally the case studies, they're not public case studies, they're private case studies, but it seems to work. So, I can answer that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go for it. Yeah. So, here here's what I've seen um and tested and and and I think one of the problems that people do with testing is not testing the correlary, right? So, I did XY Z, it ranked. Great. change X or Y and do it and people get people get too afraid, right? And that that's where I realize and and I don't blame people for that's how we are, right? We are emotive

34:06machines. That's how we're designed and built, right? So, if you look at branded search and if you look at first of all, take GSC, right? Google only just recently added a branded search, you know, where you can search without branded. And when you search without branded, you actually lose so much information in the table, right? But yes, uses a reax, right? Which means Google sucks at telling brands. Like if I I I've been doing AdWords since 2003 or four and so I know that um it will sell brands as a normal keyword. It doesn't differentiate. It only knows your brand and your domain name because the domain name and the brand usually

34:38match, right? And you can do the same. You can make a brand that could be called like best personal injury.com and people will start searching best injury. When you when you so Google I don't I think Google would struggle to try and identify particular brands and searches and I don't know what the I don't know what the value to them as a search engine would be. I to me they treat it as search terms and if you go to GSC and you click on branded and it just does a reax and it misses them right like so if you spelled personal injury without a J in the middle it won't work. the the

35:08reax won't actually capture the brand because you it won't be able to get in ury, right? And so if it's that basic, it's not strong enough to to be built around. So if you look at branded search as a component, I've seen branded search clicks like going back to the sticker example, right? Or let's say the bar, right? I first of all, I'm looking for a great pub in Manchester to go and get some fish and chips Sunday roast to watch the match tonight, right? With my friends. I might find a bar, go, "Oh, this is Dulie's Bar, Kenny's Bar. This is great. This is where we should hang

35:39out tonight. Somewhere new. Looks like a fun, good vibe. Lots of people my age. I love it." Um, you're going to go tell your friends to look up Doulie's Bar, right? And then you're going to look at the click-through rate, and the click-through rate could be 80%. And so the the the magnification of the value of that goes up hugely. If you look at most of your highly competitive terms like best horse betting site, those clickthrough rates could be done down to 0.8%. And a constant rotation battle needing constant authority, constant clickthrough rate, constant you having to expand topical authority and then linking back to that page and then

36:16getting pushed down again and then coming out adding more authority and pushing it back up and all of that, right? Whereas a branded searches comes in at like 88 minimum 40% clickthrough rates, right? And so that percentage click-through rate is an enormous um amount of of of authority calculation in I think versus Google understanding a brand or or rewarding brands. But yes in if you if you step up out of the weeds it does look like it rewards brands. But that's that's where the problem in the definition lies is like I don't think Google understands brands. Right. Well, again like again I just on one or two

36:56bits on it like with regards to known entities. If you're not a known entity it's be a little bit different but if you're a known entity so there's one or two things that they'll do as well with regards to related searches or Google auto suggest. So what they'll do is they'll do um the main focus keyword and then they'll append the brand name after it. And if it's not a known entity, the volume that they need to do is 10 times greater than if it's got, let's say, a knowledge panel or it's a known entity within Google. They only need to do maybe three to 5,000 searches. And what

37:30they're able to do there is append on the auto suggestion that comes down. So it could be personal personal injury lawyer and then a brand name after it. And there's a lot of them that do that. And then not only they doing the branded search, but now they're doing brand search alongside a keyword that they want to be known for. And when they start to do that, they're getting the click-through rate that some might

37:52choose that auto suggest. But then that when they're doing it, there's a direct correlation to that keyword starting to rank better in time. And you're not without even doing the CTR, you're just doing the search within Google search. And they'll do it. I know you two do quite a lot with people also ask. And there's quite a lot of these people doing on the CTR front where again there's I've seen a few episodes and people talk down about CTR or you run it and then the minute you stop it it stops working. Well, that's not the case if you do it right. Like if you

38:24Yeah. No. If you do certain things right and you don't need to do mass volume. The issue is a lot of these people are using tools and sending 10,000 clicks. They're not aged logged in accounts. They're not having the dwell time. The minute they stop it, they'll probably even end up getting worse rankings than what they did previously. But these little trickling of trying to manipulate the people also ask, the related searches, the auto suggest, and all those things seem to longterm help the brand across the board go to the next level of rankings that that able to take you to the next level of what keyword difficulty you can go

39:01after. And so this is the third reason I absolutely loved your podcast and you as an SEO and why um I'm so excited to be on the show is that you don't gatekeep, right? You don't talk about some sort of theory. What you've just given people there is an is a masterass in how you build and develop a brand. In other words, if Google can because it's a cons because again it looks at how many people search for certain phrases and that's how keywords either become semantic or not or become relevant is the more searches you get for a keyphrase the more it's going to recommend that as an you know as you're

39:36filling it in and because people are and typing it in whereas what I think the problem with what people are learning is that if I create a schema on my page I will now tell Google who I am and it will take that schema and build me and I will then start to rank. What you've done and and CDR manipulation I I'm on the exact same page with you. What you're saying is and and someone asked me how um how I launched my last EMD and my last EMD for that I can talk about it was freeload balancer.com which still ranks. Microsoft aren't on the page

40:07anymore. Google aren't on the page but freeload balancer.com which hasn't been edited since 2016 is still number one. And one of the things that we did is we actually went on to LinkedIn and got all of our partners to share this. Please search kempf free load balancer knowing that we would be first but knowing that load balancer would be a free load balancer would be the target keyword that we wanted to get it ranked for. And so as Google's looking at thousands of people suddenly searching for free kemp free load balancer and it had free load balancers domain name. It took us less than a day to get to the top three for

40:43free load balancer. And so there we're on the exact same page. And there in lies the big difference, right? What you're doing is feeding the algorithm exactly how it works with absolute precision. And you can do that with any brand, which to me makes Google brand agnostic, right? Because you can do you can make a brand, right? You have to be able to make a brand, right? If if Google preserved every brand from 1998, we'd be living in a very small world where Microsoft would still be number one. CNN would be the world's only news channel. Um the BBC would be the only news channel for, you know, the

41:16Commonwealth. Um [clears throat] but Google has to allow new brands all the time. And like you've just said, what you're doing is you're you're like you said, you need 3,000 searches. So if you're cornerstoneing, you're not going to be able to do that without those 3,000 searches. And what you've just shared there is an absolute course on its own. Maybe we should maybe we should gate the video and charge like $20 for that extension because that's fantastic because that's that's something real that people who do have branded search can actually go out and do which is is a is a phenomenal piece of of of of sharing. So I think that's

41:54why you know people like you stand out head and shoulders in the industry because so many people talk about like oh you need to you know Google works like this and Google works like that and it's lovely and interesting but afterwards what are you actually going to go and do what's your takeaway right you're just kicking stones right um whereas like you said um like I don't think branding gives you an advantage over someone else I think if you build your own brand you've built something significant maybe I'm just talking about the initial vector into Google And that's my mistake, right? Um, but everything you've just said is is is is

42:27absolutely fantastic. Build something that people want to come back to is without a doubt. But that to me is not the average man's conversation about eat, right? Which I think you alluded to as well. I mean, you said like the popular attitude of eat, right? And the fact that again, so so many people talk about, for example, you've got to talk about case studies and things like that. I can I can write any blog post and then link to a a case study on Harvard, right? It doesn't mean that I've actually even read the case study. And I I I think what I want people to get out of the

43:01trap is that Google reads this content and goes like, "Yeah, they linked to it. They must have read it. This must have validated because Google can't even validate the Harvard document, right?" And just because a document's on Harvard doesn't make it accurate. And just because you're an a thing about validated authors is like are we when did we convince ourselves that authors are beyond lying like an author can't lie, right? Yeah. I I don't know if authors want to see themselves becoming like a name like Wolf Blitzer on CNN or something like that, but that Wolf Blitzer has never gotten anything wrong in his career. He's not a

43:34researcher, right? And so that it's it's when people get into those hard things like, "Oh, well, I showed a case study. I linked to an edu. I linked to that." I'm like, you can link to that all day. That's not going to do anything. Yeah. I I think what you're talking about is phenomenally different and you're probably one of the first people to talk

43:53about it. See, see this there's a there's a couple of other things on eat before we move on to schema or anything else that Edward wants us to kind of debate. Our thing is um have you ever heard of raider hub? No. So ra rater hub is where if you went into um analytics and you go into your audience and then um you check to see whether raider hubs it. So sometimes if a site gets hit badly, right? So it's going up nice and then boom falls off a cliff. The first thing I would recommend and Edward you can do a chart on this um I I'll show you how to do it in Google

44:29Analytics. Go into rate hub and go into the audience and see whether raater hub is has landed on your site. That is where Google quality raers are coming visiting your site and you can see what pages that they've visited. Now the pages that they visited is what I would say the general industry if if I don't really listen to the general industry I don't know exactly what they're saying but having an about page having a meet the team page having a privacy policy page and stuff rah hub norm the Google quality raers which are using lion zeal or lion something to to to run it they

45:05normally check them pages and generally speaking I would say anyone who's watching this leave a comment if it has hit and and debate me on it or because I might be incorrect on this number about 90% plus of the websites that get that rate of hub actually comes and visits gets penalized because I think I think and I might be guessing here you might know more on this David is that I think what happens is algorithmically and this only happens by the way when you start ranking for big keywords right so we've only had it on a dozen of our websites out of thousands of websites we've had

45:38it on a dozen and that's it um so we had it on there was um a website called away grounds. It was a sports betting uh a football betting. We started to build up authority of all the stadiums, how to get to the stadium, where the nearest bars are and stuff like that. And we turned it into a football betting site and we jumped onto page one just for the main term of bet 365. So I think was in

46:01something like position number seven. The minute we jumped on page one for bet 365 just that term rate hub hit and then we got penalized on our site and we was like what? And and guess what penalty that we got and it's a and this is a manual action penalty and I can send you through the screenshot of it. The the manual action penalty was a transparency penalty. It was a physical manual action for transparency. So I've got it up on one of the other things. So here it says

46:33and I like I said I'll send you through. I'll screenshot it. It says pages affected by manual actions can see reduced display features, lower rankings or even removal from Google search results detected issues and then the main the main category of the manual action transparency. Your site appears to valid validate uh to violate our transparency policy and lacks clear dates by lines information about the authors, the publication, the publisher, company or network behind it and contact information. And then underneath it says effects all pages and that's a and I can send I can I can send you through it. So my issue is that's a big

47:17for 99% for 99% of the or 99.9% of the industry I don't believe EAT is a thing. However, if you do start to get some really big rankings and RA hub comes and hits your site at that point you might get a transparency penalty. So, is it not just worth ticking the boxes for EAT just for it? Don't take long. It's a one-off type job to do and trying to then do the the branding that try to build your author profile for. So, for get your tips out. I want to build Dave uh Dave Potter and Joe Norris as being personal brands to build them up which

47:58then strengthens the get your tips out brand if that makes sense. Let's come back. Right. So you got a manual action which can't be triggered by a quality raider, right? And and also quality raers, there is not enough quality raiders to read the discover news headlines for an hour. They just it's it's it's impossible the amount of content that we produce. It's just

48:17impossible. Agree with you on the 99% and I would agree that a betting site is could cause could could cause damage to the detriment of society because betting is an addiction and people often unfortunately some people bet for the bet. they're not actually making an educated guess. And a lot of people can get in trouble with bedding, right? So, a lot of people enjoy bedding. A lot of people enjoy alcohol. I don't not I don't want to stop people drinking alcohol, right? I I enjoy going to pubs and hanging out with people. Um, and I'm not adverse to drinking. I used to drink myself, but my hypertension got

48:50out of control. So, it's I nearly lost eyesight in my my right eye. Um, like I had 10 months to go. I had like a big black hole from the blood pressure in the blood vessels. So the the the transparency is a is a is a real thing, right? And it applies to specific sites. In other words, they need people need to be able to find who the site is if they're going to get a transaction reversed or if they've been hit by um identity theft or fraud, right? So, if if you've got a website and there's no way to find out who owns the bank account, who who who do I get

49:25in charge, like my my credit card's been used, or I' I I meant to bet £100, but I actually bet £10,000 by mistake or whatever. Those are real things that I can understand Google going after, but I don't think that's an author bio. I don't think an author bio on its own is fixing that. I also have hundreds of sites that rank for very b very very big phrases with no author bias that do just fine because I don't think the author bio does anything. Transparency is a I I don't think that's an eat issue with the with a huge amount of respect. Right? Again, I don't have a problem with people. I I

49:57use an author bio on my page is just there's just no like about me block because I can't be asked writing it, right? Um I'm I'm not I I can see how uh Bet Fair would fit completely within YML as it would a payday loan, right? Those are direct things that affect a huge percentage of people. But thinking that Google can will validate content or or rank content higher for an author is

50:23because it cannot validate that author. But if the author says, "I'm the CEO," and there's an about us with contact information, company information, and and and those match, I I can get it. And especially if a a a software engineer or spam engineer goes and looks at and goes like, "This is a site that's taking money from the public and I can't find where their registered office is or

50:43their legal team or their support team." Totally understand. But I don't think that's e right. Yeah, not me. To be fair, I was just also I was trying to do is just showcase some examples where for for me I I resonate with everything you say with regards to someone comes along and their site's not ranking and they go, "Oh, you just need to add an author bio and stuff." Thinking that that's going to solve your problems. It's not. But then just from a framework point of view, what I didn't want to do is I didn't know how it was going to play out where you would have gone, "Oh, you low life,

51:12you shouldn't be doing eat and stuff." And I'm like, well, as a framework, I don't mind having it as a framework to follow just to say, tick the boxes, get the get the right foundations in place. It's not going to transform your website's rankings, but it's just the trust signals to then be able to to do

51:30the content and the links. That's where I would get nitpicky and say it's not a foundation, right? So, here here's here's what I would say is a foundation, right? you need some sort of authority and I think Google has lowered the bar for authority but the world has raised the bar right like if you were the best the first bet fair or the first um Irish bar right there's no bar excuse the pun right however if you're now coming into Google in 2026 yes you can cornerstone you could you could use paa you could use a bunch of low keywords to get in but you're only going to get so

52:05far and it takes time right the page has to get clicks over a certain amount of time the page needs to link to other pages. You need to learn how to link internally to cornerstone. If you're going to do that without ex you could say like yeah I can do it without uh backlinks and without page rank and without backlinks from the right. But I think that since 2012 especially with so many people buying back links and then everyone saying I'm never buying a backlink again. Now buying back links is so prevalent on one side and then all of the people who aren't ranking all of

52:36them don't have backlinks. So it's like one half of the industry knows that you need backlinks. One half of that industry knows that you can buy back links. Some might just give you nothing and some might give you something and some might stop giving you something down the road. And I know companies I've spoken to people who say they're spending 25 30,000 like on a hamster wheel buying back links, right? And I'm sure if you're building a brand like you

52:59are, you're getting natural backlinks. like you said, you're getting people searching for you in Google Local, in Google Search and Google Maps and in the Google um rankings, which is an authority of its in and of itself. But I I'm fascinated at how much for newbies, we're not allowed to say the backlink word. Yet, I see people building advertising backlink sites on Google ads

53:23like openly, right? uh and and I would imagine that that industry as that scales up the value of those are just coming down with it right and I think that foundationally you need to have authority then you can get clicks and I don't know that having an author bio is foundational because I don't know how many I don't know that people will get hit with a transparency issue and and you said that the the manual action you also were visited by quality raers is right. Again, the the QRG cannot investigate every site, cannot review every site. So, it's a YM site. I get it. They were they were probably all

54:05over it. I've never seen it in analytics because I'm I'm in B2B, right, with some B TOC. I think just on there, I don't know if I can call it foundational. Just so you understand it, this this is and again like we're all kind of second guessing to a certain degree. This is what I think and I might be completely incorrect. I think they they're

54:23providing a manual action penalty. [snorts] I think they like algorithmically the thing I don't think the Google quality raers are able just to click the button to at the end of it to say yes have it. But I think all that they're trying to do is before they're going to apply it. They're just checking with a Google quality rator just to check have we missed something and when they feed it back saying no we can't see x y and zed right therefore now we are going to pass the pen because it is literally what I would say there's a direct correlation where rate of hub hits for 24 to 48

54:55hours later manual action comes through in your Google search console so there is there's a connection and you can see pages so I think it's something to do I don't think I don't think they've got the authority to be able to say yes, give them a penalty. But I just think it's a just double check this. Okay, you've double checked it for us. Thank you very much. Now, we're sending this manual action through. We're 100% on the same page because here's where I

55:20completely agree with you. The the items in the quality raider guide requires a human to go and look at that. We're now we're on the exact same page, right? We are 100% on the same page. Eat applies to YM, right? Because quality raiders couldn't possibly touch more than 0.1% of content coming in to discover in an hour, let alone the total amount of pages that are already out there, right? Um, and so now we're 100% on the right page that if a quality raider guide goes to a site and says particularly in this section, whether it's transparency or making claims like for example, if you take this drug, it

56:03will stop cancer, right? anything like that would have to go to Google's quality team to to investigate. 100,000% agree with that. That's absolutely perfect. The problem with eat is that it's being touted as when Google sees, and I mean Google the algorithm, not Google the organization with contractors, that you've got an author buyer that you've made claims that you said you've got experience and that's 99.99% of the chatter on eat right now, whether it's on X, Reddit, LinkedIn, blog posts, articles, stories, news articles, journals, right? And that's the that's the problem with it being foundational is that going to your site and simply making claims is ludicrous, right? It's

56:48a very different story if a a human being goes to a site and says I can't find their office. Um they're saying that this tablet cures cancer. They're saying that this can fix that. They're saying these things or they're saying that this payday loan is a 700% um interest rate. Those things are to

57:06the detriment of people or society. that's your money or your life, right? That takes a person those subjective things because each could also be right. So if you if you look at a big bank site like a HSBC, Singapore Bank, they don't have authors on all of their blog posts, right? Maybe some of the do for the marketing pages, but for a lot of people it could be in a logo, right? Because

57:28they're doing so much advertising. They've been around 180 years. Those are things that a m but also right if you take let's take like the tech industry, you have Microsoft, right? Microsoft very popular in the US very unpopular in Germany right very big um open- source movement a lot of German governments and and and fed because it's a federalized country removing Microsoft and banning Microsoft from their infrastructure a Microsoft logo on a page could be the antithesis of eat so this is this is like what I'm trying to get at is that first of all build EA to your heart's content but telling people that you're going to start

58:07ranking or stop ranking because you don't have an author bio or you don't have outbound citations or Google looks for this Google looks for that is very different to I think a site that's clearly within YM clearly requires oversight which Google has always tried to avoid meta have always tried to avoid X have always tried to avoid right but they've slowly had to build it in through government laws through the EU through whatever right um so saying it's foundational again setting people up for information on how to go and do eat. If I had to say here's a hundred things you could do to your page, I would draw it down to you need a

58:44page, you need a title, you need some content, you need internal authority, and you need external authority. Ready, set, go. And then you've got to build up. If you're getting into gambling, adult fun, adult sites, adult entertainment, I mean, um, medical claims, definitely medical claims, especially around vaccines, you absolutely have to have a different site. You need documentation that people can see and read. I also do believe, by the way, that if if if you have if you're writing your structure and you're making a claim about something, right, and you link to the case study that you've linked on, that the human will also read that, right? And then from a

59:23branding point of view, that all works out. So I'm not saying avoid it and don't build author bios. I'm just trying to get build a system of like how it works, when it works, when it's algorithmic, and when it's not. That that's all I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to I'm just trying to say it's a system and it's if this then that or

59:40this then that, right? Just a just just heads up as well, right? I'm only playing devil's advocate. I ain't pro eat just like I'm certainly not pro eat. 99% of my websites don't have author bios. They just don't like all my local lead generation websites, not one of them have got an author bio. Not one of them. So I'm not I'm But however, if it's a Google News site, then it has. If it's in finance, then it has. If it's in the gambling space, then it has. If it's in like drug rehab, then it has. So it's very specific. And I also think and I don't know your

1:00:15thoughts on this. A lot of people throw your money your life as being an industry. I think it's only a very very small amount of industries within your money or life that actually eat applies for. I don't think it's for all your money or life. I think it's only even where there's big big consequences like death or massive debt that something could happen with misinformation. I think it's only it's actually not even an industry. It's actually specific keywords. So, for example, let's say you're looking for um let's just say you're looking for um a protein storage or a DNA replicator and you can search for DNA replicator. If

1:00:57you search for DNA replicator for a specific type of COVID vaccine, the number of pages might go from 10 million to 10. And it's just it's the it's actually the phrase. So if you search for example, how do payday loans work? Not not YML. I need a payday loan provider in Manchester Y. You know what I mean? So it could be the same page and pages could show up for what looks like a YML search and then not show up for another YML. And so we're on the same page here. So it's so important to test the carery, which means if I say I don't like eat, it's so important to have

1:01:36someone like you come on the show and say, well, what does that look like? How do we explore that versus people walking away with the thing that David's saying like eat is rubbish. You got to stop talking about it. I hate it and you're a low life for using it. Right. Which is and and and thanks for bringing that perspective, right? Because that's definitely not the perspective I I I

1:01:51want to send to people. Yeah. And I think the the next one I want to discuss with you is schema, right? Because at times I feel like I don't know whether you do it for for clickbait or for for for people to have a go and stuff like I don't know you full in like some people were saying David Quaid says that schemer is a pile of you don't need it at all ever and I'm like I don't think he would say that like I believe that there's certain areas where like eat where there's examples where it's needed but however someone going saying that you can go and get a super duper

1:02:24stack of schema and that's going to transform your site. Yeah, that's not going to work. But what's your take on schemas? Just so I understand it. So, for example, if you're going to build a job listing site, you absolutely 1,000% need schema. Yeah, you have to have schema because you can't get into Google job listing without schema because it will only read schema. And that's because it's processing volumes and volumes and volumes of documents. Not going to use an LLM 2C because text scraping is horrible. When when I worked in Dell as a software engineer, we had to do text

1:02:54scraping from documents all the time. It's it's it's really hard. Like if for example, if you're going to say we have a flight taking off at 4 pm and you write fur rpm at EWR flying to Stanstead, you've got airport code, city name, 4 p.m. is a word, lands at 6:15 p.m. You don't know what's so when you give it a structure, you know that all of the data is coming with it. You know where the string ends

1:03:20and stops. And that's what schema does. The problem with what the world I see right where people are on Reddit or people are on X and they're saying I need to rack my site and people like you need schema. They haven't total they haven't it they could be selling um they could be selling sales consulting right which is not going to go into uh Google merchant it's not going to go into Google flights or hotels right so if you if you have 10 websites and nine of them have schema for jobs and the other one doesn't then the other one's not ranking so you could say okay

1:03:53that's technically an SEO failure right but if all 10 websites have the schema that's not a ranking factor right or or a rank ranking participant or or or a catalyst. So, schema for example, if you're if you become a known brand, right, like you become a known entity and I don't know if I I've been struggling to get David Quaid to rank in the US because of Dennis Quaid, right? So, I changed everything to David GU last week and uh I I made a little joke at the end of the podcast with Edward and we I sent a request in while I was in Ireland and

1:04:26they said, "Will you change my thing to David GU?" So it shows up when you now it shows up when you search for David G. Great. And it took a while to do that. But I didn't change the schema. I just asked them to edit it. And now it comes up when you search for it. And when you go to trends and you it comes up a search topic. It shows a picture of me and Ray DS the CEO of Ke. And so it's

1:04:45moved from David Crate to David Gate. I'm like, "Okay, this is really great." And it doesn't do anything for me, right? Because doesn't it just nice I now I have my knowledge panel, but I have to have my middle initials. So, it's important there, but when you start looking at like the FAQ schema, um I I think that a lot of web engineers feel like they need control or they want control. And I've spoken to a lot of CMOs and they're like, when you say that, you're taking control away from us. And I'm like, you don't have control, right? You have to Google's non-negotiable, right? Like essentially

1:05:18what you're saying when you the reason you have your four foundational pillars or your five foundational pillars with your you you should do this this and this because you want to make sure your team is uniformal and they're not missing things. But you've got your own checkbox versus following this huge webbased checkbox, right? You've narrowed it down like I have, right? I'm always like you don't drive down to the the shop with your hazards on, all of your windows on, the air conditioning down, and the heat turned up and the radio. You don't turn everything on, right? You you use the minimum amount of of variables you can. And so when people

1:05:50start talking about schema um and that like it's mostly as a ranking factor. Oh, you don't have schema, you're not going to rank. You you're not going to do this. The actual application of schema is either fairly niche or it's an absolute like you have to have it. Hotels have to have it. Um flights have

1:06:08to have it. Yeah. I completely I didn't think you was going to say I for some reason I thought you was that they just don't even read it. they don't take it into into play. Like I completely agree. It's like it's like EAT normally and [clears throat] like 99% of my sites are probably don't even use schema. Like it's just not even needed. Like you said, I just do the minimal amount of work to get rankings and then move on to the next. And some of them are like, "Oh, you go and get big um descriptions in for LLMs and it's not even being read." Like, so all these people are

1:06:39misselling in my opinion. And I agree with that. Exactly. However, I I thought you were saying it wasn't being used at all for like they say like job listings for like the same as for like knowledge panels and stuff. So, I'm I'm of agreement then of of that. It's just at times we use it to lower disambiguation. So, make to make certain they understand who you are and what you do. That's from a knowledge panel point of view. There's certain ones like review schema can you could say certain things like if there's not like when they used to have how-to schema and it would pull through into

1:07:12the Google SER or the FAQ schema that used to pull through with the dropowns it would give you bigger listings or the review schema could increase CTR which then means it's an indirect ranking factor because having that or direct ranking factor oh direct ranking factor yeah yeah so having that showing up and that increase

1:07:33in DTR. Boom. I want it for that reason. So, but yes, there's some people again that are stacking schema on top of each other and they're saying it's it's a it's the number one ranking factor and you're just like come on, get a grip. I get Exactly. So, so if if you're listening to the show and and and and thanks so much to James for just saying like I thought you were going to come on and say like eat it never happens and sorry that schema never happens never gets read just to put yourself in this place, right? just go to LinkedIn or X or Reddit and do a search for for um schema

1:08:06and SEO and rank factor and every single article will be written you need to have schema scheming is a rank factor schema accelerates you the reason you're not ranking there's no nowhere do people say 99% of the time it doesn't count or FAQ schema was actually redacted or reduced six years ago and then and FAQ schema is has been scrubbed from the Google documentation there are still people saying you need FAQ schema and again it's a system. So for example, I'm sure James you you know this very well. If you've got a page where you're ranking for a very high topic, you're battling a couple of other sites, right? And you

1:08:45put FAQ FAQs at the bottom of the page in the page, you're going to start increasing clickthrough rate. You're the the words the phrases overlap. So, best horse bedding, horse bedding for under£10, whatever they are, they're all related. They all they all share strings within strings, right? But if you're a site that can't rank for that, let's just say keyword difficulty score 90 99, you you're down in the tens, right? I would say you need to put every FAQ on its own page. And that's what we did with the PA hack and why it works so well. And I actually someone emailed me go like sent a screenshot and said like

1:09:23you're kidding me it's been less than 24 hours and one of the problems they had is they'd put them all on the same page. And so I said like look Google Google was built in the '90s by Unix engineers and it works the same way. And so if your document is called meat market and then you start talking about what is a steak, what is a ribeye, what is a this relevancy to the page of what is a ribeye to a page called meat market is very very low. It's very tenuous and it takes humans to actually go meet market could mean a dating site or an actual butcher shop or this,

1:09:56right? And and I don't think Google ever built that in or fact or needed to. But if your page is called what is a ribeye steak, your document is 100% because there's very few pages that rank for uh the hundred years war, who was Queen Elizabeth, and how do you make wine, right? They they tend to be three different documents. And maybe that's a a part of Google search that is is is archaic, right, and there's a a huge amount of relevance and I'm going to say the taboo word to authority. And so if you've got a low if you look at a lot of the people who rank

1:10:33for paas or people also ask or how-tos, they're within a document. And so when you don't have a lot of authority and you create your own page and you get the relevance of the document name, you can come in and bounce them out. And that's why it's such a great SEO. You know, do you know what? That's such an advanced strategy. And we we've got our own in-house tool um that does keyword difficulty. There's no good keyword difficulty tool on the market in my opinion. A lot of doing it via backlinks, but we've we've got one where it's pulling in the URL and the title tag and how relevant the title tag is

1:11:07for the query. So then what then we'd go and do is then we'd go and look at the the power of the page versus the relevance and you're multiplying it by each other. And this is where and this is why some people when we go and build a site um in in a previous episode Ed Edward has asked me how do you build a new website and my first thing was it depends because if I've got authority I might be able to have it as a H2 on the page. However, if I've not got authority, it might need its own page in the H1 in the URL and the title tag and

1:11:40it completely and this is where when you're structuring one semantic content network or topical map or however you you're looking to break down the pages and you're looking at another in exactly the same niche depending on the brand and the authority can completely depend on whether you break the pages up and either a query defines a page or a query defines a heading. But obviously if you can break it down and add it where it's in the H1 do a concise answer, you're not playing hide-and-seek with your content that it's we we said this before everywhere you it's the 12th H2 down or right at the bottom of the page. You're

1:12:15like it's such a better user experience in doing it that way. And the amount of people that just go, "Oh no, I'm I'm not I'm not going to set it up that way." Well, that's fine. Have it as the the 15th H3 on the page, right at the bottom of the page, but they're going to bounce. It's going to be a bad user experience. And therefore your whole site's going to get downgraded because they're not having a good user

1:12:36experience with the site. Absolutely. And and I think this is this is so important because so many people look at superficial statements like oh Dave Qu says scheme is a waste of time and your waste of time is schema. And what I keep trying to say to people is come down to the fundamentals, right? Like if your car is in first gear, it's going forward, right? And if you put it in reverse while you're driving forward, you're going to break the gearbox, right? If you if you understand the fundamental mechanics like like we just said, right? If you've not got lot if you've got a lot of authority, you can

1:13:06do X. So if you're going to go to a conference where you're talking to the head of SEO from IBM and the head of SEO from CNN and the head, it's none of their advice is helping you if you're building your very first WordPress hello world domain, right? If you're trying to get up there, they may not help you either. You may need to talk to their marketing and advertising and brand building and something else guy. And then the the simple thing of understanding I always say across the web and and I've started seeing other people say is like SEO is about relevance multiplied by authority and

1:13:40that's cuz I can't find where Matt Cut said that originally. I forgot where he said it or I've actually tried to save some of his video clips for prosperity. Like people talk about not being able to get indexed. And I just have this like 90-cond clip that I borrowed from the Google search video team and put on my own channel that he says, "Of course we can. We can index in in half a second on CNN if you've got links. That video was taken down by Google." Right? So if you understand that your page title, your document name, its relevance means your authority is used. So, let's say like

1:14:13you an authority score of 10,000 10,000 authority points across topics like let's just go with BMW headlamps, BMW lights, right? And your document name is we sell BMW and Mercedes lights. You're now at best 50% relevant. So, your authority is 20,000. You're now getting 10,000. And then you've got your click-through rate battle. And if you're only maintaining like 0.5% clickthrough rate battles, your authority gets weakened. And so that's just an algorithm, right? And when you start to think like that, you go, okay, that's why even though I've got more backlinks than my competitor, which is not a great statement, they've now outranked me. So we we've

1:14:54got equal amount of page rank, but their clickthrough rate slightly better, so they're winning. or I think I've improved my content, but I'm not winning the click to rate battle because you going back to what you said earlier, maybe you forgot to include something like next time search for Dulies Mercedes headlights and that's going to create a higher clickthrough rate for the page and then you're going to bounce back up. So, you have to come back to these fundamentals. And I think when we anthropomorphicize Google, we create a problem where we go like, well, Google likes this, Google likes that. And I understand it's it's so much easier to

1:15:27talk like that without me twattling on about um mechanics and page rank and algorithms and clickthrough rate scores. But that's how it works. That's how it objectively a computer a mathematical software machine translates human behavior is by looking at the scores on each of those parts as well as what people do afterwards in return. So if you understand that if your page is more relevant versus putting it as a H15 at the bottom of the page, it's going to

1:15:56affect the outcomes. um versus oh you should just put 15 FAQs in your page. Right? So it's like it's the same advice but one is a system and one is an absolute that will absolutely fail in 99% of the cases because of the different ways of of of of points of observation in system and and this is what I would say with regards to I used I used to have a lot of debates. I've now become a lot more chilled and I and this is where a lot of time I ignore I don't really go on LinkedIn or Twitter very much because there's so many people sharing misadvice

1:16:29and and my and my issue is with it is that sometimes I genuinely believe the person and this is the hard part. I genuinely believe the person that's sharing it honestly thinks that's how it works but they've only ever worked with big brands. Now, when you work with a big brand that might be a DR70 that gets loads of branded search and they've got loads of authority, they naturally get back links or they've got a digital PR agency that that runs everything for them that everything that they do on that site works and they just think that they are a great SEO and you go, you go

1:17:04and build an EMD or you go and build a brand new website in that industry and try and rank it and majority of them couldn't. And they're the true the true SEOs understand if they can rank obviously a branded site and do local sites and maybe do an affiliate site or do a SAS and they they're a little bit more diverse. They understand it all and sometimes I remember having debates with a few people and I just thought you just don't get it like you you're only dealing with big sites and you're not understanding these different ways and different algorithms for different industries. So obviously like BM25 and

1:17:41TF still work in very longtail local. So query string matching and just having the the query and the title in in the H1 that's good enough like in certain markets but the minute you go into the more competitive and you start bringing in authority and stuff at that point it's like no there's there's layers to this game of what now needs to be being done. But this is why I resonate with a lot of things of what you say, David, is because you talk the talk and you actually do things and test and it's like it's a breath of fresh air for the industry to have somebody like you that

1:18:16goes against the grain of what everyone thinks works and then you prove them wrong. And I'm like, yes. Like because I know what you're saying is is right, but you do get a lot of from people in the industry like you don't know what you're on about. You're a spam. and just like come on. Like he proves it time and time again to you. Like so I would say for that, keep doing what you do. Keep keep hustling and yeah, like keep being

1:18:43awesome. Just before you said that, I was just about to I didn't want to interrupt you, but I was about to say ask Edward, could I just get that clip of everything you said so I can rank it as the SEO starter guide and also just put on my LinkedIn because it's so vital, right? I I think

1:18:58we're the same SEO, right? um in in the sense of like if you're a technical SEO working at a big website and you figure out that fixing a slug across 1 million pages give you a 3,000% increase is because you're rolling the dice because we cannot calculate the algorithm. Right? So for everything I just said about understanding the mechanics, I don't know what I don't know how long the equation is. I don't know how many variables are in the equation. I don't know if they're times factored a

1:19:27fraction of. But if you've got a million pages and you can start rolling the dice, it's I I used the analogy on on a previous show is like it's like going to the the going to a casino and being able to go to every table where you you could throw 50 quid on the table, but it's it's attached to an elastic band that shoots back into your pocket and you can go to every single table and just take a chance. One of them is going to come through, right? It's just a law of averages. Some of those pages is going to start hitting a million p a million

1:19:54clicks, right? That is not something that you can do if you're building a website for a lawyer or a plumber or a a landscaper, right? Because the hell they're going to sit down and write all that content. Um, but yeah, I think the the the the lack of of testing and the amount of the where I think tribalism has gone wrong in SEO is that people want to defend the idea and they clamor around the tribe and the standard and they go like we have to defend schema or our work is going to dry up. uh versus saying acknowledging that actually yeah there's one line and and it was Jake

1:20:29Hundley who kept uh sharing it for me said like it only applies to government and healthcare and they repeated it twice and when people are willing willing to read that and overlook it and ignore it I don't think they're involved in a genuine discussion anymore I think that they're involved in a we have to defend this idea you've you've come to me and said I want to challenge you on this but I want to hear what you have to say and no one ever does that right and when somebody counters back at you you're like yeah actually when I think about it that might be a good idea but I

1:21:02have seen this and this this is a phenomenal this is what SEO discourse should be and if we had this I feel like there would be far less tribalism where like I'm a a content writer or I'm an page rank SEO and I must defend page rank to the end right whereas we can say well are you testing both and if you're not testing both are you being genuine to yourself or are you just is this just cognitive dissonance when I first started hearing about politics or paying

1:21:28a little bit of interest to politics. Terrible, terrible Saturday night that was. Um, and I and people started talking about cognitive dissonance. What is what is cognitive dissonance? What does it look like? And then I was on a forum and I was like, ah, this is what cognitive dissonance is now. I get it. It's like we must defend schema even though this particular schema is no longer used, right? and and it's like oh and you see it so often like it's these conjecture narratives right like the minute you say well Google says someone will go back well you can't trust Google you you just can't trust them and yeah

1:22:01it's true to a point I I think that they've done a disservice by overmpowering back links and page rank and then pulling it all back like it doesn't exist anymore and so I think if you know if you if you think about what we've done and you've been extremely successful James and I I said to Edward when he said like, "Hey, would you be coming on a master class?" Sorry, coming on the pod. I was like, "I don't know that James realizes, but I learned to do not just parasitic SEO, but brand building SEO by actually following what you had done on Reddit." Um, I went

1:22:34through all of those pages uh two or three years ago, and I was like, "This guy is the expert." Cuz like, you did it with so little content. Uh, you got it in the index way before anyone else. And I was like, everyone else is talking through their ear. This guy has it with laser precision. And you've been extremely successful at that. And for people to get to that point, trying to help them understand the system and all of the systems thinking that you've gone through, right? Like all of the things you've tried, all of the things that you've broken, all of the things that have

1:23:10backfired, that's not a checklist. That's systems thinking. That's engineering at its finest. Yeah. I mean obviously just on that just to expand it just so from a mindset point of view of what you've just said there of challenging people and stuff every single morning when we go into the office Kazra Kazadash has been on the episode with you Edward so I employed Kazra a few years ago initially he was just my web designer and now he's he's he's he's progressed now still worked with us in the office but he's got his own school group he's got his own kind of um SEO conference he does his own

1:23:42thing every day we come in we might bring something it could be politics It could be religion, it could be anything. And we just for 45 minutes to an hour with Scott Kalen, who's the managing director of um one of the lead generation companies. And we just debate and and we we find to be proven wrong and we ask questions and we try to play

1:24:03devil's advocate and we're inquisitive. And we I've tried to drill that into every single member of staff to be if you get proven wrong, that's a good thing because you've learned. Just ask more questions. Like, but the reason why I'm leading to that is because I feel too many people in the industry are too proud because they want to be known as being the best that they think that it's their way or the highway. And it's think that's the only way you can do something. And it's like there's more than one way to skin a cat. Like you could break all the pages down. You could maybe have them that

1:24:38you've got less pages and build more links to them pages, you know, diluting the pages down and stuff. But it is like this both both ways could in different markets work well and what you've got to do you've got to be willing to adapt to I always say someone says oh what would you do I'm mean roofing in Mexico and I go well it's going to be really difficult because I've never done anything in Mexico so I don't really know whether spam works I don't like in certain non-English-speaking markets GSA and and low quality link building strategies still work so if I give him information of what works in the UK. I'm

1:25:14doing him a disservice. So, I've got to straight away say I've never done it there, so I don't honestly know. I know you we could say, "Oh, it's just one algorithm. It must be the same." But it's it's not. It it it can change depending on correlation, depending on what the most trusted sources are in that location and stuff like that. So I I love I love the fact that one Edwards turning up every single day and getting people on. And do you know the biggest thing Edward that I loved about you when I spoke to you was this is off air on the first episode you was like I don't

1:25:48mind having someone that's let's say far left or far right coming on voicing their opinions like I think it's good to have difference of opinions on so you can listen to them and have that mindset of just being every day is a school day and I'm going to learn from these people and this is what I was excited to be on with yourself Dave because I know that I resonate with a lot of things of what

1:26:11you're saying. I know you walk the walk. I'm sick of people trying to talk the talk, get up on stage and I'm the big all I am. Look at me. And you're like, you've never ranked a website in your life. You're walking around on the speaking circuit and you've got no case studies to show. And you just got to be careful. Anyone who's listening to this, you just got to be careful with who you do follow and make certain is someone that's going to live and die by what

1:26:35they genuinely believe in. So agree. And that's why I knew and that's why I was like I didn't want to be late for this because I just knew that we were the same type of SEO. Um I had a so I had a disagreement with someone on a Reddit article or Reddit post two years ago, three years ago about CDN's and someone said and I said first of all page speed I don't think matters as much as you think. At at scale it's problematic for user performance. If it's a mobile, if it's job hunting and people are doing it on a phone, on the subway or or the underground,

1:27:10problematic. But again, you're out building your first website, it's built in WordPress, you have two pages. I don't think speed's a massive issue, right? And this guy's like, "Add a CDN." And I'm like, "Do you realize the amount of hops adding a CDN is?" Cuz I was head of marketing for a load balancing company that we turned from 20 million to 250

1:27:30million in six years. Do you realize that if he's getting three ticks a day from Google and that's not enough to actually even get a crux report because you need I think 300 clicks in 30 days. Adding a CDN is not just a cost factor, a time factor, an engineering factor. It's it's more hops and it's not going to deliver anything. It's going to slow down. That guy still came back to me uh the night before last and started trolling me on Reddit from something that the mods banned him for two years ago. He just he just picked right back up and just wanted to he just wanted to

1:28:03get going about it. And it's like you're not it's that's not a genuine debate. That's not a devil's advocate. That's not a I didn't you didn't come to learn. You came to not lose. Yeah. That's all that's not a that's not useful for you. That's not useful for the community. I think if if if I speak to someone and they're not willing to test the corollary, my heart starts to sink, right? Because I think that's where we get blinded into believing in far-right far-left stuff, right? In in whatever discourse it is, right? That Ferrari is the best car and it that's the only car that can be the

1:28:41best car. That's it. There's no failing. If anyone says it's a failing, like that's that's going to be a horrible life because life's going to keep tripping you up, right? But if you're willing to say, I think it was this and so I'm going to test it again. And I think also people are afraid of Google and think that Google's watching them or

1:28:59it's going to punish them for testing. You and I have known like you said, you accidentally push that blog post with, hey Matt, can you read the the this article and rewrite it, right? And we've done enough of those things that we can go like actually you can recover, right? You can recover pretty easily. And and even if you get a manual action, you can recover here. I'll find a way to recover. And it's just a mindset. And I and and I just want people to stop thinking it's a unicorn list or that we're gatekeeping some magic schema that we all know about or that there's HTML

1:29:30structure or that there's some magic like universal code. It's a lot of it's testing, right? I'm I'm pretty sure you've sat down at the start of a week and said, "Okay, we need to get to number one for this. Matt, what's your idea? Casual, what are you doing? What are you doing?" We try it. Some of them don't work. Three months later they work, right? Three months later they work. Not because of time, but because the other things set them up for success, right? And when you start to attribute, it's actually a little bit it actually becomes quite complicated,

1:30:02doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I honestly believe that also in certain markets that if you've got some sort of partial penalty, I don't know your thoughts on this side, but if you've got some sort of partial penalty, it's so difficult to get out of that until the next core algorithm update. So like you can do really good work for a couple of months and then it might not come to fruition until there's a core algorithm reset or re-quality score or something. You can be working hard and not see the result. And this is where it's difficult for SEO agencies because some could be actually doing

1:30:35bad, but they're in a positive ranking state and everything they're doing is actually looking like they're doing well and then they get hit and then it's like, oh well, we've got paid for 12 months. And then others the the site's in decline and they're trying to like get it into a neutral ranking state and try to fix some of the site and they could be doing a lot of good things but over the six months period before the next algorithm update comes along. It's like they've only steadied the ship and it's like oh you've not grown me I'm going to leave now. And it's like I I do

1:31:04feel sorry for certain agencies and that's why I don't do any sort of SEO service because at times on the big this is these are on bigger sites. it can take a while to recover. Um where if you're on a on a local you can publish a page if it doesn't work you can change the sentiment of a page or repurpose it slightly and then you can then recover it and get the rankings again and you can just it you you're playing along the way and it's dead simple but on some of the bigger ones it's not as as simple. I

1:31:34don't if you've seen that or not. So how how Google works has always like fascinated me like at an engineering level because I designed some of the software or I I redesigned some of the software that Dell used to build. So back in Limmerick in the 1990s Dell computers opened up bought an old Atari factory and then bought an old Wang factory and um built a a computer factory and I I was on the team that designed EMF3 which Michael D had given us 13 months and 80 million to build a

1:32:04factory to build 13,000 PCs a day. By month 11, we were hammering out 36,000 PCs a day. And the software that we built, we had to upgrade from Dell Unix 5 to NT4 apps. And I love thinking about that networking, how it's built. And I actually did write an article about how I think Google's infrastructure is laid out. And a couple of Google engineers DM me to say like you you it's sc it's interesting how close you got. Not that you did a great job or anything like that. So I I as an engineering nerd, I just love that. I think what happens with um with penalties is that the

1:32:41heristics that trap you in either only get updated when the update comes out. So I don't I don't think people realize how complicated an update rolls out. First of all, they've got to align all of the tables. So, if they if they introduce a new field, right, like we're going to track um did they click on the right hand side of a link in the result or do they click on I don't think people realize that Google actually look at where what part of the page title you click on and that helps build a snippet, right? That they actually have different viewport um they have a snippet builder

1:33:12that has different viewports that maps out what how much of your page title will fit and what the most important part is. So, if you change your font size, you get a different snippet. It's not that it just cuts it off, right? It's the amount of engineering that they do at that scale I think is almost overkill but it's working for them right so when they upload an core update they actually have to change the tables they have to change the algorithms and they actually have to rewrite the tables to match so if we're going to give you 2% up for this and then take away 3% for

1:33:41this and then put you up 1% for that they have to rewrite the whole web and that's why it scales out and that's why you get these fuzzy ups and downs I think and so if you're stuck It's because essentially penalties hold you back. They don't generally run at indexing. They run as a postindexing analysis of what's happened. And it's not until the new system comes out that they either rewrite and that gets you out of the trap. So like you said, you could actually be doing 100 things that are good, but because of that um sort of back stop that stops you from getting above position 55. You don't know if any

1:34:15of that's working until the actual algorithm is replaced that's holding you back or the heristic score changes that you're not in the trapped percentage and you escape out. And so I I have a lot of empathy for people like that because it's so clinical. It's like you just achieved 0.1% of this and you're in and you your your neighbor was 0.1% out and they're out and it's it's so cold and clinical. Um, that's how I see like a relationship with Google and why I I I guess I worry about when people say, "Well, Google doesn't like me or Google needs more time to evaluate." And maybe

1:34:52I'm a little sarcastic and I go, "Well, it's not a book reading club, right? It's like it's not like waiting for its neighbors opinion." Like, this is software. It it's like the what also makes also surprises me about a Google, right? with the amount of money that they make and the amount of control the shareholders have on them is like their core search team must be so small yet it's driving so much e-commerce so much traffic so much time on the web you look at like all the things that Google have been doing they've been building um data centers underground data centers underwater data centers that float on

1:35:25the water data centers in the sky self-driving cars they don't seem to be able to do anything but their core search team if you take out the ads team which actually technically generates the funds and you take out the management and you take out the search team's like really small right that they actually do this engineering initiative and that's why I think that to me it's still very much the same system from 2003 with a huge amount of tweaks and a huge amount of ifs and forks and things like that and I think also when I was start when I started saying this that Google has like

1:35:56a limited um appreciation of quality you also nodded quite quite cuz you know that like when you start to see the depth and breadth of content to to start to be able to say that one system can decide for all these perspectives. Like there's content on the internet that says the earth is 6,000 years old. There's content on the web that says the earth is 6 billion years old. There's content that says that we moved from another planet and it's all there, right? I think Neil deGrasse Tyson said it well when he said it's a confirmation bias engine, right? Like if you Google why is eat good, you will get a story

1:36:28that tells you why eat is good. If you Google why is eat bad, I'll probably rank. Yeah, you'll get this podcast and it'll tell you why it's bad. But I don't think it's bad, right? I think it's a noble effort. And I think as a for for how you've built your system around it, you're saying it's good to not to not forget about these things, but I'm not reliant on it. This is this is part of my five spokes. And what I also love is that it's not a hundred spokes, right? I'm not trying to every page must have schema a table 15 commas uh no more than 35 H3s no more of these

1:37:03you you're what what what's actually understated here is your phenomenal knowledge and appreciation for how Google works as a testing engine. That's like the most understated thing that comes through everything you say. all of the examples you give and then the appreciation for those core things that Google's looking for is so valuable and I hope like people will ask Grock. So Grock's a great tool to take a video, drop it in and say, "Well, what did James really say?" and get it to distill that down because it doesn't just use the um the the uh transcript. It's one of the few tools I think that can

1:37:40actually uh listen to the video. um drill down into what James is saying about the core things that Google's looking for in pages and how to get people to come back and and switch the balance of this order suggested search so that your site becomes recommended or your brand or your name becomes recommended. That is the beauty of the all of these mechanics of how it works that I as a nerd have always loved so much. I think I think a little key takeaway there of what you've just said um for anyone who's watching this which I think is huge when you go and write a page and let's say in the

1:38:15let's say it's in the gambling space and it's about bet 365 review and you're talking about it in a positive manner and you're saying how great it is and here's the affiliate link. If you're not ranking for that, there is a way of you getting into ranking for it where you might be looking to say why it's bad and why you might not want to use it and you and you might be able to get into that SER and get the clicks that way and then cross-ell into other affiliate kind of commissions and stuff like you don't want to use this brand because of X Y

1:38:46and Z. These are better. And the amount of people that just go and publish and set and forget, like you've just said there, David, where they go, it needs to have 3,200 words of content. It needs to have 16 H2s. It needs to be this almost like TF of it needs to have this this amount of words and this many times. And you're like, really? Is this still what you're doing? Is this still how you're playing the game? Like go and check to see what's working. Test it. If it's not, if it's not indexing, you've completely missed the intent of what it needs to be and republish it. If it is,

1:39:21but it's not really getting picked up for the right terms, maybe change the intent slightly of the page or the sentiment and you might be able to get in through a different way and work through your traffic tiers that way. And like you just said there, one one talking about scheme in a positive manner and one talking about it in a negative is a completely different set of results. So try and find out where you can get in and get your your growth with traffic and move move up those

1:39:48traffic tiers. It's the same as listicles. I've seen a lot of um you know popular SEOs who I have a lot of respect for uh say that Google's going to remove listicles and I'm like how how is it going to like that's censorship right? There's a huge problem of s like that companies can't use typos to to communicate to their audience. That's rubbish that you can't step in and do that. That would crush innovation. Gary Isles actually even said like how boring would the web be if Google had a preferred structure and everyone had to follow it. It'd be horrible, right? And I don't think people think about those unintended

1:40:19consequences of those ideas that they because it it makes it easier for them to understand the web and the web is not easy to understand. We our brains are not big enough to comprehend the the web. But if you think about listicles, I think a lot of people look at like a question like what are the best CRM platforms or what are the best bookie platforms or the best betting sites or the best game sites. Some people see that as oh the best in the best intent match is a list of things like a list of 10 different websites. And so when I talk to clients or prospects or people

1:40:52looking for help and they say well we can't mention our competitor's names. I'm like who who decided that it must be a list of other sites? Why can't you build a listical that says here are the top 10 reasons we think our product is the best and you decide. Right? Your your page has just as much right to rank and you don't have to be defamatory or transgressing other people's trademarks or copyrights. You can just write about yourself or you could just write about here's the top here's what we think makes the best skateboard or the best sticker or the best whatever and we've only got five out of 10 of them but

1:41:27we're building the other five. So come along for the journey, right? That there's so much creativity in SEO to see people getting locked down and saying I must do this, I must do that or Google's going to hate me or Google's going to punch me. There is so much space like I remember writing a blog post when we were competing with F5. And I think the co-founder said, "Okay, we've been sued by them. Let's not do that again." And so I went and wrote an article about uh refreshing your website hitting the F5 key. And back then we had to use stock images. And I found one of one of my uh

1:41:59engineers found a stock image of an F, you know those remember the old gray and white keyboards where the the F keys were gray and the F5 button was cracked and it was the only picture of F of an F5 button we could find and it was cracked. I was like this is perfect and it ranked for F5 load balancer and like you you can you you don't have to go what is everyone looking for? What

1:42:20do I think everyone's looking for? You're open to creativity. Please go and use it. you know, give into it. I think on that though with regards to listicles, so this is is my opinion about listicles, like if it's an LLM and they're trying to choose, okay, who is the best SEO experts, how how are you going to be able to differentiate whether James Douly is better than

1:42:43Edward Stern or better than David Quaid? Realistically, the only way of them being able to determine who's better is by comparison type articles. But other people being able to compare side by side in my opinion here's number one, here's number two, here's number three. So I think listicles for that reason is quite good. But everyone just became obsessed like the SEO industry do. They get one process and one system and say right that's it listicles. I'm just going to do listicles to get in for anything related to best. But like you just said there you could you could go and do an article why is David Quaid the

1:43:19best SEO consultant in New York. go and get 10 others that are in there. Not doing a listical, but just putting them side by side with some verifiable facts of why you believe you're better than them. So, it's not a listical, but you're just explaining why you are better than X, Y, and Zed, and A, B, and C. The articles just now being able to compare those verifiable facts side by side, and then he's able to say Edward Edward Sturm is the best podcast producer. David Quaid is the best New York SEO consultant. Give them and sometimes doing the X versus Y versus Zed. So, you're just doing a comparison

1:44:00of three or four and do them side by side of why you are better. Otherwise, it's very difficult for the LLMs to try to determine who's better in them or them. And sometimes people want to know who's better in X and Y. And sometimes you've just got to feed and then it is just a con it is conf confirmation bias and it is built on consensus. So you've just got to feed the algorithm like SEOs do to Google. You've got to feed the LLMs what information they need to make an answer and synthesize what's needing to

1:44:32be done. I'm smiling from ear to ear because that's exactly the lesson that you did and that's exactly what I did after I saw that and that got me in a lot of trouble. And Edward's going to start smiling cuz [laughter] he he knows exactly what I'm talking about. And that's exactly what what I saw. And so when I first got into chat GPT, I'm like, I wonder how this works, right? I I I bought into the smoke and mirror and I'm like and then I re I started asking it, well, what is the best SEO on Reddit? And I, you know, thinking like how is it going to build

1:45:04an agent that's going to go and what what what's it going to evaluate with? And then I realized it just grabbed it just went to Google and asked for a list. And so you can when you ask it like who's the best SEO on Reddit or who's the best financial adviser in Reddit, it actually just does a Google search who's the best financial advisor in Reddit and if you rank you're in the list, right? It's not actually able to

1:45:23do that or not yet or if ever, right? And that made me realize like one it's such a smok and mirror trick and once that evaporates once that that that sort of like veneer of like it's a complicated hidden engine and you're like wow it's just so lazy that sometimes there's only two pages from Reddit in the results and it's actually getting its answer from other blog posts and you realize like some of those people might not even be on Reddit and make it into the list and you're like that's how gameable it is and that's how like But if you're going to compete in a

1:45:59listical and page one has got 10 people and page two's got 10 people but eight are different and page three's got seven people different. You're not going to stand out on one entry, right? Cuz statistical anomaly like you said feed it. So you really have to play both games. You really have to understand that one, it's not going to Reddit and doing an assessment of people and two, how do I make sure I come up more and more in that list? And that was one of that's actually how I not found you, but that's how I came to see you as different from the rest because I think

1:46:34you were doing an experiment with something and I was like, this is literally the most brilliant piece of SEO engineering. And I don't want to call it parasitic engineering, but I was just so blown away cuz you're not super active on Reddit, right? Or No, not at all. No, no, no. I'm not I'm not that active on any of them. I've got someone now managing some of the um the socials the um and to be honest with you, it's a bit cringe at times if I'm doing best. I don't want to be known as being an SEO. Like I leverage SEO, but I'm a businessman. And like anyone who anyone

1:47:07who knows me who's who's who's listening to this would know that I always say I'm the dumbest SEO in the room. I'm not. But I this is what I always say when I'm in a mastermind. I'm the dumbest SEO in the room, but I leverage SEO and I'm great at business. And that's what I am. I'm a businessman that leverages SEO and PPC and and social media and stuff like that. And I'm good on the business front. But I try and play down because and the reason why I say I'm the dumbest SEO in the room, just so you understand, is because I just don't mind asking

1:47:35questions. Even sometimes I ask a question that I think I know the answer to, but I like hearing other people's opinions about what they think is the correct answer to that question. You sound like every best CEO that I've ever worked for who absolutely got there by saying, "I'm super interested in SEO, but I really want to know what other people think." And you are a great businessman. I'm an SEO, but I'm not a great businessman. And a lot of people say like, "How come you don't have your own bar or your own this or your own that?" It's because I'm lousy running them and I don't want to. Um, and so I'm

1:48:05so impressed that you're able to actually know that your core focus is as a businessman and all of those things and identifying talent and educating and training it. I I think it's phenomenal that you have that 45 minute session at the start of each day where you encourage critical thinking at your organization. How many organizations their HR wouldn't even allow that to happen yet what you're teaching them probably solves friction and if there are two idealistic battles in your team they're probably able to work it out a lot better after a few days of that training and how few companies incorporate it I' I've seen like tech

1:48:39teams do I think it's called candid feedback or candid something where they're literally allowed to tell someone well I think you're an egotistical maniac in the team room right and it's just about breaking egos down and going look this is a pace of work. We have to figure this out if you're going to be emotionally protective of an idea. We're going to keep running into battle after battle

1:48:59after battle. Yeah. Um and here you are able to understand the most complex SEO environments that would make me b in horror of like, wait, I got to do a casino. I'm going to do a casino. But you seem to have you you seem to have that capability of like just putting your ego on the side, which is what what comes across when you say, "I'm not the smartest person in the room." But you are the smartest person in the room because you're able to gather all of the smartest ideas and critically engage with them and say, "Well, I'm not sure if I agree with it,

1:49:30but I'm still going to go and test it." And how many people never do that because they're like, "What if I'm proven wrong?" Or it's it's so subconscious, right? And that's where where people are missing out. Yeah, for sure. I take I I for me personally, I think my my success has been that I've I've and in a lot of other industries, people would laugh at you for this. I've failed the most. Like the amount of failures of what I've done along the way and the amount of testing that we've done and I've gone all in on certain projects going, "This is what we need to do." And it's just failed

1:50:00miserably. But you've just got to I'd say my probably number one trait when people ask me is my boats back ability. And I think it's got I've got two older brothers and my two older brothers used to I used to play sport with them from like being five to 15 years old. And because they're older, they used to beat me all the time. So if I play football, they'd beat me. I'd get back up and try

1:50:19and beat him again, but they beat me. And I and I feel I've got this bounceback ability that it allows me to fail, not dwell on it at all, and just go again and go again and go again. And I think that that's what SEO is about. It is that continuous testing and developing and not being too worried or scared that if you really think an idea is going to work and it doesn't just being like well it is what it is. Every day is a school day and move on to the next thing and knowing that the algorithms might change tomorrow and I'm happy with that because I know that

1:50:51we'll be able to adapt. our business. I always say some of our competition are driving a big tanker and for them to change direction is going to take a long time for us. We're in a little speedboat. We're not I mean we do well business-wise, but we're in a little speedboat that can just go and change direction really quickly for whatever happens in tomorrow's algorithms. And I think that's the mindset that people need to be having that things are changing a lot. And are the 10 blue

1:51:18links going to stop now within Google? Is it going to be more AI mode first or like I don't know what your thoughts are on that. Well, I'm I'm stealing that analogy of the tanker in the speedboat for a start because I think that's absolutely brilliant. Like they're juggernauts, right? They're they've got so much momentum but they can't adapt. They can't switch. So that's a phenomenal way of doing it. And then that that pick up and try again, right? Like so many people keep doing the same thing and it doesn't work. That's when you need to adapt. That's when you need to pivot, right? Um, in terms of like the 10 blue

1:51:52links, I am such a terrible forecaster. Um, I'm afraid to say, "Yeah, they're going to go away and then they're not and say that they will stay and they won't, right?" Um, I really have no idea what's going to happen. Um, because I I spend so little time thinking about it. Um, because I can't imagine like what it would look like. Um, what one of the things that I that I think is so is so weird is is is it's hard trying to treat the Google search user as one tribe, one mindset. We can see in SEO how much people think like sheep, right? Because we can see

1:52:26coralled keywords. But when you look at like for example um we had a project where uh AWS was suspending or sunsetting one of their financial planning services and I had a client that were mentioned in the wrong category on G2 and co-pilot was mentioning them as an as a potential um uh alternative as the best potential alternative and I said we should we should run Bing ads because a lot of our audience are Microsoft fanboys and they'll be using they'll still be using Bing and we started getting so many conversions. I was like, "Yeah, this is great." Cuz like we're paying $5 cost

1:53:04per click in Google. We're like at 157. I'm like, "Yay, we're doing it. We're doing it. We're doing." And then I realized people were going to co-pilot and saying like, "Oh, AWS is sunsetting. What should I do?" And they were recommending product. And then they were going to Bing, running a search, clicking on the branded ad, and

1:53:20converting. And they were not a nonfit. And I was like, "Yeah, let's let's spend more money. Let's spend more money." And then it was a terrible idea because they were coming in for the wrong. They didn't know how to click out of co-pilot. Yeah. So they would they were reading the brand and then going and searching for the brand in Bing, clicking on the ad, and then filling our sales team with like a complete waste of time because it was it was it was like a 747 fit for a

1:53:43speedboat, right? So um I I don't know what the user is going to do. That's that's honestly where where I'm stuck. And that's a that's I feel like that's a huge blind spot for me. Yeah. What do you think, James? Um, I'd say the three things I'm focusing on is what do I think the users want? And I'm not and and that's the bit that I don't really know. I think there's a divide. I think that if someone's typing in top of the funnel type queries, I think that that might go AI mode first. Um, but like Charles F was saying, "Oh, in Q4 this year,

1:54:19everything's going um AI mode." And I'm like, "Nah, it's not like cuz the I'm I'm now looking at the cost of information retrieval like to do it." And I'm looking at how much money they're going to make in in ad spend, which is the most I'd say the two I'd say the most important part is how much

1:54:36money they're going to make out of ads. And the second most important is how how costly is it for us cost of information retrieval. And I'm like I can't I'm looking between the user the cost of information retrieval versus how much money they're going to make. And I'm like I still feel that they're going to need to maybe nurturing from top of the funnel down to bottom of the funnel faster which I feel they're already doing anyway which then means they then can start showing the ads more and because they're funneling them down and they're keeping them on on search until someone's willing to pay for ads to be

1:55:11seen. Um, I don't think that much is actually going to change unless it's top of the funnel, which I might have egg on my face in saying it, but I always feel people always like SEO is dead. That sakes, game over. I I think they're making a lot of money and I think they're going to be one of the last ones to try to decide to change things because I think I think they're making quite a bit in there. Now, I've seen one or two bits on like the in local a lot of the snippets of like the Google business profiles, they're taking out the the telephone numbers and stuff like

1:55:48is making it hard for him to call if it's just a general listing. But I believe that there might I don't know there might be some sort of if you paid if you're there and you could pay to be there or I I don't know is the honest we're all we're all second guessing but I'm always looking at users cost of information retrieval and how much money they're going to make because they're they're a company at the end of the day and they need to make profit and I think people forget that first part that that's what it's all about. They're not a search engine. They're a business that

1:56:18makes money via ads. What do you think of the idea that Google with its because Google's resources, right? Like for if if you had to come to the game and you couldn't get access to Google's index, you have a two-part problem. You have to build the LLM, LLM infrastructure, teamwork, all of that. And then you have to build the index. And the only index out there, the

1:56:36only way to search the web is Google. That's the only index that that really exists. And and Bing, but Bing is a lousy operator, right? We've seen even though I think Microsoft's AI 88% their 80% of their revenue comes from open AI which is phenomenally interesting problem. I wonder if Google is just calling them

1:56:59calling the market and bankrupting them. In other words, we can go we can play this a lot lot longer because if there's no if there's no chatbt, do they need to keep running AIO? Right. Like you said, right? I wonder how much of a strategy is in there that just says we can just keep going because like now they're doing like if you if you spend

1:57:20$50 on ChattyP ads, we'll give you $50. Google's been doing $500 forever in the US. They can keep doing this because 99% of their revenue is still coming from ad. So the you the the the buying user hasn't mass hasn't even in 30% moved over. I think I think Tik Tok might have taken more by taking the the next generation. But I wonder if they're just calling it and just going we can keep doing this rag all day long cuz one our cost of lookup is so much cheaper because we have direct access. We can dump all this data straight in and they're just making chat GPT and Claude

1:57:52innovated out innovate. And Claude's innovation is actually heading all the way over to like self-mation bots that can use LLM as a it because one of the biggest difficulties for people to access technology is the structured language. So if you don't understand C++ tech is gone to you right a lot of people don't never even tried HTML but now you can sit down and you can instruct a claude to build something or do something or carry out an action just like you would talk to a person which large language models that's what they're most efficient at. And I wonder how much of this is like Google just

1:58:25saying we can we can meet you but we can also do this forever. Yeah. If I was if I was an investor sat on the main table that's what I would be saying to do. Like if Open AI needs to keep using Google search in every single search that they're going to do. They need to use SER API or some way of scraping Google. You can't build a business like that because you're just never ever ever going to be able to compete. So Google Yeah. And Google could stop certain crawlers being able to access that information and Bing's

1:58:58information versus Google's information. Like what Google's done over the years like they've got the biggest encyclopedia in the world in Google Maps. Like that all that information of what they've done with Google Maps is incredible. I I think the there's going to be one or two spanners in the works like in the fact of what is Facebook and Apple gonna do? Are they going to do anything? Because someone was telling me two I don't know if you've seen this but two days ago um Meta Brawler has been very active. So are they looking to create a search engine maybe? I I don't know. Like it was the most active crawler the other

1:59:36day. Um which is which is quite surprising. Um, so he's I I the honest answer is I don't know, but I think Google will win the race because of the information, the encyclopedia, the data and everything of what they have. Um, the others I I don't honestly I don't know. I think is he is Claude [snorts] using Brave Search and and Chip is using um a little bit of Bing. still trying to get information from bits of Google, Bing places and stuff, but you compare Bing places to Google business profiles and it's just like light and day, you know what I mean? It's just horrendous how different that it is. So, I don't I

2:00:18don't see how others are going to win the race. But I it's just if others come into play, I don't if they can't even if a new search engine comes along. Google's so sophisticated in what it's done, I think they're going to have to give shares to Google. I think Google, but then it comes back down to then the monopoly of what they're owning and stuff like that. It's a it's a it's a tricky one. I I think search is the misnomer. I think search is just the first battle. Like if if we remember the 2001 crash, um it's because the businesses weren't able to make a

2:00:52weren't able to make a profit. Amazon was in the background. It wasn't pets.com. Amazon was in the background building up to where they were going. I think that search is missing its Google moment. It's not beating Google, right? I think it's missing that and I think that's where Apple and Facebook are going to come in. So, Facebook could be crawling for but I don't think they're going to go I mean they've got the a

2:01:16they've got they've had a search bar. Their search has always been terrible. If I want to find anything on Facebook or X, I go to Google, right? Same as why people I think use Reddit uh in in the search. Not not because they want Reddit's opinion. It's because the Reddit search is so terrible. You've every time you do a search, it goes back to infinite. It goes back to like a five-year crawl and you're like, "Wait,

2:01:36I need to know what happened last week. This this isn't like it's an FA Cup question. I can't go back to 5 years ago. It doesn't doesn't help me." Yeah. And so I think that they their way into the market, the way to get on for for the LLM vendors, the way to get the news was we we'll take down Google or we're we're going to we're pretending not to compete with Google and we're pretending to compete with Google. But if you look at the the amount of use, right, the the the use case for LLM is massive, right? Because we're seeing the money going in. We're seeing the money

2:02:06in in in in data centers and and in energy to to support it, but it's not search because search is still happening in Google. That memory isn't that that muscle memory has gone nowhere. I think that LLMs need to find the in each industry the new vector in that makes them irreplaceable whether it's how do we communicate with our corporate environments and there's the the the

2:02:28there's other harder barriers, right? Like for example, you can't just as a if you're if you're if you're an individual, you could take all your bank statements and drop it into chatbt and say, "Okay, do my IRS filing and it'll come up with a document. You can file it with the IRS." I'd love to be a fly in the wall if the IRS decide to look into that. Right? But as an accounting firm, you can't do that. You can't take that and put it into an LLM because right now the amount of human oversight power is as much as is more than you would have done if you just did it yourself. So, I

2:02:59think LLMs have to still solve that problem. I don't think the battleground is search. I think it's just today's battle, but I'm I'm hoping that there'll be some sort of crash or re reinvention of itself where it'll come back as replacing our interface with things. Maybe, maybe not. But I think there's a there's another battleground for Apple

2:03:19and Facebook to come in. I This is one for you, Edward, as well. How like optimistic are you for it? Like I'm I I'll I'll start. I'm super optimistic at present with things the way things are going. Like I think it's the best time to ever be alive from a business owner, from an entrepreneur, from an SEO. I think it's absolutely unbelievable times. But I don't know what your thoughts. I I sometimes see a lot of doom and gloom in in certain areas and I'm like, are you am I just missing something here? Like is it not

2:03:50just an unbelievable time to be alive? I don't think it's going away anytime soon. Also, I think uh the 10 blue links has already changed. Like you see like a ton of video. You It's like I mean a ton of video. If you search any brand name, you'll see a video carousel like right under the brand name. And that's like incredible opportunity for parasite. But um what about in

2:04:12Yeah. What about in general terms? I think maybe James was asking like what do you what do you think about right now like where where where if you understand SEO, you're seeing what's happening in LLM and how they're growing in future general business. Yeah, it's the best ever. That's why I have a daily SEO podcast cuz it's like the best opportunity. It's the best time ever. And also, you know, something that I've been saying on X a lot is that as like the three of us, like we are kind of like leading in SEO. There's lots of other amazing people also leading in SEO. But because so many marketing

2:04:44leaders want to learn how to get recommended in LLMs, we are the leaders in that. We are literally at the forefront of digital marketing. like we are the top voices not just in SEO but in digital marketing because so many people want to understand how to get recommended in large language models and like that's what we do all the time and it's just like yeah what a what a time like you said James what a time to be alive I have never spoken to so many talented CEOs that do not want a demand genen layer between them and SEO I spoke to a number of people who've built

2:05:20million-dollar boring businesses Right, proper businesses, right? That are I wake up in the morning and I know my factory runs itself. I want eyes on the first thing I do is I open up coffee and GSC in the morning. The CEO of like a company that's expanding at like 100%. And I want to know because if we lose if we lose three places on five keywords,

2:05:47gone. Phenito. and to hear like so I James I I worked at a company um that I met in Limmerick and um it was built on Google and they they their rank position they got mentioned by Microsoft and Google paid 99% of the bills and we had a partner network and we had re returning customers which brings it down but the new money came from Google and I ended up with three CMOs who would say to the board yeah I love Google and then return to me and go like we're shutting this down Google's going to close tomorrow SEO is dead it's rubbish it's a waste of

2:06:19time I want to build a brand. And honestly, it was the worst time. I I joined because like I was like, great, I finally get to be in control of SEO and I don't have to be a consultant where I'm just like giving options and advice and picking things and arguing constantly. I can now control it. And wow, did I get that wrong? I was not in control of it. And um it's amazing like how these guys would pull me aside and say like Google's going to close shop next year. We're taking our AdWords budget and putting it into and we had like a like I think in one month I spent

2:06:47a quarter of a million on just the word load balancer and I sent it to dell.com because we and we actually got people to start searching for Dell load balancer which is it just drove our sales like incredible because Dell don't have a load balancer and these it was just like it was so horrible to deal with a company that was built on SEO and then my manager was anti- Google and now I'm listening to people who are like I can't do this on X. I can't do this on LinkedIn. I can't do this. We need the right person with the right need at the right time. It's always been SEO and

2:07:18people keep saying I need to build a brand and build it this and it's just smok and mirrors. But if I can get people from a search engine to my page and they can get what they need, I can turn that and scale it and build it until I run out of people. And no time

2:07:34in our history has that been possible. That you can buy the domain name for $12. is you can set up the hosting for 1020 a month. You can create the content and you can you you now don't even need a web designer. You can you can build a HTML site with Claude. You can go out and and even if your job is a waiter or HR manager, you can build a platform for free. You can go to Google Stitch and say I I did this as a fun experiment. I asked her to build a a a step counter app for an ant colony. I just [laughter] thought it was a fun

2:08:08idea and a debate as an analogy. And it went and built all of the user interfaces for all of the different ant skills in the ant colony, like how the guard might might um enjoy like getting more steps, walking around the ant hole. And it built like all of the logos and the interface completely for free. That just 10 years ago would have taken three months with UX designers and graphic designers and HTML builders to put into Figma. and it just started draw and it draws it in the screen. I was like, it's so good, isn't it? Like I our developers now are building sites that

2:08:46they do doing the days of work and it literally is like three months worth of work that they used to do. And this is where it's scary for me because I've got three kids under five and I was kind of I was never going to slow down, but I was kind of at a point where like we've built out a big empire. We've got a lot of decent ranking sites and now I've gone build a site that's better than what I had and for certain longtail keywords the the claude code within 15 minutes can outrank some of our sites and you're like wow this like now now's

2:09:18the time you need to be doubling down and I was so caught thinking I'm gonna slow down a little bit and now I'm feel like I'm I'm busier than I've ever been. You could have you could have like a few hundred Instagram followers and then go and find some piece of software in your niche and de what's the uh what's the word for when you take a

2:09:38feature and you you break the unbundle? You can unbundle one of the features, vibe code that, find the keywords, the bottom ofunnel keywords that represent that feature. You will have the few hundred followers your posts on Instagram are probably ranking within 24 hours. and then take that and say my new piece of software is the best for this feature and within 24 hours be getting clicks from Google. Like yeah, it's it's amazing. Also, like with Google Trends,

2:10:07I'm James, like I'm sure you know this. Search engine optimization as a as a topic is an all-time high. Yeah. An all like and not just like a little all-time high. It's multiples of where it was like 10 years ago when we thought SEO was hot 10 years ago. It's multiples in interest. It's insane. I have it I have it on the screen right now. It's like I'm like and it keeps going up too. It keeps going up month

2:10:32over month. What? Like what is going on? Because it will do though because it's the core fundament like I know chat GBT now you can run some ads but when people are doing any everyone now the hot topic is AI and AI visibility. So people want to get cited in perplexity in claude in Gemini in AI mode the AI overviews uh chat GPT. So they want to be be seen in all them places and they can't and a lot of them they can't run ads and what's the main core fundamental to get in then SEO. So you need to be able to do SEO to get into that and it's like it's such a

2:11:04great skill to know what you're doing to be a also like when you look at your competitors and they don't and you can you can tell that they don't know SEO and you can you realize that you can just completely dominate the market. It's the most exciting thing ever. It's the best feeling. Yeah, all of all of the LLM agencies I think tapped into something that was very clever early on, but I think that that was a short fuse, which is they started talking about brand building and brand alignment. And that a that resonated with all of the brand marketers of company saying, "Great, we don't have to

2:11:38do this technical SEO fudge, right? This I've had people meltdown like we're trying to have a debate and then they'll melt down and go like authority is rubbish. It's fairy dust. I hate you. I hate everything." And just like go away, right? But I think that a lot of the and and a lot of the people we've had on the show, Edward, um have have spoken about like, well, if you just align your brand with your intent and your audience, these LLMs will find you. And I'm like, okay, you're not an engineer because that's not how you build, you can't crawl and synthesize the whole web to

2:12:07find the right brand. And what I found is that while that's resonated with the marketing team, the C and the CEOs and CMOs are not buying it. And if the CMO is buying it, they're they're they need to be aware that HR is finding a replacement for them because SEO is the only way in and the smart people know that. I think a lot of people were like, look, during the heyday of of of like

2:12:28social media, maybe we can't crack SEO. We'll come back to it. We can crack social. And I think now people have seen more than ever SEO hasn't gone away. If ads re how can ad Google ads revenue be winning quarter over quarter with the same user base if it's all shifted to LLM? And so when I think of these agencies going out there and saying, "Oh, it's gone. Your user is gone. This is gone. This is evaporated." I'm like, "You are just you're talking about brand

2:12:53commitment alliance building your tone. You're destroying your own brand by lying because it's so tangible. You you're going to get caught out with this, right? And I'm sorry, but the 10,000 LLM tool providers are not all going to survive, right? It's it's it's not likely. So um I I if if I was in an LLM tool provider agency, I would be I would be realigning very quickly and

2:13:15saying, "Okay, look, here's the truth." Because people can see through it. I think Yeah. I think anyone who who is listening to this who wants more AI visibility, people like YouTube would be absolutely top of my list in the fact of you knowing exactly about chunking. So you you're knowing that okay, here's the qu here's the question like the people

2:13:34also ask question. Here's the answer. It's a nice concise answer to what it is. That's exactly what the LLMs are trying to pick up. Little bits of chunks from query fan out, chunks of content that they can synthesize in the answer. If you know what query fan out terms are popping up and you can answer those questions in a concise manner, you're going to consistently get put into the AI overview. And so many of them are like, "Yeah, that's it." Like everything's doom and gloom. Mike, it's never been easier if you understand knowing how to do keyword research and knowing how to answer that specific question that they're asking for. It's

2:14:12it's the easiest it's ever been. Exactly. Um just a quick question back to something you asked. How many internal internal tools do you do you have? Like I know you said you built your own keyword analysis tool, which is probably something most people could build, but that's such a fascinating thing. Do you guys find that you have a lot of homegrown tools? We've got a lot of homegrown tools. Yeah. But um this might surprise you to be honest with you. Like we we actually use every single tool that we know of on the marketplace where it previously I'd keep it very short, very sweet, but the

2:14:44reason why we do this is because so I'll give you an example. I don't even know whether I'm allowed to say this or not, but I'll say it. Semrush reached out last week and they're paying us multiple five figures to do some case studies on AI visibility, but they want us to use their LLM visibility tracker, right? So, we've said, "Okay, not a problem. It's going to more than pay for the case study and the promotion of it, and it's going to promote our brand. So, we're going to put them the money into it, and we're just going to use their LLM visibility." We're not bothered what LM

2:15:17visibility tracker that we use as long as it's showing share aer voice and and the way that it is. So we use HS, we use Seamrush, we use um all the different like Radar Kit, Peak, Profound. We're using all of them. Um whether one's better than the other. Obviously there's lots of debates on that, but we internally we have debates like within the office. Some people prefer Radar Kit, some people prefer um Peak for example. I think like PWC. I think the guys there are pretty good. um the like

2:15:49SEOs at the at the forefront and stuff. So, at present we're just using them all. And I think we it's same with like the we we're doing quite a lot with AI avatars now. And people are oh what you using and we're like we're using Zoe, we're using 11 Labs, we're using Higsfield, we're using Hey Gen. And they're like, why are you using all them? I'm like cuz we still don't know who's going to win the race. So, we'll just use them all. And if I'm being 100% honest with you, a lot of them we don't pay for. Um, so a lot of them come to us

2:16:20and say, "Look, we'll give you a lifetime commission, uh, lifetime kind of unlimited license as long as you do one or two podcasts for us." So, and I don't purposely go out saying these are the best, they are the only choice. I just explain what they do on a podcast, normally interviewing this like the one of the developers and explain what it is. And I say if you want to track your LLMs, here's a tool you might want to use. Um, but I don't know which one. I'd have to ask my team which one they think is the best. But I do know there's internal arguments of I also know

2:16:54there's internal arguments of whether you should be tracking AI visibility because it's so volatile and how you should be tracking it and stuff like that. Um, I quite like so Kyle Roofs on Page Optimizer Pro, he's got um he's got one now where he does some sort of visibility, but it's it's where you're lacking in visibility and how you can improve. And I quite like that part. And there's one called Local Dominator from El Dar Cohen, and he's got one and it does similar things where it's all about the opportunities that you're missing that your competitors are being cited for. So, because we're always like I'm

2:17:31not too bothered about rank because there's no such thing as a rank tracker in an LLM, but I'm just always caring about how do we get more visibility. How do we get more visibility? What we not showing up for that we should be showing up for and what sources, let's say it's a listic we're not listed on that we could get listed on to and stuff like that. But what what are you using, David? Are you've you got any specific

2:17:53tools that you like? Um, again a a spread um like we're we're probably too invested in in in Samrush. Um and and and probably for the probably for it's too much to shift over from Yeah. Um but we but with our clients the the the the tool stack is huge. So we're we're using across the board. We're using different local SEOs. We're using AFS and Samush the most. Um, and and I it's just another great thing that I I I see in you. So many people are like, "Well, what is the best SEO tool?" There isn't. And then people take the reverse going, "Well, there's no point trying to

2:18:32track your LLM visibility because no one knows." But you can't just fly completely blind. I'm I'm very sure that each week, maybe you're not getting the perfect dashboard you want, but I'm very sure you're finding enough data in there to make changes. I'm very sure that even if people use Microsoft Clarity's um prompt tracker report, they would get because I I ran for one client on 10 prompts and we saw 10 things we should do straight we could try as an experiment straight away. And so so many

2:18:58people are stuck in this argument. Should I be using a rift for SEMR or this or Semrush is terrible? You should never use it. And I'm like, well actually does actually really good jobs at for for what I need it for. And I I they're so locked up on like an ideological war whereas what they're missing is like well what data can this do or what output can I get from this and can I use it? And if I if I pour all this time in and I get nothing then I'm not using it. I'm not interested in rating it as a good or bad tool. I'm

2:19:25rating it as like can I get this? How much work do I have to do to get it? And if I ask them to change this will they implement it or do I need to move to another tool which is exactly how IT teams and cyber security teams look at platforms and operations. And I think marketing is just like I don't know if it's because we're we we we're invested so much in brands. We sort of like want to follow brands and follow an ideological approach versus looking at it objectively and systematically and saying well okay maybe ARFs is more accurate on the on the keyword volume

2:19:56prediction. Does that matter versus finding keywords I haven't thought about or helping me determine does what does this page have backlinks or can I get that from Bing web master tools? Right. And I agree, it's not nice to have to log into each tool and know what's best, but I I can't build it and I can't convince other people to build it. And I think that's the way to look at it. And and you can see it in search, right? SEO shows that that people keep typing in what's the best keyword tool, what's the best this, what's the best that, right? Well, what is it you're trying to do? And does the

2:20:29tool even do it? And that's where you should start, right? And it's just like it's a fundamentally different question. I think for us as well, um, this was on another episode with Edward, is that from from a link building point of view, and this is where when we're choosing our expired domains, if we decide to build on an expired domain or an age domain, we're also using things like MOS, HRES, Semrush, the spam score, link research tools for, um, power, trust, and toxicity. Um, we're using Majestic for trust flow and citation flow. We're

2:21:02just getting as much data as possible. And there's times that we could see where let's say within Kellen's database, he might be obsessed with DR and we might see something that's only a DR7 website, but it might have 500 referring domains and that could include things like Wikipedia and there might be certain links that's in there or it might be have a high trust flow and we think that's undervalued. We can buy that site for $300, but from our own internal scoring system, because we we have a system which is all weighted on what we think a site's worth. If we think that that site's worth $5,000 and he's got it at

2:21:42$300, we're buying it. And there might be others that we Somebody might have it $10,000 and we might think that they're worth $40,000, but there's others at 10,000 and we've only valued them at four and obviously we're not going to take those. So, we've got our own internal what we believe works. Um, what we believe needs to like minus 50% if it's got spammy anchors or looks like it's been manipulated in some way or form. And we've got a nice system on that. But we we get all the data and like sometimes the trust flow data from Majestic can work better than the DR that's been manipulated from HRES. So,

2:22:19this is where we're a we're a datadriven business. Like we love data. The more data the better. And obviously we can crunch that and the more data we have the more we can make like real choices of what we think is is the right thing to do. Absolutely. Because each of the companies has their own way of calculating DR and DA and they keep adjusting it. So they might see a site that had a dip and their DA is going down. So they've adjusted based on past performance. The problem with that is then if you're just dealing with one tool and someone says, "Hey, we've got a

2:22:52link on this page. Do you want to buy a link from it?" Or whatever the use case is, and you go to and you go, "Oh, yeah, it's DA57. Great." But if you actually just look at a 6 month to 12 month window and you actually see a line going down like this and it's crashing to zero,

2:23:06there's it's just not worth it, right? It's just not there's nothing on there. It's not it's never going to be in an LLM. It's never going to be in a search. Back out of it. But like you said, if it's if it says it's a DA7, but it's going like that. Yeah. then that's the one to jump on, right? And so again, it comes back to like if you if you're if you keep trying to solve SEO down into this tiny little checklist that okay, but the DA is fine and this is fine and this is fine. But what about like if the DA is 90 and it's

2:23:32a site about traveling about New Jersey and you want a link for glacier travel in Norway? That's just an absolute waste of time. It doesn't matter if it's a DA90 site because it doesn't talk about Norway and it doesn't talk about glaciers, right? So, um, that's where people need to step out and stop trying. What I like about what you've done is you've taken all of this data and the magic is that you found a way to map it out for you. And the problem with people looking at trying to trying to minimize that to just a DA score is that it doesn't take in enough. That's the

2:24:04problem. I I get what you're doing, but you're opening up to so much risk and you you might have to spend $100,000 because you have to because 40% of your $10,000 is just thrown away, right? Yeah. Exactly. That and we we find so many opportunities in areas. Another big one is what we're actually loving now more than anything is this isn't from buying the domains point of view, but from actual link building strategies or from our outreach team is just the opportunities from the LLM. So if the LLMs are picking it up, it generally probably means that it's ranking within Google, which then means it's a trusted

2:24:39source within Google. And sometimes you can go and outreach into an existing like what we used to call a link insert or a niche edit. You can just go and outreach to them and for $30 get your brand being listed on that existing listic. Sometimes you pay $50 and you can get it to number one. And you're like, "Right, brilliant. Okay, we'll go and do this outreach campaign and these this is what's propping up some of your competition and now you can get listed in there. So that that's a good that's why we're using as many different LLM visibility trackers at present because they do randomly I don't know if it's to

2:25:13do with the proxies of what they because none of them are doing it via the API because it's bringing back you don't want to do it via the API but maybe it's different proxies different areas of how they're doing the search but they all seem to bring back different opportunities so we just keep extracting the opportunities and just like this is a really relevant page talking exactly about what we want to do it's manipulating the large language models we want to get seen on them pages and that's a great strategy that we've been

2:25:41doing for um outreach. I think that's what the LLM tools do that's so clever is that instead of just worrying about DADR and so on is that if the page is mentioned in the LLM like you said it's automatically trusted by Google. You don't have to pretend that you can do a backlink analysis because I you can't just eyeball a backlink. A lot

2:26:01of people think they can eyeball a back. Yes, you can see a backlink if it's like from blogspot.com from like link buyer, right? Then you know it's probably trash, right? But you can't really eyeball and if they're getting traffic and if they're still working. But why why bother working all of that out if if it's in the LLM and the LLM is coding it. It's it's it's an it's all of the calculation is done. You're you're measuring and testing the output of the engine and you can just jump it that

2:26:27way. Yeah, for sure. Is there anything else you're doing with regards to AEO or AI visibility that's seems to be working well or is it just kind of just rinse and repeating the same model? Definitely not. So, we've actually, if anything, kind of taken our eye off LLMs a little bit, right? Just just a little bit. We rolled back a little bit and realized um how much especially for the areas that I'm in. Um I do have a couple of of sites that I build as personal projects that are getting like 30 clicks from Bing that are getting like 90,000 citations from Copilot. But for as for

2:27:08agency work, we realized how much is still coming from Google and that we've actually stopped we actually turned off all of our Seamrush AI reports for the meantime because they're $100 a month and you multiply that by 30 and suddenly you're burning a lot of money. So, we just turn them off at the moment because what we're what we're ranking for in Google when you if if if for example you have a broad question like where should I go on holiday next you have no idea where that's going to come from in in an LLM because it's going to be driven by previous questions. But if you're saying

2:27:38like, uh, I need an AI, I want to replace my S, I want to replace my EDR, MDR with AI with a Gentic platform, there's only so many pages that can come up in Google. And so the the LLM's just there's not there's no space for us to to cover. It's it's automatically covered by just the lack of competition. Um, one of the things that we are loving is EMDs and bringing EMDs or partial match domains is so critical. Like if if we if we learned anything from HCU is like having a single branded domain is so risky because someone can make a mistake. Right. Long time ago, I was

2:28:18hoping to get into Microsoft as a consultant for SEO, which I did. And one of my web team engineers in Poland accidentally, he was just going through WordPress and just wanted to make sure everything was tight. And he saw a button privacy and he clicked it and it added no index to all our pages. And we went from number one in SEO Ireland in

2:28:37UK to like number no one. And it took us 14 days to find it. Crazy. So yeah, exactly. And one of the best contracts I ever had. I had I had so much fun. I I remember giving a talk about SEO and I was supposed to talk about Bing and all my slides were Bing and all my words were Google. [laughter]

2:28:57Um but they were very upfront about it. They were like, "Look, we we're doing marketing for our partners, so we know that they have to rank in Google." So it actually kind of worked out. Okay. Yeah. But I think um for LLMs, um having EMD domains, you can still put your own brand on it, right? because when the LLM reads the text, it get puts the link on the right hand side, but it still refers to the brand. The domain name doesn't actually matter. But if the domain name matters so much to Google, if you if if you're building a 100 pieces of content and and I I don't think people look at

2:29:29at data enough, and I'm pretty sure you do, if you're if you're putting out, let's just say for our 100 blog posts a month, right? How many people are looking at what if 90 of them aren't ranking? I'm I'm sure your your your your content is going up, but what if 90 aren't delivering? Then why not put those on an EMD

2:29:49where they could work? Yeah. Right. The the the challenge years ago for an EMD was like, okay, well, we've got our brand team now. It's extra work for our content tone manager. It's more work for our design team. It's never been easier to take a screenshot of your own page and ask or cla to build a HTML version of it and then put that on a domain that is an EMD domain. You don't have to do maintenance every day because what's going to break, right? you're not pages don't break themselves and then all you have to do is link once from your site not in the footer to that emd

2:30:23and then you've just got to get people coming back to it which will naturally happen or should naturally happen with like oh I'm looking for dul's best website designer and then they go end up on duly webbdesigner.com right and then that clickthrough rate sustains and maintains them so I think if you're not building EMDs you know looking at single points of failure here. You know, DNS used to be a single point of failure. Still might be domain name, domain registration. Didn't um HubSpot lose their domain name, didn't they? Their CMO got the got got laid off and he forgot to renew it and two weeks later somebody bought it and

2:31:00sold it back to them in 2015, 2016. Yeah. So all of these single like you don't own the domain name, you're renting it. Yeah. So, what if Google decides heristically you you you look like a HCU site? Bam, you're gone, right? Um, if you're not running EMDs and 90% of your business is coming from SEO, then it's like you don't you can't run a Lyft company or an Uber company with one

2:31:24insurance provider. You have to have 10. There should be due diligence like the SEC should have due diligence built in. Like you've got one domain. What happens if now obviously for brands like if you're an IBM they're never going to get penalized probably if I was a big brand I'd still have some supplementary websites um yes they do they all do Nike has 19 yeah I definitely do people don't notice it it's just like people just Yeah I just won't have a single point of failure like you said I I love not having a single point of failure so I love EMDs I love PMDs I also love

2:32:00regurgitating cont if I've got a piece of content and it's not working well, I love like basically going grabbing it and even if it's not on an EMD, go and print it onto like Medium or Blogspot and force indexing it and stuff like that and then you can link it back to another site or if a if a page does perform really well is rewriting that for other sites as well and stuff like that. Um, I I love just the data side of

2:32:24things. So, where's traffic coming from? How do I get more of that traffic? Where's traffic not coming from that my compet competitors are getting? and how can I get that from them? And it's just a continuous game of how do I get the most traffic? Um, and too many people become obsessed with building out pages and building out pages and doing links and it's just like they're not really I love I love how analytical you are, David. Like I love the fact that you're looking at things and saying, "Okay, this hasn't worked. Okay, I'm now going to republish this and put it onto a new URL. Okay, this hasn't worked. I missed

2:33:00the intent of the click window. I think you called it. So therefore, I'm now needing to change that to try to get it that it's getting the traffic because otherwise it's just wasting crawl budget. It's just no point in in having it to a certain degree. So I I love how analytical on that front that you are. I find whenever I go to buy a domain name and whether I'm looking at like a spreadsheet or looking at a tool, I never end up buying them, but I'm always intrigued by the slug and the document name. And I think one of the best free tips on how if you can't afford Semrush

2:33:33or you can't afford a a keyword research tool and people are sending you these lists and I'm going to get in so much trouble because like my biggest followers on LinkedIn are link center. It's like I get like 19 ad requests a day. Hopefully it'll stop. Um but if you take those those spreadsheets and because we understand okay keyword to relevance is important and we know that for example semrush and arifs gets their keyword data from ad planner and ad planner only keeps keyword data for keywords involved in auctions because they have to that's the place they have to so they'll pay for that but there's

2:34:04so much search that we don't know so often in B2B unlike B2C we'll put in a phrase like XDR versus MDR versus EDR and it'll be like zero search volume because no one's buying that phrase but you publish a page for next minute you're like there's 100,000 people a month searching for it. When you find those PBNs or link farms that are ranking and it's getting cited, there's magic in their page title and their

2:34:26slug. All you have to do is copy it. That is like you don't have to buy the link. So when somebody starts annoying you with a link spreadsheet, go and take a look at the pages and see what happens when you replicate that 100% because they've worked out the low keyword difficulty vector, right? They've worked out this is too competitive. Cisco, Citrix are here. I'm not going to sneak in, but just a one word difference could be a high volume of keywords and you could actually do more from that than being the 10th link on that page for $100. Um, and that's something I think people don't realize is actually being

2:35:03handed to them, that someone else has actually gone and done all this research and you can just steal it. I'll give you a good example of that that works brilliantly. The word cheap. So, n most brands don't want to be kind of seen to be cheap, but loads of users seem to you want to search the word cheap. So every if you're struggling for a keyword for a service instead of saying everyone's like best this, best that, best this, go in with cheap or cheapest or low value and you go and put that modifier in and not hardly anybody else is going after it and you end up there's times you end

2:35:41up getting that many clicks for it. You end up ranking for best anyway because the amount of clicks that come through. So this is our little tips and tricks. What I would say is I don't know if you've both been in Google Search Console when you add in your um uh YouTube channel. Oh my god, there's so many opportunities in there that I've not seen before. I'm like wowers, this is good. And it show like millions and millions of impressions like and you're like a lot of them I've never seen before. It's my video what my videos are showing up for, but I've not even done pages on my website for it and

2:36:16I'm like wowers. This is some of them are getting tens of thousands of searches because the the search keyword tool in in YouTube has always been so basic and it like even if you're getting hundreds of thousands of clicks from searches, it gives you like 10 keywords and and that doesn't help because those are the 10 keywords you're getting clicks for. But yes, having seen um when you add your social media profiles and what they're getting clicks for and that data is not in ad planner and it's not in and the volumes are hysterical, that's a great reason to do that. Um I noticed that for

2:36:48X. I was like, wait, what? How are people searching for these things and I'm ranking number one for it? That's it. Again, it's it's like I I think that the the number of keywords in those keyword planner tools in some industries is less than 5% of the total volume, maybe even less than 1%. because of how

2:37:04how expensive storage. Do you guys think uh connecting your socials to uh Google Search Console is like kind of dangerous cuz parasite SEO with your social media is like so effective. I mean, it's like it's just so easy. like we were talking about before and I'm just James, we were we were texting about this on WhatsApp where I'm where I'm because you really can just rank for everything with social and and I'm like if and and a lot of the time you will see like if you put up a video and the video appears on Instagram reels and on Facebook and on LinkedIn uh and on Tik Tok, you might have the

2:37:44same and on YouTube you might have the same video ranking in the top four spots on each platform. Like, which is absurd. The same piece of content, exact same. And I' I've just been thinking like maybe it's kind of dangerous to say like these these social platforms are all linked to one another, are all

2:38:08owned by the same. So, what was interesting about that is when you first said it to me, I was like, "Oh, you're on. You could be on to something here." cuz like cannibalization. They don't want to put two pages on the same website showing. So why would they want your website then your video then your socials all showing up. However, what you can just do is just a workaround Edward is if you are worried about it is just put it under a different goo I don't know if you've got multiple Google search consults but just put them under different Google search console so then they're not linked to

2:38:36the same one. That's true. Um so that's probably what I would recommend. I've actually put my YouTube on the same one as my my website, but on on one of the others, I've gone, okay, maybe I'm wearing a tin hat and maybe I am a little bit worried. Um, and oh, I'm I'm ultra paranoid that I think that that makes me pretty good at SEO, too, is being super paranoid. But cuz that could be a way like maybe I mean maybe uh developer maybe Google devs were like yeah this is kind of like pro problematic that the same piece of content is taking the top spots across

2:39:12multiple platforms. Oh yeah let's just tell everybody to connect to Google search console and then we can we can just identify all all of these. Personally I think it's too much engineering work for too little return personally. That's just my No, that's well that's why I'm that's why I'm asking. I wanted I wanted I'm also you know if if your if your if your X account is called Cloudbrink and your Reddit account is called CloudBrink

2:39:34and your domain is called Cloud Brink. It's obvious but but again I wasn't thinking about [clears throat] what if I have a Reddit alt account that's promoting content and then I'm not going to link that to my branded account. That I get and and maybe that hasn't happened because you can't connect Reddit. But um from that perspective totally get it. I I would be paranoid too. But I also wonder how much time Google puts into that. I I actually thought one of the reasons that Google was doing it was so I remember looking at LinkedIn's traffic and how much they get from organic search and it was like a billion

2:40:05clicks a month and I was thinking about this you know this debate like do I use Google do I use social media and I'm like Google is sending LinkedIn 1 billion clicks a month in other words most of that traffic is search traffic just being washed through another retailer right and like how at risk LinkedIn would be if that got cut And I I wonder if part of what Google is is doing is is trying to demonstrate, yeah, you got so much views on YouTube and you got so many views on X, but we're the engine that's providing it, right? And and not not from a parasitic

2:40:41SEO point of view, but from a point of view that if you put content on your blog, but you also put YouTube on your blog or on X, Google can find it and share it from there. and that to to try and give marketers that it's not Google or LinkedIn or that it's a lot of what you're getting on those channels, you're getting them because the users on those channels, but we're actually the

2:41:04connectivity between the two, right? Google isn't as much the destination as it is the vehicle and right and I think that's important to understand. And I think by showing that they now not only do bus and train routes but they do airplane routes as well is the real fascinating takeaway. I mean what you get what you've just said there like my interpretation of Google like went up massively because I was like wowers. I didn't realize how much traffic I was getting to my Twitter from Google. I didn't realize how much I was getting to

2:41:37my Facebook specifically from Google. I'm like, wow, it's doing way more than what I thought. Like, hats off to Google. Thank you very much for all this traffic. So, like may I don't Yeah, may maybe it is, but like I I was very impressed by how many impressions and how many clicks I was getting on. I I

2:41:56didn't realize how much I was getting. Um, and having that data, I thought was was amazing. Parasitic SEO has probably done more for boosting LinkedIn ads by 50% than anything LinkedIn has done. Yeah, I think I I like parasitic SEO. It it's it's it's it's an emotive term, right? It parasitic automatically sounds negative, but how is it a it's not a new concept, right? Um I mean, if you look at OM for example, right? Anyone who's had to do OM for a friend or a reason or because it's a business service or because you've got negative reviews and you bought a new company, you want to

2:42:33get rid of them. OM is not that different from parasitic SEO to degree, right? Like they share a lot in common. In fact, the better you are at parasitic SEO, the better you are going to be at OM, right? So again, it just it comes down to like everyone likes to say they're data driven. I think no one after watching this is ever going to think that James isn't data driven because he articulates it so well. He's like, I don't care about the tool. I don't care about what people think. if I get it from this tool and I get it from this tool and I have

2:43:03to pay for both both tools. It's worth paying for because I need the data. Whereas people are like, "Oh, maybe they're scamming me or maybe I'm doing this or maybe that or maybe that." And and these it's these emotional things that get in our way. Emotional is what makes us human, right? It's why we love our kids and our parents and it's lovely. But if you're going to do that in business, you're going to have the rug pulled out from underneath you because someone else is going to look at the data and find a way through. And so you can't really use an emotive brain and then find data to back it up because

2:43:32it you're building a bridge of cards and it's going to collapse. If you're worried about like if you don't have an SEO tool and you're like, "Oh, I can't pay $100 a month." I think that's really unfair for people say in other markets like if you're in South Africa, the Philippines or Kenya or India or Bangladesh and you're trying to build a company where $100 could be 10% 20% of your income. And I wish it was like McDonald's where McDonald's in Manhattan is $8, but in Ireland it's 5 and in India it's a euro, right? Um I wish there was even more even pricing like that. But you do need tools, but

2:44:06you also need to know why you're using the tool. And if you think that there's a best SEO tool, these tools don't go out and do SEO for you. These tools give you glimpses of data that you cannot get. You cannot go and scrape the web and collect all of these back links and all of these info. You need to buy that data from these companies. that's what they're selling. I don't think $100 a month is a scam. I understand it's expensive. It's more expensive if you don't know what you actually want from it and what you're going to do. Like you you can't plug in your domain and it's

2:44:34SEOed and that it gives you all this advice and if you just follow it blindly, you're going to rank. But I don't know how you could possibly cornerstone without it except for stealing keywords from backlink shills. I don't know. think on there like a lot of the tools do like a 7-day or 14-day trial. The amount of work if I worked on a single website I could do some serious damage in seven days. So like if you go and get a seven-day trial, literally that should be able to get you going and you just you just camp off to the seven days for for now. If you are living in

2:45:09Bangladesh and you can't afford the $100, it's going to give you 100 pages to write and the data you're going to get from the Google search console then to start expanding upon that is going to be huge. Like so it should be able to then start self- earning and then being able to pay for the you need the right tools for the job. You need to sharpen your saw. You can't do it with a blunt saw. Do you know what I mean? You need to There's a classic saying, isn't there with seven habits of highly effective people and one of them sharpened the saw. Like make certain you've got the right tools

2:45:40for the job and and you need it. Or or if you can't afford it, go and get a job working for someone, work very hard and ask in your spare time, could you use a couple of the tools? Like me as an entrepreneur and a business owner, if one of my employees said, "Over weekend, I want to build out some on my own websites." I would encourage that because I'd encourage them to learn on the job, they can use the tools, they're developing their own skills. Like so anyone who's watching this who's employed just and if they say no maybe you need a better employer because I

2:46:14think a lot of them would say yes or they'd want to at least know what you're doing but then at least you can be learning on the job and using the the right SEO tools to be able to take different websites on to the next level. I'd be surprised if like if a small company and the boss didn't give you the keys to their GoDaddy and said go buy the domain name and show me your money

2:46:33what you did. Right? That's a good boss. But I I I also think that again the way I see newbies learning SEO maybe because I spend so much of my time answering like why do why won't my page index and I'm so sick of people coming back with oh it's a 4x error and I'm like it's crawl we we've let's get beyond this right let's let's move along and um I just see people going well buying into the ideology like I need good content Samar told me my content's good I'm not ranking and so it's kind of like you still need to know what the tools do and why you need them. That's

2:47:06the first part. And maybe you can get that. If you can't get that in the first seven days, you're not ready for the tool. But I think trying to to help let's actually reverse this. You said it this we were talking about say certain SEOs that have worked in certain areas and they can't build a site. If you had to build a site from scratch, let's just say like you woke up tomorrow morning and and the universe pivoted you and you've suddenly woke up in a different country, but you've still got all your knowledge and now you've you've got a computer and an internet access, but

2:47:35you're in the middle of nowhere. You don't even know where you are and you had to build your build a website to get you out of the situation and get get you back. Where where would you and build an income? What would you do? What would how would you build your first website? Like let's say I've got absolutely no money. I've just been dropped and I've got computer access and I've got no money. I can't even build I can't even buy a website. I can't host it. I can't buy it. I mean, you could you could basically turn around and say you could get it that you can host it for free on

2:48:00Cloudflare. Um, but let's say I can't even buy a I wouldn't buy a domain. I'd go and do social media like social med like Edward said before. You can you can rank LinkedIn posts, you can rank tweets, you can rank Facebook stats, you can go on to Reddit and provide good value and then in time start building up the brand that way. You can do YouTube videos. All these are free to play. So, I'd just go and do that and I'd go and start building up a network and then I'd probably then start asking one or two people, do you want me to do this for

2:48:31you? Um, and start earning $50 a month and then that $50 I'd reinvest it and then I'd buy a site and then I'd use the 7-day free trial. And I I' you know what, and it sounds daff I' part of me would love me to lose everything and start from scratch again. I'd and I think I would enjoy it. Like and I know it's weird and you go, "Oh, go and give all your money away to someone." But that's not the point. Like it's I'd like to be back. I love being in the

2:49:00trenches. I love learning new things. And I think like with regards to I'd save quick money up to try and get the $20 package to use Claude Code because Claude Code's incredible that you can then connect doing automous agents to syndicate out. But you it's just I just be bit I think too many people procrastinate and I just don't think they go and start doing things and I think a lot of these people ask the question and my issue is at times the same person comes back to you 12 months later asking you the exact same questions. And that's my issue with certain conferences and why I prefer

2:49:40masterminds because when you go to a mastermind, you're in a private room and there might be 12 of you and at times honestly things can get rude because you can basically turn around and just go you're not ready, you're not good enough. And but you wouldn't want to say it in a conference if they're up on stage or something because you you feel like you're calling them out. But in a private group, you can just be really honest and transparent and say, "You need to go and get employed for 12 months because you're miles off. You're going to waste money and time and you've got kids. Go and get a job and go and

2:50:13find a job that might not be the best paying, but you've got a good employer where you're going to learn on the job and go and work hard." So, but if I needed to, I'd say social media and parasite SEO to start with until I started to earn some money. Reach out to loads of people. Is there anything I can do for you on like LinkedIn? Maybe giving them free videos, kind of jump on their podcast to try and build up my audience and try and provide value. I'm always about starting with leading with value to start with. Um, it's hard if I'm in Bangladesh just on the streets

2:50:46and I'm trying to sell something then the people aren't going to buy from me. They don't know who I am. They don't know what I do. You've got to earn like you kind of earn your stripes. Um, that's what I would do anyway. I don't know what what would you do? Radical cander, by the way, was the word I was looking for. So, when you when you're able to give that feedback and save people versus saying, well, you can do anything and if you keep trying

2:51:08harder and harder, you'll get there. Sometimes you you you need to just be blunt, right? And say like you need to do this and it's the advice you don't want to hear. I had a I used to have a a blogspot domain and and one of my employees said like we have to get rid of it. I have to replace it with WordPress and put it on as the worst thing we did at the time. But I could rank like people would give me keyphrases on a Friday night on Twitter and I would rank for it and people go like rank for lawyer New York City and I

2:51:33I would try to do it in like 15 minutes and I did it on a blogspot domain and I just used to love it. I come back from dinner with the wife and we'd be watching TV like God give me something. And I'd be sitting in Limrich and I'd be like all right I'm going to do it. I'm going to rank for lawyer in New York City. Um, and and and and I would I'd be able to to do it. And I don't know if that's because like you're from an Irish IP and it sort of like stacks it, but most of my friends on Twitter were from

2:51:54were from uh Ireland. Um, I I would I would just start doing that. I I don't think the domain name matters as much. I think you can you can do it on LinkedIn or you can do it on WordPress.com and start building a site and showing how you do it and and like you said, start sending a service, right? like start getting an an income flow whether it's helping people build a website or help pe people fix their schema or help people get into Google knowledge base or whatever and start doing those things until you you build up um and then you know why you need the tool and what the

2:52:25tool does but you probably have to find a way to experience it on the on the blogspot articles what you did was it just that you thought it you had it like locked in and how the content needed to be or was you doing any sort of virality or like tiered link building to the blog spot. So back then there was a lot of um it was very common for people to meet up at conferences or networking events and then say like oh I met this person and they do this and they would link contextually and my blog spot had at the that time about 4,000 backlinks that were all on

2:53:00point and as long as everything was SEO related ranking for it was just no problem. And I ranked number one for SEO island for like the best part of 10 years. Also software outsourcing and web design. And [clears throat] also I think I was third in the UK for a small point of time. I actually met someone who had a company down in Cork but a big company like 50 people. And I met him in New York and he was like we tried so hard to outrank you and we hated you for doing it on a blogspot domain. [laughter] But I just like I said I just knew the I

2:53:30just knew the what I could and couldn't rank for. I knew I couldn't rank for like freight container, right? So, I wasn't going to try that. But I I knew the I knew the bounds of which I could rank for and and it was just like a fun game. And it and it got me so much referral business that it that it was

2:53:45crazy. You always you're very locked in with like your topical authority of what you can like where you can and where you can't rank and stuff like and I seen one or two of your videos where it was like Edward was asking you about payroll software on Reddit. Um and then you was then started out going, "Okay, well, I wouldn't forget that I'm not doing that to start with. I'm going to do this and then I'm going to do that. I'm going to put the connections. I call it internally, I don't know if it's the

2:54:10right word or not, contextual bridges. So like, okay, I need to build it up and do build the contextual bridges up. How did you learn that personally because it took us a while to understand properly what we could and we couldn't. And you've got that locked in and not many SEOs talk about that. It took me a while too. Um, it took it what I started to trying to figure out the very first SEO that very first thing that we realized was it was a a site called Microsoft B central and it started off as as $50 a year and you would pay and you could build a profile

2:54:48and they gave you 16 links and they were all follow links and we would just ask our clients for 15 keywords and just put the 15 keywords in and they would just all automatically rank and it was amazing. It was like free money. And then eventually started to realize we would write a blog post about these things, then write about a blog post about this and it would just have zero rank. And then we realized it's that there are some phrases that you get a higher relevancy score. That actually took longer to realize. And then we started or maybe we realized the relevancy score and then we started

2:55:18realizing the bridging. And then I started saying to people, you if you want to tell Google that you're good for betting, the reason you start with what is a bet, how do betting works is it's the string matching. And so I saw so many similarities between how ads worked and how Google worked, right? Like this keyword with if it's four words, but three of them match the keyword, the slug, the domain name, quality score went up. They didn't match, it went down. And then I noticed the exact same thing in ads. all the time. And then I realized what they were doing is they were connecting similarity between

2:55:53words. So car headlights has nothing to do with with BMW um brights. They're not related. Or maybe there's now a semantic engine that maybe can tie them together, but they're generally not related. And once once I started to realize just again how simple it is, and that's how I start all of my SEO projects. I go like, I think we need to just step down and realize it's simple. And one of the reasons I do that is I I don't like magic in the system. I like questions. I like unknowns that we have to uncover, but I want to know that we can uncover it. I don't want to believe that there's

2:56:23a unicorn in the middle there. Um, and I know it's not. And I think that's one of the things that Matt Cuts did. And so I I want to believe that there's a way to get there. And so looking at the string comparisons, I just realized this is this is how it works. It's just it's

2:56:39literally these three words match that. That's an outlier. that's 100% this will lift that and then that's how I got locked into and then and we use the same word um uh topical bridging like I kind of see like these islands and we're literally building bridges to them and if this is too far it falls down then we've got to go to the side and go around it but that's exactly you you've nailed it like I think we're the same SEO now I realize that yeah yeah yeah so on contextual bridging we there's a few different like I think it was back in 2017 Chris Carter did

2:57:12something on SEO avalanche and he was like talking about moving through your traffic tiers. Um but then it was like semantically connecting things together. Okay, how how it's fine saying just move through your traffic tiers. Okay, I've got so I've got 200 searches now coming through. Like does that mean I can go off to 250 searches a month? It was like everything needed to be topically relevant. It took us it took us a long time cuz we used we used to rank by good quality pages and then just links and we just that that was it. Just literally links used to just just prop us up for

2:57:50everything and links still good but have diminished and then we had to get better then with our with our clusters. Um, and you you're just one of very few people that I speak to or here where I'm like, you've got that dialed in so well, like so so well. Like we I feel we've got it. I think that's one of our core strengths in the business. And I speak to a lot of others who talk about keyword research or how would you start a website and stuff like that. And I'm like, not many say what you say. And that's where I think people need to grasp onto that

2:58:24when they're listening to what you say when you're talking about them contextual bridges. It's like that is key. Like too many people go up too high and they're not they're not working the way up to get to that island over there that need to hop across to get to it. I think it was around 2007. So I I bought primary position.com in 2004. I started doing SEO 2002 three. And um it was a Matt Cut's video that cemented it when he started talking about neighborhoods and how pages in neighborhoods are related. And I think a lot of people see folders [clears throat] and think that the

2:59:00folder name contributes to the slug, which it doesn't. But when we started doing things like for example, if we're going to do website design, we would build the folder like website design, then we'd have website design. What is website design? How does website design work? Who are like how do you learn website design? How do you translate marketing strategy to web design strategy? Those neighborhoods, those clusters, and we could see which pages

2:59:24rank and then how the other pages rank. Then that joins the dots very very quickly. Um, and I think I learned via reverse engineering. Like I think I'm like somewhere in ODHD and being able like I don't understand something until I get to the end point and it's very painful. It makes learning very difficult. It's very easy when you're when you're like starting school and you're getting A's for everything and then you have to start doing things you don't like and that the they they they be you have to wait till the end of the month to find out how the concept works and we that's when we can start reverse

2:59:57engineering it and I think once I realized that I was like this is so easy and I I I never see people talking about it and sometimes I'm I'm even afraid to talk about it because like it's like am I the only person who thinks this way? So it's great to hear that you you you feel that that's such such an important

3:00:15thing to to lock into and understand. Yeah. I think that's where you can win in almost any market like you. So like someone says, "Oh yeah, finance I can't do it in that or or gambling I can't." You can do it in any market. You just got to find the right terms to go after to start with and build your way up. You have to start somewhere. Majority of people start with ahs and they go with the ones that get the highest search volume and and then then they're sat there with 200 pages and they're like I'm not ranking for anything and you're just like you've not done any anything

3:00:48properly of how to set it up. And I just feel I feel sorry for some because that's how some people get taught. Like some people get taught like go and do your keyword research, go and do keyword clustering. Some some don't even do keyword clustering, but some like go and do your keyword clustering if you're going to put something together and then there's just no planning in place. I always see like the way I would explain what you're brilliant at is I want to build a house and you're brilliant is being the architecture. So you the architect that comes along and says this is where the doors going to go. This is

3:01:21where the windows are going to go. Where others just go right here's your bricks, here's your mort, start building them. And they've not put the foundations. They don't know where the the doors going. They don't know where the the windows are going. They start building. You go, "Oh, he's meant to put a window there. Oh, he's meant to do." And they

3:01:34they're just fixing things on the fly. There's no proper actual strategy and plan where I can just see the way your brain works is no, you need to do I love the episode with the the pay I think it was payroll software editing and I'm like that is genius and not many people say that. Like I don't think even you Edward was like but why are you doing that first? And it was like it it's just when the way it when it clicks it just clicks

3:02:02and it's like right that's that's good. I like what you're doing there. I was wondering if anyone was going to pick up on that. And then when Ed was asking me I was like oh this is going to sound so silly. And I was like I wonder how many people will actually tweak that that is actually cornerstoneing. That is how you build up and that's how you get it. And I I think often Edward understands the question in the in the user's mind because I got some really nice compliments um about both of you on LinkedIn during the week. And I sent them both to um to Edward and I said

3:02:33like you got you know this this amazing guy who's built this incredible fintech platform came on. He said look I love your videos. I'm just going to be straight up with you. I really liked him but you're so much better with Edward. And I was like I I thousand% agree. And if I could get Edward every day I would. and he's very good with his time cuz he he lets me WhatsApp him every day. Um, but I was like trying to think of it at the same time. I'm like, I bet everyone's going to think this is made up, right? And it was like really awkward and I was like, I wonder if

3:03:02anyone's going to pick up on this, but if if there's a secret source, then that is it. That was the one thing I learned that I learned so early on that that I think helped me. And I think one of the things that didn't help me was like being in an Irish market and back then in Ireland's population was like 3.5 million. now it's 6 million is it's such a small country and the the amount of services that you'd have in the United Kingdom or Germany, France or even in the USA and the amount the smallness of the market and how we had to like we

3:03:30almost gave websites away for free to sell SEO or we would sell websites at a higher margin to to pay for the SEO and and it and it's so restrictive and it's so hard to start there and then you move to a country like this and you're like you can make you can get billions of clicks and dollars for doing small things like a proxy for cell phones on Android, which is someone I met the other day is making millions doing that from Serbia. And this like blows your

3:03:56mind. I think that was something that like I wish could have happened earlier. So yeah, I want to wrap up here, Edward, in saying like thank you so much in what you do for the industry. I think that consistency of turning up every single day and that persistent kind of thing of what you do is incredible. Um, you're the you're the out the three of us, you're the one who's going to new levels

3:04:22with Gary Vee and all the rest of them. Yeah. Um, but no, I appreciate everything you do for the industry. I think it's absolutely brilliant. Thank you. really I want to I want to cut you off Edward because I want to I just really want to echo that and I know I've said it before but I just want to double down and so many people have come to me and said I saw you because I'm watching the Edward Sturm show and I saw this and I saw James and I loved when when the when the people I like connect together and I don't think you realize

3:04:48how many people you're you're solving they like they're just overwhelmed and they've got to get it done. It's a business problem they have to solve. Whereas for me it's a game I'm playing right and and and James is such a smart businessman. He knows he's got options and he knows that options are the survivable survivability plan for businesses and you doing this every day whether with whatever happens you turn up every single day with the best smile and bring out the best in people um you you've done more you're you've taken on Matt Cuts's flame right in his coach and you're just you you you're doing more for SEO I think

3:05:21than the search team are. I really I really mean that it's a labor of love and I and I thank I thank people like you because you guys inspire me and you guys help me show up every day and you guys come on the show and talk for three hours with just amazing gold and fire and so three hours that's my longest ever

3:05:42podcast. I actually think this is the longest one on on the show and it's it's with two of the best people in the industry. So I I couldn't be happier. Um, and thank you and thank you for the kind words that really coming from you guys. Like it means so much for real. Not at all. And and James, thank you so much for all of the questions and and the perspective that you give people and and and and the the critical thinking skills like, okay, David says this all the time because he's passionate about it, but what does he mean and how showing them how to do it? And you can

3:06:12ask questions without causing a meltdown, right? You can say like, well, is it really that? I think the skills you the skills you can teach in SEO stem from your ability to apply critical thinking. Yeah, David, it's been an absolute pleasure sharing the stage with you. Um, you're an absolute legend. Keep doing what you do. Everything. It was funny because prior to it with Edward, I'm like, I've got to play devil's advocate, but like my issue is I resonate with so much of what he says. So, like I can't really argue with him because I'm like I agree with I understand the point of what he's saying, but I'm gonna have to

3:06:48try to try somewhere to play a devil's advocate with you, but everything what you say I think you're again I'm not just saying it because you think, but you I don't just jump on a podcast for three hours with people that I don't like. Like Edward, brilliant for turning up every single day. What you're doing is incredible. David, like the the stuff that you're putting out there and the information you're putting out there is unbelievable. So many people I know will be DMing you saying, "Thank you so much." And a lot of the Google parrots because you're going against what they're saying will be hitting you and

3:07:20and you're going to get a lot of And that's just part and parcel of cyber bullying and all the rest of it and just just ignore it. Block them and just keep doing what you're doing, mate. Because for so many people, they'll be loving what you're saying. Thank you so much for all of the

3:07:35perspectives. Thank you. Go ahead. Cheers. This was great. This was great. Let's All right. So, this is episode 1,131 of the podcast. 1,131 days in a row doing this show. Let's go. Thank you again to my awesome guests. If you watch this episode on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye

3:08:04now.