The Salt Sessions

Transcript 

 

The Salt Sessions - SEO Insights

0:10
My name is Bev Salt.

0:11
I'm the founder of Add Salt.

0:13
I'm a marketing consultant.

0:15
For more information about me, head over to my website addsalt.co.uk.

0:21
Today I'm joined by Alice Widger from Milk it Digital.

0:25
Alice is a SEO expert and we know each other's through community group called the Mums in Marketing group and we're both founding members.

0:35
So welcome Alice.

0:37
Thank you.

0:38
Today we're going to talk about SEO, as you might have guessed, and how we're going to optimise well, websites and content for emerging trends.

0:49
So Alice, let's start with EAT.

0:53
I'm not talking about food.

0:54
The acronym used by Google, EEAT.

0:58
Do you want to explain to us what that is?

1:01
So EEAT is another one of Google's wonderfully labelled algorithms.

1:06
Google has some of the driest names out there when it comes to talk about their algorithms and how they look at content on websites and how they deliver it onto their search engines.

1:16
This one handily stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.

1:23
It's quite a mouthful as you can tell.

1:27
So in the simplest terms, it's all about how you can optimise your website for these different factors that Google looks at.

1:37
So for example, when we when we talk about the first E, which is the Experience.

1:43
And so something I talk to some clients a lot about how do we show our experience?

1:49
How do we show our expertise and the 2 go hand in hand.

1:52
And like I said to my clients, you know, it's all very well sort of having a beautifully designed website.

1:57
But if you're not actually telling people what you do and how you do it and why you're the best in the business or the sector or you provide the best products for the thing that you do, then how is anyone going to know about it?

2:09
How you actually going to sell it?

2:10
Also how a search engine is going to understand it as well.

2:13
So although you know you know what you do, and although your client base might understand what you do, you have to prove it to search engines because they're not mind readers.

2:23
They don't care that you have this wonderful business.

2:26
They don't care that you have this beautifully designed website.

2:29
What they care about is the fact that you can actually show it and bring people to your site to want to read about it and eventually get in touch.

2:36
And how can people do that, Alice?

2:38
So yeah, so we do it through content.

2:40
So we do it through it's another one of Googles lovely named algorithms, which is all about useful and helpful content.

2:48
And in your simplest way to do that is literally by writing it, we talk about it from the point of view of your ideal audience.

2:56
So you do want to talk about who you are as business, that's why you do it.

3:01
But you want to be talking about the pain points that your audience has, the clients has, you know, what are the issues they're experiencing, which is making them wanting to find a service or product to fix that issue.

3:12
So for example, if you're a plumber, you know, you might do emergency plumbing 24/7.

3:19
So if you've got a page about plumbing, obviously we talk about the fact that you do 24/7, you know, emergency plumbing in a certain area here, all of your credentials, here's your experience.

3:31
This is what you do in this situation.

3:34
You know, maybe you've got pipe that is frozen and exploded over and your house is flooding.

3:39
It's like putting that content on that page not only tells search engines what you do and how you do, it is also letting the people know when they come to your website that you actually do it.

3:51
You're not making them think like I've landed on the page and not a lot of content.

3:54
Do they do it?

3:55
Who are they?

3:56
Is it the service I need?

3:58
It's all there them to read about us all there for them to trust you, which then pulls you into the A&T part of the algorithm, which is all about authority and trust.

4:07
It's building those trust signals.

4:11
The other part of the A&T of that is about authority and trust.

4:16
So from Google's point of view, it's building backlinks to your website.

4:21
And a backlink is a link from another website to your website.

4:24
When it comes to websites, it's not about, you know, the quantity of the backlinks, it's the quality.

4:31
So the backlinks should be coming from websites.

4:33
That makes sense.

4:34
They should be from websites where it would be a natural link to your, to your, you know, whether it's, you know, from a directory, an industry paper, it could be a blog post, for example.

4:48
It could be any sort of number of things that would make sense for your ideal audience to be on already.

4:54
And then to find out about what you're doing, get a link back.

4:57
So this, this, it's like two birds with one stone.

5:00
You get, you know, a piece of PR and then you get a back link to your website and that all builds trust within Googles eyes that you're actually kind of legit company, that other people trust your opinion.

5:12
They trust your service already and that will help will the quantity of backlinks you have helped to build the domain authority on your websites.

5:24
Yeah.

5:24
So again, it really, really depends.

5:26
There's no sort of magic number.

5:27
And I always say this to my clients, it's like you can, you can have a really well performing website with one amazing backlink and it's better to have a really good quality backlink than hundreds of really bad quality backlinks.

5:41
Ideally you should be going for a domain authority that is high.

5:45
Different SEO tools use different ways of sort of assessing it.

5:49
So it will be different depending what SEO tool you have.

5:52
Some count up of 100, some can't out of 10, you know.

5:55
And then you know, generally there is like one which is generally pretty bad and pretty spammy.

6:01
Again, you know, Google has an algorithm to look at backlinks, so it'll discount any sort of low domain spammy looking backlinks already for you.

6:10
So you don't need to worry too much about those unless you're getting harmful traffic to your site which will show up on Google Analytics and then you can think about disavowing it in Google Search Console.

6:20
But Google smart and it understands backlinks and what's useful all what's not Great.

6:26
Thank you.

6:27
So the next thing I wanted to ask you about was SGE, another acronym which stands for search Generative experience.

6:36
I've spoken to a few people and they, they haven't actually seen SGE.

6:40
So I just wanted to show for those watching, I'm just going to share what SGE actually is.

6:48
So I typed into Google what is SGE and you can see here it's an AI powered snippet.

6:54
So it shows you what SGE is.

6:58
And on the right hand side, it will pick out the companies that Google things are the most relevant to answer that question as well.

7:07
So for those of you who haven't seen it, that's just a quick summary of what SGE is, Alice.

7:13
So these are AI powered snippets that users can ask a question and it would generate an answer based on existing web content.

7:21
So as marketeers, how can we optimise our website so we can rank where the AI snippet has popped up?

7:29
Yeah.

7:29
So again, it's one of those things where Google launches something and obviously AI content is huge.

7:36
It's blown up from ChatGPT onto Google.

7:40
Google had Bard and thank God they changed the name because it was really, really bad.

7:45
Another amazing example, Googles dreadful names.

7:48
So when it comes to content, again, nothing, nothing has changed from the the advice that Google has been given, Seo's have been giving and content creators been giving for years is to write content for your audience.

8:00
So again, it all comes down to what Google likes to say, useful, helpful content.

8:05
And it is literally that.

8:06
It's don't create content just for the sake of it.

8:09
And it's something I'm asked all the time, how many blog posts should I write a month to get my website ranking, How many words do I need to add and all these things.

8:18
And it doesn't work like that.

8:20
It's better to have capacity to write 5 blog posts a year.

8:24
Just do those five blog posts, but make them really, really good research into what your audience wants and what your ideal client wants.

8:33
What are their issues?

8:34
What are their pain points?

8:36
What are they searching for?

8:37
The start of their journey?

8:38
Because informational searches are all based on people trying to figure out an issue that they've got.

8:44
Whatever happens to be all the questions of what, how, when, if, what are these things that they're trying to find an answer to.

8:52
So if you can create a piece of content around those core issues that your client, your audience has and you write it from the point of view, then so you have to reverse engineers or put yourself in their shoes and then give your answers from obviously from a business point of view, then you know you're going to create something which is useful.

9:14
The other thing you want to do as well is to have a look visually on Google, Yahoo, Bing, whichever you know, web browser you use and look at the content that's currently ranking for those searches.

9:24
Look up what they've written about.

9:25
Look at, you know, things like the backlinks they've got come into those pieces.

9:29
Do they have a video on there?

9:30
Do they have infographics?

9:32
What have they done?

9:33
And then what can you do which is better but also delivers answers that they haven't covered?

9:40
How can you angle it from what's out there already?

9:44
So it's providing something which has got a unique take on it.

9:49
And then that in turn is going to feed into the AI snippets.

9:53
And don't be afraid of the AI snippets.

9:55
They're there, but I don't think they're going to, they're going to go away.

9:58
I don't think Google or anyone's going to retract this from a search.

10:02
It's now part of the search experience.

10:04
Being in my mid 40s then you know, search has changed so much.

10:10
You know, we've got reviews, we've got knowledge panels, we've got maps, we've got images, videos, shopping ads.

10:19
We've had, you know, people also ask in there and the little accordian kind of menus push down, which I see that as like the start of the AI, where the AI generated content where it was taking snippets from websites and putting it in there.

10:32
And then the newest form of that is now at the top of the search engine results.

10:37
But what's handy with the with the Google One over something like ChatGPT is that you've got those links right there.

10:43
And also we've got that extra panel which also links to those same websites where it's pulled that content.

10:48
So then and you can go, you know what, that looks really interesting.

10:52
I want to read more about that, not take people to that website.

10:55
So at no point a website is being pushed to the side by Google and sort of going, we're going to take all your content, but we're not going to link back to you, which is what everyone was really worried about when they were first talking about it.

11:05
But that hasn't happened.

11:07
You know, those links are still there.

11:08
We still have our top ten organic results and search engine results.

11:13
You can just Scroll down.

11:14
You can ignore AI if you don't want to be told what to think and you want to do you want to do your own research?

11:20
You still can.

11:21
It's all there.

11:22
It's just now we've just got a little AI snippet at the top to speed things up.

11:27
Alice, are there any tools to help people decide what content they should be generating to answer their customers pain points and queries?

11:37
The biggest one is the answer the public.

11:41
I think I got that name right.

11:42
Yeah.

11:42
So answer the public.

11:44
It's very handy, even if it is power owned by someone who I'm not.

11:49
So what's so keen on in the SEO world?

11:51
But I've said about that.

11:52
But yeah, it's, it's a really, really handy tool.

11:55
It's really good.

11:56
Obviously your own Google Search Console is going to be full of data or things that people are searching for already to find your website.

12:03
And that's something I advise my client.

12:05
It's like when we're sort of looking at keyword research and things like that is that we look at what Google is already seeing on the website.

12:12
What can we take from this?

12:13
What easy wins?

12:14
I don't like saying easy wins of SEO because it's not, but it is.

12:19
There's so much information in your Google Search Console.

12:22
If you look under performance, you can see all these different searches and you can pull out from there what could be something which is starting to rank or Google's understanding certain things about your website.

12:34
Then you can pull content from there.

12:37
You can do your additional straight up Google search as well.

12:40
You can pop questions in there and you can literally put it in the search bar.

12:44
You can start to type in and you can go through it sounds really basic, but it's actually really good tactic and you just put say, for example, what is what is SEO?

12:55
And then you can just go ABCD and to see what comes down the search results.

12:59
And it's like the top asked questions and things like that will come up.

13:03
And again, that's another really super easy freeway or finding content to write about.

13:08
Thank you.

13:08
That's brilliant.

13:09
User signals.

13:10
So Google relies heavily on user signals to rank content and determine relevance.

13:15
So as marketeers, how can we optimise our websites for user signals?

13:22
Yeah.

13:22
So give people a good time.

13:24
It's as simple as that.

13:25
Give people a good time.

13:26
It's like, you know, it's a two way street.

13:29
If you build a website that is really, really nice to use, it's easy, you can navigate, you can find all the things you want.

13:38
You don't have massive images taking up, you're having to scroll past loads of videos, all of these things.

13:45
Or if you're on your mobile, it doesn't take 4000 years to load.

13:48
Giving people a good time.

13:50
And if people are having a good time and Google's having a good time and it's going to love you.

13:54
So Google is a little bit muddy and it talks about user signals.

13:59
It's kind of, it's one of those things where Google in the past has sort of claimed that it doesn't use user hear signals from Google Analytics, just rank your website.

14:12
I think that's because I see like client sites when I've taken on the site and there's no interaction time on site is really low.

14:22
You know, we've put the work in, we've put really good content in and then people are spending more time on the site and then it starts to move up in search engine rankings.

14:31
But again, it's really hard to pinpoint what exactly did it because there's so many different factors.

14:37
Google has something like, say 200 and 5300 ranking factors beyond that.

14:43
Because not even Google really knows how Google works because it's such a point where it's so smart that there's just so many different elements involved in where a website ranks and why it ranks and how it ranks that you can't just go.

15:00
It was that because there's so many other things happening at the same time.

15:03
So this is the beauty and also the frustration of working in SCO where you can never really say we did this thing.

15:10
It was that and very much the same reviews, signals.

15:13
Ultimately, don't worry too much about what Google wants.

15:17
Worry about what people want, and Google will follow.

15:22
That's brilliant advice.

15:23
I love it.

15:24
Alice, if our listeners or viewers had any questions, how can people reach you?

15:29
Yeah, So you can find me on my website, whichismilkitdigital.co.uk.

15:35
And you can find me mostly hanging out on LinkedIn under my name, which is Alice.

15:40
Alice Widger can't say my name.

15:43
And I'm also on Instagram occasionally.

15:47
Not as much on my handle on Instagram is Milk it Digital and you can see me sing round on there and sequin dresses in beautiful Devon.

15:59
OK, that's been really helpful.

16:01
Thank you very much for your time today, Alice.

16:05
Thank you for asking me.

16:07
Bye, bye, bye.