# Jennifer Mathews: The SEO Goddess 🔥

by [kirupa](https://www.kirupa.com/me/index.htm) | filed under [Interviews with Creative People](https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm)

[Jennifer Mathews](https://seogoddess.com/) treats SEO as a practical web craft, not a bag of ranking tricks. Her background in design, development, and small-business problem solving gives the whole conversation a grounded feel. She talks about technical literacy, hiring red flags, page speed nuance, spam cycles, and why SEO can be rewarding work for the right person but a miserable shortcut for the wrong one.

Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A

A conversation with **Jennifer Mathews** | 1h 01m

## About this conversation

Jennifer Mathews gets to SEO from a direction that still feels refreshing: she starts with building websites. She talks about design, development, early ecommerce work, and the simple client problem that pushed her deeper into search. A polished site did not matter much if nobody could find it. That is an excellent foundation for the rest of the interview because it keeps SEO tied to real web work instead of treating it like a mysterious layer floating above the product.

That broader foundation also explains why she keeps coming back to technical depth. Jennifer talks about site architecture, rewrites, templates, URL control, and the friction that shows up when enterprise teams want SEO outcomes without understanding the underlying systems. She is especially persuasive on this point: a lot of search advice becomes shallow because people forget that pages, links, content, and crawl paths all sit on top of actual implementation choices. In her version of the job, the best SEO practitioners are part strategist, part diagnostician, and part translator between business goals and engineering reality.

The conversation is also full of useful myth-busting. Jennifer gives page speed and Core Web Vitals their due, but she refuses to turn them into magic switches. She is similarly practical about content and links. Support content matters when it genuinely helps users and rounds out a topic. Links matter when they are relevant and earned. Spammy shortcuts still exist, but she treats them as part of an endless cycle where search engines improve, bad actors adapt, and the same low-quality tactics come back wearing a new shirt.

Her advice on hiring an SEO consultant is one of the strongest parts of the interview. If someone hints at special access to Google or relies on mystique instead of explanation, that is a warning sign, not a selling point. She also shares a useful caution about constant page updates: if you keep changing a page, you can keep resetting the period where search engines are still figuring it out. The closing career advice is blunt in the best way. SEO can be a good path, but if the only reason you want in is quick money, you will probably hate the work long before you get good at it.

## What you'll hear about

- Jennifer approaches SEO as an extension of real web building, not a separate magic trick.
- Technical literacy still matters for understanding templates, URLs, crawls, and indexing.
- Performance signals are important, but they are rarely one-switch ranking answers.
- Relevant content and natural links age better than manufactured shortcuts.
- Anyone hinting at privileged access to Google should raise immediate suspicion.
- SEO rewards patience and craft more than people looking for easy money.

## Jump to a topic

- [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=0s) **From web design to SEO**: Jennifer explains how client traffic problems pulled her from site building into search.
- [8:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=525s) **Early web tools and tactics**: She looks back at hand-built sites, old editors, and the first generation of SEO work.
- [17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=1050s) **Why technical depth matters**: The conversation turns to rewrites, architecture, and the value of understanding how sites actually work.
- [26:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=1590s) **The nuance behind speed**: Jennifer unpacks performance, user behavior, and why page speed is not a simple ranking lever.
- [33:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=1980s) **Content quality and spam cycles**: She talks about low-value content, AI-era shortcuts, and the recurring pattern of search manipulation.
- [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=2400s) **Hiring the right consultant**: Practical advice follows on how to evaluate SEO help and spot the people overselling it.
- [47:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=2820s) **Why constant edits can backfire**: Jennifer explains ranking volatility and why nonstop page changes can delay clear results.
- [56:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=3360s) **Career advice without sugarcoating**: She closes with a candid take on who should and should not pursue SEO as a profession.

## To learn more

- [Jennifer's Website](https://seogoddess.com/)

## Transcript

The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors.

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=0s) - Kirupa

One of the most competitive pieces of real estate is the Google search box and the results it provides. Being at the top for popular keywords is the difference between having a successful business and, well, not. Let's enter the world of search engine optimization, or SEO for short, and go into the details of what a good SEO specialist does, what to look out for when hiring a specialist, what SEO is in the first place, and a whole lot more. I talked to one of the world's foremost experts in this area, Jennifer Mathews. This is going to be a fun one, so let's get started.

Jen, thanks again for taking the time to meet with me. I've been following your content for a long time now and, like we were mentioning before we started recording, I don't even know when I started following it, but it feels like I've always seen your helpful information on LinkedIn every time I sign in. So thanks again for taking the time to share this broadly with all of us and to talk a little bit more about yourself. The first question I always like to ask is: how did you get started in tech? How did you get started with SEO in your case?

### [1:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=60s) - Jennifer Mathews

Yeah, yeah, so I'm going to go back to the beginning, and this is going to kind of date me a little bit, but I'm not interviewing, so I'm okay with it. I grew up in the '80s, so we had one computer in the house for the entire family. My brother ended up getting his PhD in aerospace engineering, so he was the tech guru guy, and I used to tag along while he and his friend—mostly just him—would hack on websites. He'd be in there coding and doing cool things. He had two synthesizers set up with the computer.

It would do all this cool stuff, and eventually he got me a coding book. I was an artist to begin with, so that's how it kind of translates to SEO: you've got to be a little bit left-brain and a little bit right-brain. I would paint, do sculpture, and do all sorts of things growing up, and I also had that techie influence from my brother. Later in life, I got into web design and development in the late '90s and started doing it as a freelancer for local businesses. I like a challenge, and I wanted those businesses to be like Amazon, so I learned how to build that kind of functionality.

Now you can create a website with WordPress or something else, install a plugin like WooCommerce, and you have your shopping cart. Back then it was not as easy, so I actually learned how to code using CGI and Perl, work with Authorize. Net, work with the local banks and their merchant accounts, and figure out how to process credit cards securely. Well, I don't know if it was very secure, but anyway, that's where I started: just developing websites. I didn't realize how intricate the work was getting.

When those websites were built, the clients would tell me, 'It's great that you built this for me, Jen, but nobody's coming to it.' Of course they didn't have any money because they were these small mom-and-pop shops, so I started figuring out how to get free traffic to a site, and SEO was the biggest one. It was so easy back then. You basically put in your titles, descriptions, meta tags, and the keywords you felt they should rank for, and you pretty much got rankings right away.

Then it got a little more complicated, where you had to have the keyword mentioned on the page, and we were doing things like white text on white background, and then Flash came into play. That's where I first got influenced. I did work for my brother at his tech company, then it ended up not doing well—I call it part of the dot-com era—but I learned quite a lot about web design and development. I did QA testing. Anything they were willing to let me do as an intern, I absorbed. I just absorbed as much as I could, and from there I eventually went to work for an agency that did just SEO.

I thought, how cool, because that seemed to be my passion: the challenge of trying to get rankings, especially when Google came into play and changed the game completely. That's how I got into it. I started working for the agency in 2004, and there were only, what, maybe 9 to 12 people in the office when we started. They had several hundred clients they were trying to optimize, from really small businesses to very big clients. Some of the claim-to-fame stories were that we got rankings for a client for flowers and got rankings for trophies.

Our biggest one was this company out of Issaquah, and he ended up opening a second store and had 3 other websites that we optimized for him. He grew his business considerably just from that. Then, in terms of how I got into enterprise, I went from that agency in 2006 to Classmates. Com, if anyone is old enough to remember that. I remember the ad all the time, that little black-and-white one that said, 'You might know this person.' I'm like, maybe. Let me click it. They're still around, I think.

They probably would have survived if they hadn't charged, because they charged just to let you view somebody's picture on their profile, whereas MySpace and Facebook came in and everything was free. There are a couple of projects I launched while I was there that are still live today, so I'm kind of proud that they held on to them. Oh, kitty. Love it. Yeah, when I'm not in the office, it's pretty much a zoo here.

### [5:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=358s) - Kirupa

Oh really? I'm a big animal lover, so anytime I see him, I'm like, yeah.

### [6:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=363s) - Jennifer Mathews

Totally distracted. We just have two cats, and they're both very friendly. They let him in the office as well, so he can find a spot to take a nap on.

### [6:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=373s) - Kirupa

So we're live here. I love that they always know when you're busy, or they go to the people who don't like them. Yeah, exactly. But this is actually really interesting, because I got into web design and development in the late 1990s as well, especially in the old GeoCities days, before Google, when every search engine had a 'submit a site' link. You'd be like, oh, I created a new page, let me go to submit a site, let me type in the URL and hit submit, and then the crawler would go. I think it was Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo, and all these things had a submit-a-site button. I'm like, this is fantastic.

Google had it initially as well, and then they removed it. I'm like, wait, how am I going to get my stuff found if I can't submit the site to it? There were all those fun moments back then. Going back to when you first started with web design, because I love developer tools and design tools and things like that, what tools did you use back when you were doing your web development work?

### [7:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=435s) - Jennifer Mathews

Oh gosh, I think I'm trying to remember I originally my brother got me on to front page, yep, so he actually convinced my parents- this voice this- when I was really starting out, and I was trying to be on my own, I had- I was a young mom, a single mom with young kids, to pull some of the personal life into it, and I had left my husband and I was trying to support myself and my brother told my parents they need to step in and help me, help me get a computer, and then bought me a copy of front page for Christmas and I liked the wizzywig part of it.

But, coming from coding, I think I just used like a notepad or something, a some text editor, because I had a Mac and then I went to PC, which was really tough for me to move. I had a power Mac and then to PC was so hard, but in the long run was easier to develop. Yeah, but I know I just had like a text editor, yeah, and then got front page but I didn't like it because it threw in all that extra code. Yeah, but, it did have a feature where you had a tab to where you could edit the code.

And then what I would do is go to the wizzywig editor and just copy and paste my so for shopping cart when I had the products, put them in a table- that's how old this is- like everything was in tables, and then I would just take that cell and copy and paste it and then just change the image and change the description and price and title. But so it made it my life a little bit easier. Eventually went into Dream Weaver when it was a editor. I did use oh my gosh, what was it? It was home, was it? I want to say home Hite, that's what I used.

And then, like air or Corell, did homest. Oh my gosh. Yeah, you're really bringing up memories, yeah, so I started using that- I think it was somebody- when I was an intern, one of the developers recommended it and I started because I still was doing, because I was interning. Like almost no pay. I think I was making like five bucks an hour interning. We talk about salaries too. My first job at the agency was 30000 a year, and then about when I went to Enterprise, that was better pay, but, yeah, so, yeah, Homesite. And then, and then Adobe bought them right and rolled it into dream Weber.

Originally, dream Weber was just a drag and drop, almost like a PowerPoint type of tool where you could do animations and stuff, but then became an editing tool, like a more of a development tool. But, and then I started developing an asp. So when I was at the agency, I developed a internal- this is really getting into it- we didn't have a customer management system. They were using files and paper, paper files- you know old school. And so I had we had a receptionist at the front desk and I created an access database and I said: plug in all this information into this database.

And then, I developed with ASP, not done net and everybody's got the wizzy wigs now. But I, yeah, I developed with that and I- I'm trying to remember I think I might have used Homesite then or maybe just a text editor, but yeah, then we had our own internal to manage because there's so many clients and, yeah, not a lot of us. So to try to manage that system and how it went. But yeah, that was my old coding days.

### [11:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=661s) - Kirupa

No, that's fantastic. I've been doing this since 1998, and a lot of the audience here is very technical in so many ways, so I always love geeking out on tools. For the most part, I feel like people today don't realize how good we had it back then in some ways. Now it's like, 'I need to create a new website, so let me spend an unreasonable amount of time learning a framework, learning a build tool, and creating a new problem.' Back then, Hello World was literally an HTML page where you typed in hello world. It could have been in Notepad or some WYSIWYG editor.

Today you're still creating Hello World, but the page is 300 kilobytes because there's a bundle and you're using React or something. I love these frameworks, but still. If you don't know the fundamentals of how sites were created back then—what HTML, CSS, and JavaScript actually are—you're missing out on so much of the kitchen sink here, because you think this is the final solution. I always like to go back and point out that things were easier. You had an FTP server, you just dragged and dropped a file, and it would work. Today it's like, do I have a cloud provider, what is my authentication profile?

When people say it's so hard to build websites today, I'm like, it absolutely is. Even if I had to start today without having done what I did back then, it would be impossible. The barrier to entry and experimentation is just so high. Back then I had no idea what I was doing. I used FrontPage Express, which came free with the browser, and then I moved to the full FrontPage. I convinced my parents to buy me FrontPage because I wanted to be able to do frames and iframes. FrontPage Express didn't allow you to do iframes, but FrontPage did.

That kind of naivete helped me, in many ways, experiment and try things out. I feel like we're missing that today in all these tools, because by the time you get Hello World up, you're already burnt out and you're like, okay, I'm done, I'm going to take a break and do something else. So it's always fun to go back and talk about this stuff.

### [13:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=782s) - Jennifer Mathews

I think having that background sometimes surprises me, and it also makes me appreciate it. To jump ahead a little, I worked at ADP, UsedCars. Com, Nordstrom, Groupon, and then GitHub. GitHub was the toughest site, but I learned a lot, especially since it's developer-driven. There are brilliant developers there who are willing to work with you on things, so I learned a lot. That background really helped me, because once we got into ASP, we started to be able to use include files. Then you're dealing with databases.

With the internal database we had and all of the products, I would have an include file for the top and bottom, and then code per page and use parameters to define the page. Then you get to Apache and rewriting URLs. People don't always understand that, but that's basically what it is. Then there's the whole debate between subdomain versus subdirectory. I used to battle with engineers when proxies started coming into place and you could rewrite the entire URL.

I actually wrote on my own personal blog, which was originally on GeoCities and then became Blogspot—SEOs have complained about the URL of my personal blog and I can't even tell you exactly what it is. It's something like Search Marketing Goddess dot Blogspot, and I've never changed it. It's always been there since the early 2000s. I wrote a post there about how to do a proxy. Now it's just a push button, like you're saying, but I used to have to explain to engineers that you could have, okay, we're a. NET shop, we're on Windows servers, on Windows machines, and now the cloud changes that a little bit. But think of UsedCars.

Com as the prime example. We had our own servers in the office, there was somebody who managed the servers, and then we wanted to have a WordPress site. They'd say, 'We can't do that. WordPress isn't a Microsoft-hosted thing, so we have to host it somewhere else.' But we still wanted it to look like it lived in a subdirectory. I kept saying, no, you can use a proxy rewrite to have it be in a subdirectory. They'd say, no, no, no, we can't do this. So I learned how to do it and showed them how it could be done, and that's why I wrote the blog post.

That even turned into consulting work for other people who wanted to know how to do it. Now I can go into a company and it's much more normal. GitHub may not be the best example because their WordPress is on a completely different domain, but Nordstrom's blog is on WordPress and the main site is on a different system. Because of proxies, you can write whatever you want and make it work. Where it used to be complicated, I still know the technical side because of all the things I've been through over the years. That helps me have conversations with engineers and say, 'I know what an include file is.

I know how databases connect to websites, and how you can create millions of pages while really only editing one. I know how rewrites create these unique URLs.' A lot of times they'll say, 'We can't change the URLs,' or 'We don't know, we have no control over them.' I'm like, yes you do. You just write the URLs. You decide what they are, and Apache rewrites, or newer equivalents, make that happen. Having that experience helps. I feel for the SEOs today who are getting in with only two or three years of experience.

A lot of them come in through content and don't have the technical understanding, and then they want to get into the complex enterprise world, or they work for an agency with enterprise clients. The enterprise clients are frustrated because they don't understand, and the SEOs are frustrated because they don't understand. That's why I try to write the content I write.

### [17:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=1072s) - Kirupa

That's so true, because enterprises often have legacy systems that are 10, 15, or 20 years old, and they just can't change them, even if they wanted to, because of backward compatibility. They might have customers who just aren't tech-savvy enough to know that the URL has changed and things like that. It's always a fun topic because, when we look at Salesforce, this is often a common topic as well: Why are the URLs the way they are? Why can't we change them? Why are the pages the way they are? It's because the customers we have just can't change. They have integrations with legacy systems that require a specific hard-coded path.

The person who built that system probably isn't doing that anymore, and no one knows how it was built. It's basically just a server in some closet that everyone hopes nothing ever happens to that causes it to go offline, because at this point it's all a mystery how it works. Especially with Salesforce, a lot of that stuff is internal, and they're pulling it in. Newer clients are going into the cloud, so that makes it a little easier going forward, but those legacy clients can't change.

I also wonder: If I am starting out today in, let's say, web development, and I want to learn all the things you just described, where would I even begin? How would you even get started? Nowadays, you essentially have to hunt for a web server that doesn't provide a full-on CMS and actually allows you to get raw FTP access. Then you need to have Apache server-side includes and Apache enabled, which nobody even does anymore.

### [19:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=1164s) - Jennifer Mathews

I don't know if the browsers would even know what that is. Yeah, so I actually did start. Well, now I get to plug my little site. So I started a website called- oh, now I forget the name of it- Ma, is it master seo. I kind of hit up every once now, while when I get time and put content up there, and I try to put as much as my knowledge as possible. The whole point of it is to those who are starting out. So, just like you're saying: like what, how do they get started?

They don't, and I don't expect, you know, when I hire seos or I have interns that work for me or I Mentor a lot of seos that want to get into the business, I don't, I'm not a brat and I don't say: you know, you should learn the way I did and you should create a HTML website and know how to do all this stuff. You know I try to start them with the world that we have today. But also explain why things are the way they are. Are you know, especially with Google? Google changes the roles all the time.

If you're been in the business 20 plus years, like I, have you watched Google say you can do one thing, which you've probably seen, that on the surface level, they'll say: you know, for a long time they said: submit two directories and here's a list of directories to submit to. Right, like you're saying, like you used to be able to submit to Google and say: go, look at my website, and they took that away. Understanding why those they took that away? Because they came became efficient, right, so they can.

If a new website comes into place, same as who iscom can find that website, Google can find that website very, very efficiently. If? That website's linked from another website- which is why seos promote link building- then they can find it even faster and so there's no reason to do the submitt they also have in GSC. If you can submit a URL individ? Ually so you can go and connect your website. So they'll find it that way as well. So there's no reason to do the submittal process anymore. But there's also yeah, so there's, there's reasons behind. And then the whole submitting to directories, right, so here's what.

What I was getting at is that Google will say: do this thing, and then everybody does it and, like you were saying earlier, there's a lot of Bad actors and there's more, I would say, without. This is not an official study, but off the cuff, and my gut feeling is, like 90, at least 90% of the people doing SEO are Bad actors, and it makes and it is hard to find the ones that are legit and know what they're doing. And so, because of those Bad actors, everybody's submitting to directories. There's people, there's websites, creating directories. You know scammers that are creating directories that you can submit to them.

And it became too much, and so then it became spammy and scammy, right. And so then Google's like: whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, stop, now we don't allow anyone to do submitting directories. And then they got to a point where, because people are still doing it was still working and they're like: we recommend you don't, we recommend you don't, or maybe just Dem mods and nobody else. And then, it just became so bad that they're like: now we're going to penalize you for submitting to directories because yall aren't listening to us. And that is the common, and this is the thing that I try to explain to seos.

If you know this part of the world that we're in, right, Google will say: did do this one thing: recent example, Google said for the last several years to: do your FAQs right, put FAQs on your page. Structure data around it. You'll become you'll. You know, get a chance to get an answer box. You can get into the people also, ask they good key features? It promotes win-win, right? Google gets content for those those parts. And, you're getting that feature page and so of that feature position. And just this year they're now saying: we don't recommend you do FAQs anymore, right and so, and so this is their pattern.

They're gonna- this is what's going to happen with my prediction- they're going to say: we don't recommend it going forward, and then people are still going to do it because it still works, because they're still looking at it, that they don't want you to, and eventually they're going to say we're penalizing any site that has fa that's loaded with FAQs, when it doesn't make sense. Right, if it's not an FAQ page and it's only FAQs, then because that's where they're going to go, that's where they headed, because that's their pattern and that's the part that I tried to explain to seos, like you need to understand.

Look at what's going on. What's going to be. Yeah, Google says to do this, but then what's going to get taken advantage of and what's going to be manipulated? And don't do that thing. And even though Google recommends it, just try to stay. Just even keill, don't ride those waves that Google has, yeah, you know, or don't take advantage of it.

### [24:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=1473s) - Kirupa

Yeah, I think another recent example in this area is all the interest in Core Web Vitals and increasing page performance and making sure your site performance is really high. Then I see mixed answers where it's like, actually, maybe we won't get penalized if performance isn't all that great, because certain sites just can't be super performant. How true is that?

### [24:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=1499s) - Jennifer Mathews

I think they change direction all the time. As far as web performance goes, I hate to say it depends, because I hate that SEOs use that word, but it really does depend on the site. I've seen sites that are slow and still do okay. I've also seen slow sites that don't do okay. Is it because they're slow, or is there something else playing into that? Now, if you've got a slow site, I mean, it's bad user experience, right? Exactly. There are other factors too. This is what I use as a gauge.

SEOs will say that Google can see how users are interacting on your site and know the bounce rate and all of that. I think they can because they have GA, but I'm skeptical about whether they use that data. They say they don't, and they really shouldn't. I think using GA like that would be gaming the system, taking advantage in a way other search engines wouldn't be able to. But they do have GSC, or at least the data you see in GSC, so they can see what's going on in the search results. This gets back to speed and load time. Somebody types in their keyword and sees a bunch of results.

They see the paid stuff first and they're like, eh, I'm not going to do that. This stuff is crap. I don't like landing pages and I don't want to be marketed to, so they go straight to the natural results. That's what I do. Then they click the first result, and if it's not loading—whether it's their connection or the site's connection, whatever it is—but it's taking a long time, do you think they're going to sit there and wait? They're not. They're going to close it out and go to the next result. Google sees that they're clicking the first result and then quickly clicking the second result. That's the data.

So that's what I tell SEOs, or people who ask me that question. It's not just page load. It's also usability. Are they getting what they're looking for very quickly? Let's say the page loads very quickly, but it doesn't answer the question. Maybe it's just got a bunch of crappy AI content—we could open a whole can of worms there—or maybe it was written by a human but it's still bad and clearly only there for SEO. If users just see the same keyword over and over again, are they getting what they want? No, so they're going to leave and go to the next result, and Google sees that.

I will absolutely, without a doubt, say that is a ranking factor. Whether it's page load or usability or whatever, that's where we get into bounce rate. I don't think they see bounce rate in GA, maybe they do, but they definitely see the clicks.

### [28:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=1686s) - Kirupa

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Because when you look at single-page apps, for example, they just can't always be fast. The app bundles are much larger. But if you go back to a site like Salesforce, for example, and you're looking for something very specific, there may be no real competition. If you're going to a particular company's page where people can view inventory and buy things, they're not going to click away to something else because it takes a long time to load. They have to be there because there is no alternative. So in those cases, does it make sense for you to optimize to a certain level?

Of course, from a technology point of view, yes, the best user experience is for things to be fast. But from an end-result point of view, if you ignore the time factor, it may not really matter because you have no alternative and there's no competition there. Whereas in other spaces, that competitive data makes a lot of sense. The part I really didn't think about, but that's obvious in hindsight after you mentioned it, is that Google does know what you click on and the time between when you click the next link on that same page.

That's a strong indication that maybe what you were looking for wasn't quite there, and it's completely independent of whether Google Analytics or any other beacon is sending a signal to Google that you're spending X amount of time on these pages.

### [29:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=1761s) - Jennifer Mathews

Yeah, well, I'll give you an example of exactly what you're saying. I live on an island, and I have a propane tank that powers a lot of my heat, my hot water, my thermostat, my cooking, everything in the house. I discovered yesterday that I have a leak, and I was out of propane. I had just loaded it, like, four weeks ago, and it should not have gone that quickly. I have AmeriGas as a company, I'm an AmeriGas customer, so I go to the AmeriGas website. First I Google it because I don't know where the login is and I just want to find it quickly.

I search for AmeriGas login, I see the result, and I click on it. That site is so slow. It took forever to load. But I'm an AmeriGas customer. I can't contact anyone else because I have a contract with them. There is no competition, so I have to sit there and wait. So why are they in the first position? Because I clicked and I waited for that thing to load. Do they know the page load? Maybe, because they're crawling and collecting data. But for that keyword, clearly I'm a customer, I'm going there, and I'm sitting there waiting.

So that's always going to be the first result regardless of how slow that site is. That's why you have to say it depends. It depends on the competition, the site, the keyword they're searching for, and what the user intent is. So to make a blanket statement and say page speed affects rankings—yeah, when I'm talking to my bosses and our site's really slow, as a blanket statement I'll say, look, we need to speed some things up. But there are times when you really don't have to worry about it too much, to be honest.

### [31:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=1885s) - Kirupa

Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned AI earlier, and I know I opened that can. The latest drama around this is that we've seen a little of it before, but there was a very popular post recently where someone literally looked at the keywords of a competitor, used AI to create all the pages needed for that, published them, and showed the results—here's how much traffic they received without doing much work as a human being. Then we also saw the fallout where Google quickly de-ranked them and removed them from those results.

Are we going to see more and more of these things where, just like before, many people in the SEO industry aren't doing things in good faith, and this is another example of that? Are we going to have to add yet one more signal for what to look out for when we're trying to distinguish good SEO from bad SEO?

### [32:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=1935s) - Jennifer Mathews

That's been around for a while, right? You had sites like Textbroker. I've been in this debate because people say AI is going to ruin content. I'm like, really? Because you already have Textbroker. I don't know if you've ever used it; I use it religiously. But you have to manage it, and it's the same thing with AI. Textbroker is a crowdsourcing site with humans writing content, although AI has changed the game. I'm pretty sure those humans are using AI to write now, but they're people from all over the world. If they speak English, they can write, though they may not know the topic. I used it for a VashonDM.

Com site I have for the island that provides information, and some people on the island have called me out for it. I have used Textbroker to write some content. It's $20 for, I think, about 900 words, so it's a nice, easy way to write a quick article. The prompt was basically everything: you put it out there and say, “I need this content.” The more information you provide to the person who's writing, the better the quality will be.

I would put out, “I need an article on things to do around Vashon Island.” I would find a few references, some travel sites or whatever with the top 10 things to do on the island, and say, “Go here, read about it, and then write me a list.” They don't get some things quite right because they're not from the island, but AI would do the same thing, right? I'm an AI proponent, so I will take this argument to no end with people who are against AI. In fact, my own son is against AI, and we get into these debates. He's 26 years old.

You'd think a younger person wouldn't be fighting with the older person about it; you'd think it would be the other way around, that he would support it and I'd be the curmudgeon. But no, this has been around forever. It's not AI specifically. AI has been around forever; it's just getting smarter, and there are cooler uses for it. Textbroker is an example I use: you still have to be specific. The more specifically you write your prompt, the better the content will be. It's a human doing it, and it's the same thing with AI. The more specific your prompt, the better it will be.

An example of something I absolutely love is Amazon. I was shopping for Black Friday and noticed what they were doing where they have the reviews. I always look at reviews before I make a purchase. What are people saying? You can tell which reviews are fake and which are real. I always go to the negative ones because those are going to be real for sure, and then see what they complain about. If it's customer service but otherwise a good product, I don't care. If somebody says, “It wasn't the right size; I had to return it,” whatever, that's your own problem, but otherwise the product is good.

You get some good, honest information there. Amazon used to do the “what's mentioned most” tag, and I think they still have it: “easy to assemble” or “was broken in the box when I got it.” If something is repeated over and over again, they'll have that at the top. They're using technology to surface it. Now the next step is that they're creating an AI-driven content paragraph above those reviews, saying, “Most people say this,” in a cohesive, easy-to-understand paragraph. I really appreciate that as a user. I also know it's AI-driven, but for SEO purposes, if more ecommerce sites can do that, they're getting unique content on the page.

It's beneficial to the user because it summarizes what most people are saying in the reviews, so they don't have to dig through them. They're getting converted faster—a win-win for everybody. That's a good, positive use of AI. I'll find more and preach the positive side of AI to no end. It just needs to be curbed and controlled. It can be bad, but a lot of SEO can be bad too, right?

### [36:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=2205s) - Kirupa

Yep, exactly. Like you mentioned, content-farming sites have been there forever, where they're just writing about anything and you can spot them from a mile away. It's just bulleted lists, no images, ads everywhere, and you're like, yeah, I'm pretty sure this is not the most authoritative source on this. But I did click on it, so kudos to them. They managed to trick even a semi-skeptical person who's wary of scammy links into using it. So yeah, it's a constant battle. Whatever techniques we figure out right now, the bad actors will evolve, so we need to always keep evolving too.

### [37:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=2239s) - Jennifer Mathews

Oh, there will always be bad actors. It's not AI doing it's the people behind the use of the AI. That's just been taken to a whole new level. But I'll tell you this: if somebody copied my website and they beat me in rankings, then there's something I'm doing wrong. It's not just them. Sure, shame on them for getting into the first position for everything, but what did they do that I didn't do? That gets down to companies needing to pay attention to SEO.

If somebody can come in and scrape your site—if Nordstrom were completely copied one for one with AI-written content, and somebody did a better job than Nordstrom and outranked them, and it's an affiliate site that Nordstrom now has to pay to sell their products on—then shame on Nordstrom for not having a good SEO team that knows what they're doing. Scrape the site if you want, create a copy, but if that other site is outranking you, the original site needs to get its stuff together.

### [38:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=2308s) - Kirupa

Yeah, that's very reasonable. You mentioned that a lot of people in the SEO industry aren't doing it for the right reasons—they're bad actors and scammers and things like that. So let's say I'm a company trying to find a good SEO consultant. You're busy, so I can't just say, let me talk to Jen and see if she's available. What should I look out for? What should people look out for when they're trying to hire a high-quality SEO person to help them?

### [38:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=2334s) - Jennifer Mathews

Yeah, I mean it's funny because I, you know one of the common denominators- and you'll you'll find these like, here's the checklist, right one is: if they say they have a relationship with Google, don't do that. I've seen on LinkedIn some bad seos will actually say they work for Google, which they don't right. They'll be like Google's my employer and it's like: yeah, I mean, that's really bad stuff. I mean anyone should hopefully be able to. So any affiliation with Google?

I've even seen seos used to work as the paid search account managers, right, which don't even really know paid search all that well, they're there, they, I mean they come off the street. They don't have a lot of experience. Some of the ones that been there five, 10 years really really know their stuff, and I' I've known a few that have gone up through the rankings and they, you know, are directors of teams at at Google. But, anyway. So there, oh my Google pixel is like: what do you want? Use that between that and Alexa, this one's named a different name. So, things start. What do you want, but anyways.

So what was I saying? Yeah, my Alex. A lot of these individuals would be saying that they're actually paid search at. You know, and oh yeah, that's where I was at. Yeah, so that's one thing to look for if they have any affiliate. Now I have relationships with the devil team of Google. That still does not. So I don't know if you've seen the SEO goddess homepage, but Martin split and I had a conversation that Google actually did the whole like, recorded the whole conversation and posted on their website.

You know, I don't even say I have a relationship with them because I mean, and even then, that's the devil team. They don't even John Mueller, he's devil, he doesn't. He kind of knows Google and he can give you some answers, but he's still broad. He can't give you like exactly. You know, somebody goes to him and says: why is it my website ranking? He's like, well, here's your checklist, right, go through it. Which is everybody? But yeah, so nobody should have a relationship to Google. That's number one and that should be obvious.

But it's not always if anyone recommends- and but I've had here's the thing is I've had business owners recommend spamming stuff. So I would say, if any SEO recommends something that is going to trick Google and get your rankings quickly. But I've been in conversations as a consultant where business owners will be like you know, oh, our design team did these beautiful pages and doesn't have a lot of text on the page. So can't we just put our keywords in the alt text of all the images? Or why can't we just do, you know, same color text on the same color backround into 20, 2023?

They have actually said those things to me. And no, that's tricking the search engines, right? So, my answer is: you know, if it's an image heavy page and it's doing and it is what's best for the user and giving them what they want, then just leave it alone and let's see if Google ranks. And if not, let's, maybe reach, do some reach out, you know Outreach- and get some links, link building done to it. Or let's write some blog posts with that, have content that talk about the page and then send people there, right, let's not just money up but with a bunch of text, just because you need it.

So, it's always what's best for the user. So, if they're not- I guess that's what it boils down to- is you know, if they're not doing what's best for the user and giving you the answers. That gives a good user experience and if they want a trick, those are the easy ones. If something sounds fishy, don't go for it. But, like I said, I've had business owners that are like I want you to do this and I'm like I'm not gonna. That's just not how I roll, right. Yeah, I just don't do things that way. I do for my own sites to test thing.

I totally do black hat stuff just to see if I can get away with it. But that's my own testing websites and if it fails I just go on and create a new one.

### [43:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=2588s) - Kirupa

So you mentioned that there's no real get-rich-quick scheme here, and probably no real rank-quickly solution either. What's the average time frame someone should expect when they engage with a high-quality SEO person before they start seeing results showing up in Google?

### [43:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=2606s) - Jennifer Mathews

You'll see results right away, or you should. If you've created a page and it isn't showing up right away, something's wrong. In fact, that happened at GitHub. They created a “What Is Git?” series of pages, and before I started, a consultant helped them. It was brilliant. The consultant did a great job, working with the teams to write really good-quality content. The downside was that they didn't think to link to the page, so it was an orphan page and wasn't ranking. They said, “It's been a month and a half. How come it's not ranking?” You should see something.

If it's not on the fifth or sixth page, it should still be somewhere. If you're not seeing anything, that's bad. You should see something the day it's launched, or at least two or three days after. You have to remember what SEOs try to remind people: there's crawling, indexing, and ranking. First is crawling. You should see that it was crawled. If it wasn't crawled, something's wrong, and you have to go back to the drawing board. If it's crawled but not indexed, why isn't Google indexing it? What's going on? You have to figure it out, and it's usually a technical thing.

That's where the whole left-brain development background I have comes in handy. Or go to your engineering team and say, “It's crawled but not indexed. What's going on here? Help me understand.” If it's crawled and indexed but not ranked, something is seriously wrong. What did you do? It should rank somewhere, even if it's on the hundredth page, literally immediately. Now, there is an algorithm or patent—I don't know if Google named it this—called rank transition. I don't know if you've seen me share that article. I wrote it years ago and reference it often in every job I have and whenever I work with clients.

If you Google “rank transition,” there isn't just my article; several articles are written about it. There's a Google patent that describes it, and it's meant to fight spammers. A spammer can see results right away, as they should, and asks, “Where am I ranking?” This is meant to fight spammers who respond to those immediate results. They launch a page. Two days later, they're like, “I'm on the fifth page for this thing, so I'm going to make changes to get higher.” They move to the fourth page, so they make more changes. Every two or three days, they're constantly making adjustments.

They'll be on the first page, then the next day on the third page, wonder what's going on, and keep making changes. Rank transition operates for 90 days. That's why SEOs say you won't see settled results for 90 days. It literally gives and then randomizes your position for a period of 90 days. You launch your page and content, and Google says, “Here you are.” Let's say you get the fifth position because it's a new page, or you did great against your competition. They put you in the fifth position. Rank transition basically randomizes your position for 90 days, and every time you update it, the clock starts over.

It's meant to compete with spammers who constantly make changes. If you're constantly making changes, you'll never see good, stable results. You'll be randomized forever. This is what I tell my clients and bosses where I work: We're going to see your position right away, and then we want to let it sit for 90 days. Where we are in 90 days is where we can say, “This is where we're at,” and make adjustments. Sometimes I'll say, “Let's give it a week,” then take the average position because it randomizes. I'll say, “We're probably going to be in a sweet spot around here, but at least we're showing up.”

You have to understand that you're going to get randomized. Let's say it's randomizing on the fifth page, but it's always at the top or bottom of the fifth page. It could just be random, but my best guess is that it's probably on the fifth page. Let's do some tweaks or maybe some link building to give it a little boost and see if we can get it up. But after that, don't touch the page. After 90 days, we can say, “Here it is.” There are some pages where I say to keep testing and playing around.

When I do tests at big companies and have massive chunks of pages and data, I'll say, “Let's do a local test. Let's just do Washington State and these 20 pages in Washington, run this test, and see where it lands.” Then we see where it lands and don't touch that for 90 days. Suppose it lands on the fourth page and is randomizing there. Then I'll say, “Let's do Oregon next, take this to the next level, see where it's at, and keep playing.” But 90 days is a good, safe bet. Wait 90 days and don't touch the page. If you want to keep playing, take that risk and keep rolling.

### [49:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=2947s) - Kirupa

You mentioned link building a number of times so far. What is link building? What is an effective way to do it? I'll mention and give you some context as well. I run a popular forum that goes along with my technical content, so people post content and things like that. Of the new content I get, about 90% is people just writing these articles and putting a link in the middle of them as a way of link building. With spammers, it's a constant battle not to have them be there. Even though I have rel="nofollow" added by default to these things, it doesn't deter them in any way, shape, or form.

That's not going to do anything; Google still looks at the link. But I've seen great examples of link building as well, and I'm curious to know more. I'm pretty sure the audience right now probably has experiences of both kinds: people spamming any kind of comment field or submission form where their content gets onto the page, and some good examples of it. What is a good example of link building?

### [50:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=3009s) - Jennifer Mathews

Yeah, I get the same thing, because on my Vashon-Maury site I have all local businesses, and they're only supposed to be in Vashon. But I get businesses from San Francisco, insurance companies, Ray-Ban sellers, all kinds of random stuff. I get you. It's totally irrelevant. That's bad. The people doing those links are just horrible at it because it has nothing to do with the site. Now, if they were talking about travel, then something in the Seattle area might be relevant enough to Vashon that, yeah, sure, maybe it belongs there. But when it's that far out of left field, no. A link should look as natural as possible.

I used to say no link building at all because I've worked for big brands that didn't need it. Nordstrom had fashion bloggers, influencers, Instagram, Pinterest, social media—people were naturally creating content and linking back to those pages, so we never really had to worry about it. Same with Groupon. Same with UsedCars. Com. But when I was at GitHub, we found that we actually had to do link building. How do you do link building for GitHub? Well, there was an entire DevRel team there, so I started tapping into them a little bit more.

The first thing I did, which was probably really pushing into gray territory, was write an article in Search Engine Journal about using GitHub for SEO. This was tied to that whole 'What Is Git?' content we were talking about that had been created but didn't have an internal link. I actually created an external link in the article with the anchor text 'What Is Git?' and did a little explanation. It was gray, but it was useful content. Search Engine Land never lets me link externally when I write for them. Search Engine Journal is a little more flexible on those things. Plus, it's GitHub. It's a legit, reputable source.

And like I said, that content was very valuable to the user. We ended up putting it in the footer of GitHub. Com, so hopefully it's still there and they didn't take it out, but you can find it either way. That was one of the few times I've really had to do it. Anytime GitHub created new content, there was this whole issue around it, because every time a new subdirectory was created—or a new profile on GitHub, or anything new under GitHub. Com—Google was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not sure if that's legit. So when marketing created content under a GitHub. Com subdirectory, we had to prove those signals.

You had to have a link from the website, and you had to have a link from somewhere else before Google would treat that as legit. So I had to do link building in that case. But my biggest blanket statement is this: if you're going to do link building, do it as naturally as possible. I hate the term because it's always associated with spam—commenting on blog posts, submitting junk to forums, and all that—but relevant links matter. Think about DevRel teams, influencers you already work with, or PR. At a big company I always worked with the PR team and said, hey, if there's a new product launch, what can we do?

When GitHub was launching Copilot, for example, I worked with the PR team to get links back, or at least get the main Copilot page talked about in a natural marketing way. That marketing page was not something I created, and I had nothing to do with making it, but I would talk to those teams and encourage links to happen naturally. Sometimes as an SEO you have to get a little gray, but do it in a relevant way. Don't be spamming. I kind of want to reach out to the SEOs who spam my sites and say, this is not going to get you anywhere, right?

I want to have those conversations, but I know it's not going to work because they're not going to listen to me. They don't think I know what I'm talking about.

### [55:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=3313s) - Kirupa

No, it's tricky, but yes. If you had to give any advice to someone who wants to get into the SEO business and become an SEO specialist, what would your number one piece of advice be?

### [55:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=3329s) - Jennifer Mathews

Don't do it. I've actually had people ask me that often they're like: I want to do what you do and I'm like: okay, why, first of all, why, why do you want to do this, if their answer is: I want to make money? This is not a way to make money. SEO is not. I mean, yeah, you might make good money, as opposed to, like, I went from working in pet stores to working- and I actually was.

I went from a shoe store making the 30000 a year to going to work for that agency, at 30000 a year, but I was making the same amount of money as I was managing a Shoe Pavilion. So, and it was the same hours. In fact, it was more hours. You know, I worked till late at night. So, the thing is that se is good to have as a skill? I mean, if you're passionate about it, I'm passionate about it. I'm odd, it's an odd thing, and those of us who, for some weird reason, we like a CH, I like a challenge, I like, the rules are constantly changing.

I mean, I'm in this 26 years and it's so different from where it was in the beginning. Yeah, I'm doing the same thing, and I worked for other companies, but, the landscape constantly changes and that's what I love about it,. But you know, make sure if you're going to do it, get into it for the right reasons. Understand, here's the thing that I wish I had known when I started this career. I had career goal aspirations to work for a big Corporation and to be a director in a big Corporation someday, and 26 years later, I know I have really good experience.

I have managed teams, I know strategy, I could be a director title,. But companies just don't hire directors of SEO and when they do, I don't think they quite understand what they're wanting from those directors. And so, yeah, if you want to have career aspirations to someday be like a VP of growth, SEO is not the path to go. You can start an SEO, but if you're in SEO, look to other ways, like a product manager, product marketing, project manager, growth is a good place to go because there's a lot of VPS of growth. That's a title that's coming through,. But learn other aspects of marketing. Learn email marketing.

Learn nurturing programs. If you're in B2B, learn product marketing. Know how to manage a project, know how to work with people, and then you can grow in your career. But SEO is not a place to grow in your career. It's a good place to make money. You want to make money. You want to be a consultant. You want to make lots of money. You can make lots of money as a consultant, if you're doing it legit, and a lot of people have had very lucrative, amazing careers that do consulting or start their own agency or went from agency to working in house.

So there are a few VP roles, because I have posted on LinkedIn that there's just no directors of SEO and no VPS of SEO. And then I get bombarded with a few that say, but I'm a VP and I'm like, yeah, at an agency or, you know, at a startup, yeah, but Enterprise, big corporations just don't hire. Yeah, the GitHub didn't backfill my position. There's no SEO work. I don't think there is. I think there might be.

I think that one point I saw they were hiring a strategist, that's, you know, but I was a manager, so they, I think they might have somebody underneath, like that level, but no, they just don't have. And I was an individual contributor at GitHub. There was not a big old team, right. So, but yeah, I mean it's just get into it for the right reasons. And if you're getting into SEO, the way to start is to you know. Circling back to what we talked about in the beginning, learn the content aspects of it. Usability is big, like understand what makes a good user experience.

If you understand that, and then on the technical side, you should know technical side, you don't have to be a technical expert. There are technical seos. There's companies that are hiring specifically technical seos now, which I'm glad they're doing that, that work with Engineers. So if you have like an engineering background, you want to get into SEO, then go for it. But, and be specific. But you should, if, even if you're doing content, you should know enough, right to like know what a meta take is.

There's an argument I get into and this drives me nuts: if you can know that a there's a title and description, the title is not a meta tag, right, it's an element tag, and people and I got people arguing to me no, and I believe please do not call yourself an SEO if you do not know the difference between what a meta tag is, what metadata is and anything. There's metadata on images, right, so you have to understand what that is versus yeah. So yeah, well.

### [1:00:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=3637s) - Kirupa

Jen, it was fantastic chatting with you. If people want to learn more about you, where should they go? I'll make sure the links are in the description as well, but I also just want to hear from you directly.

### [1:00:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=3646s) - Jennifer Mathews

I appreciate it. Yes, SEOgoddess. Com has all of my information. I do consulting here and there, and I love a good challenge. I'm a mentor too, and I don't charge anything for mentoring. I do charge for consulting. Just reach out to me there. I have a Calendly link because I used to have a form and got spammed like crazy, so now there's just a Calendly link. If you would like to talk to me, schedule time with me. We'll have 30 minutes and just talk.

### [1:01:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=3682s) - Kirupa

Yeah, perfect. Jen, thanks again, and we'll catch up again soon.

### [1:01:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d56t5NFf_A&t=3684s) - Jennifer Mathews

Yeah, thank you so much.


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