one of the most competitive pieces of real estate is the Google search box and the results it provides being the top for popular keywords is a difference between having a successful business and well not let's enter the world of search engine optimization or SEO for short to go into details of what a good SEO specialist does what to look out for when hiring a specialist what is SEO in the first place and a whole lot more I talked to one of the world's foremost experts in this area G Matthews this 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 were

you know recording I don't know when I started following your content but it feels like I've always seen your helpful information on LinkedIn every time I would sign in so thanks again for taking the time kind of share this broadly with all of us and to talk a little bit more about yourself and so the first question I like to ask always is how do you get started in Tech how do you get started with SEO in your case yeah yeah so I'm

going to go back to the beginning and and this is going to kind of date myself a little bit but uh I'm not interviewing so I'm okay with it um but yeah I was I grew up in the 80s so uh my we had one computer in the house uh for the entire family my brother ended up being um getting his PhD in aerospace engineering so he is the tech Guru guy and I used to tag along as he and and his friend and and mostly just him just hack at other websites he would be in there coding doing cool things he had two synthesizers set up with the computer it would do all this cool stuff um and eventually he got me a coding book and I was an artist um to

begin with so that's how it kind of translates to SEO you got to be a little bit a left brain and you got to be a little bit of right brain and um so so yeah I was an artist I would paint did sculpture did all sorts of thing all through growing up and then also having that techie influence with my brother um translating to later in life I got into web design and development in the late 90s and started doing it just for as a freelancer for local businesses I learned how to I like a challenge and uh I wanted those business to be like Amazon so I learned how to now you can create a website with WordPress or something else and you can install a

plugin like wo Commerce and you have your shopping cart back then it was not as easy so I actually learned how to code using CGI and Pearl and work with authorized.net and work with the local banks with their merchants and their merchant accounts and how to process credit cards securely well I don't know if it was very secure but um anyways yeah so that's where I started is just developing websites and I thought it was just developing websites I didn't realize how intricate I was getting uh when those websites were built the clients were telling me that it's great that you built this for me Jen but nobody's coming to it and then and of course they don't have any money because they're these small mom

and pop shops and so I started figuring out how can you get free traffic to a site and SEO was the biggest one and it was so easy back then you basically put in your titles descriptions metatags you put in your keywords that you felt that they should rank for and you pretty much got rankings right away uh then it got a little more complicated um where you had to have the keyword mentioned in the page and we were doing things like white text on white background and then flash came into play So yeah so that's where I first got influenced I eventually um I did work for my brother at his tech company then ended up not doing well I call it the part of the

dogon era um but I learned quite a lot about web design and development I did QA testing anything that they were willing to let me do was an intern I um just absorbed as much as I could and so I went from there to eventually working for a um agency that did just SEO and I thought how cool because that seemed to be my passion just that challenge of trying to get rankings especially when Google came into play and Chang the game completely and so that's how I got into it and I started working for the agency there were so was 2004 and there were only um how many we have like maybe 9 12 people in the office when we started and they had like several hundred clients

that they were trying to do optim you know optimize for anything from really small to very big clients um some of the claim to fames is we got um rankings for a client for flowers um we got a rank Kings for trophies was our biggest one this company out of uh out of Redmond no isqua he was in isqua and then he end up opening like a second store and had three other websites he that we optimize for for him and um he grew his business considerably just from that so and then how I got into Enterprise from there I went from that agency in 2006 to classmates.com if anyone's old enough remembers that and then I remember ad all the time this little black and white

said you might know this person I'm like maybe you know let me click it yeah yeah they're still around I think they probably would have survived if they hadn't uh charged because they charged to just even view somebody's picture on their profile whereas you know Myspace and and then Facebook came in and just knocked everybody out because everything was free whereas classmates was yeah charging for all of that so um but there's a couple projects I launched while I was there that are still live today so I'm kind of proud of that that they held on to them um oh Kitty love it yeah when I'm not in the office it's pretty much a zoo here yeah

oh really I I'm a big animal lover so anytime I see him I'm like uh yeah

totally distracted we just have two cats and they're both very friendly and actually let him in the office as well so find a spot to actually you know take a nap on

so we're live [Laughter] here love that they always know when you're busy yeah or like people who don't like them yeah yeah exactly exactly but this is actually really you know interesting because I I remember like I got into web design and development around like late 1990s as well especially like the old geoc cities days and before Google know and like every search be like a submit a site link so they'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 and be like I think was like lyos alav Vista yaho and all these things had like a submit a site Buton I'm like this is fantastic

Google had it initially as well then they removed it I'm like wait how am I going to find my stuff if I can't submit MIT the site to it you know and there was like all those fun moments there but going back to when he first started with web design I always you know because I love developer tools and design tools and and things like that what what tools did he use back when you were doing your

web development work oh gosh I think I'm trying to remember I originally my brother got me on to front page yep um so he actually convinced my parents this voice this when I was really starting out um and I was trying to be on my own I had I was a young mom a single mom with young kids um 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 uh 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 uh I had a power Mac and then to PC was so hard um but in the long run was easier to develop uh yeah but I know I just had like a text editor yeah and then um got front page but I didn't like it because it threw in all that extra code yeah but um 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

um products um 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 uh we talk about salaries too my first job at the agency was 30,000 a year and then about when I went to Enterprise that was better pay but um 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 um internal this is really getting into it um we didn't have a

customer management system they were using files and paper paper files you know old school and so I had um we had a receptionist at the front desk and I I created an access database and I said plug in all this information into this database and then um I developed with ASP not done net and everybody's got the 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 no that's fantastic you know I always like to do this because you know I've been doing this since 1998 and a lot of the audience here of course is also very technical in so many ways and so for me like I always love get like geeking Out On Tools because for the most part I feel like people today just don't realize how good we had it back then in terms of the tools that we had because on one hand they're like oh I need to create a new website let me now spend like you know an unreasonable amount of time learning like a framework learning a build tool doing like you know creating a new problem like Hello World back then was

literally an HTML page you typed in hello world it could have been notepad could have been a way see way you get editor and today you're still creating hello world but the page is like 300 kilobytes because there a bundle there like you're using reactor yeah I love these Frameworks it's one of the things where if you don't know the fundamentals of how you created sites back then and like what is HTML CSS and JavaScript you're missing out on so much of the kitchen Sync here because you think that this is the final solution and so you always just like to you know go back and see like yeah things were easier you had an FTP server you just drag and drop a file it would work whereas today it's

like do I have a cloud provider what is my authentication profile and it's you know 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 for entry and experimentation is just so high back then I had no idea I used front page Express in free with the browser I no IDE what I was doing then I moved to the full front page you convinc my parents to buy me front page because I wanted be able to do frames and ey frames which I had no idea all this HTML you know front page Express didn't allow you to do iframes but front page did I'm

like oh this is the magical tool that only a dove tool you know can provide and and that kind of like naivity 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 this is like I'm done I'm going to take a break now and you know do something else so it's always a go back and talk about this stuff yeah

well and I think having that background I almost sometimes surprise myself and also appreciate my background in some cases because working so cut to me working it so I worked at um ADP usec cars.com and then so I went from classmates to there I've worked at Nordstrom's Groupon um GitHub was the toughest site but I learned a lot especially since it's developer driven the whole thing um and there's brilliant brilliant people de developers that work there that are willing to work with you on things um so I learned a lot and but that background really helped me um because when we got with ASP we started to be able to use include files right and then you're dealing with databases so the database we had internally with all of the

products and me I would have the include file where I'd have the top and the bottom and then then um would code per page and use parameters to define the page and then we go to you know Apache to where it rewrites URLs people don't understand that that's basically what that is right and and then there's the whole debate between um subdomain versus um subdirectory and um I know I used to battle with Engineers over when a proxy could be was started coming into place where you could rewrite the URL like the entire domain right so um I started I actually wrote um on my own personal blog that was originally geoc cities and I've heard seos have complained about my URL of my very personal blog I can't

even tell it's like what is it's on blog spot so it was originally Geo cities and then they turn it into blogs and so it's like search marketing goddess or something like that dot and I've never changed it it's always been there since the like early 2000s but I wrote a post on there because I wrote how to do a proxy now it's just push button like you're saying like I used to have to explain to Engineers like you can put okay we're a net shop right we're a Windows on Windows servers on Windows machines now Cloud changes that a little bit but um and then the WordPress and we have our own servers this with like use cars.com the prime example right on our

own servers in the office there was somebody who managed the servers and then we want to have a WordPress site they say we can't do that well we want to host it somewhere else because WordPress is not a Microsoft hosted thing right so um but we have to have a host for it and so it's in a completely different space and I'm like no you can use a proxy rewrite to have it be in a subdirectory and they're like no no no we can't do this and so I learned how to do it I showed them how it could be done um and so that's why I wrote the blog post on it and then that I became actually a consultant for others that like how to

be able to do but now like I go into an um a company like GitHub they have a WordPress although it's on a completely different domain um maybe they're not a good example but Nordstrom's blog is on WordPress and they have a different system um that the site's on right but because of proxy you can write what ever you want go um the the world so that like where it used to be complicated but I know the technicality of because of the things that I've been through throughout the years that my point um is that it helps me understand and I can have those conversations with engineers and be like I know I know what an include file is I know how databases connect to the websites and you can

create millions of pages and really only be editing one right and then using yeah the rewrites to create these unique and a lot of times they'll be like we can't change the URLs or we don't know we have no control over what the URLs I'm like yes you do you just write the URLs you just decide what they are and Apache rewrites is what makes that happen or you know now there's new ways of that technology to happen but um but yeah having that experience and I feel for the seos today that are getting in that just have two or three years of experience and a lot of them get into content and they don't have technical understanding and then they want to get into the complex Enterprise

world or they have they work for an agency that has Enterprise clients and the Enterprise clients are frustrated because they don't understand and the seos are frustrated because they don't understand and um yeah I I feel for them which is why I try to write the content I

write that's so true because Enterprises often have Legacy systems that are 10 15 20 years old and they just can't change it even they wanted to because of backwards compatibility they might have customers who just aren't techsavvy enough to know that the euro is changed and things like that but no it's a it's always a fun topic because when we look at Salesforce this will often be a common topic as well it's like where are the URLs the way they are why can we change them why is the page then the way these things are it's because you know the customers we have just can't you know they have Integrations with Legacy systems that require a specific hardcoded path and that person might have built system probably isn't doing

that anymore and no one knows how that is built so it's basically just a server in some closet that everyone hopes that nothing ever happens to cause it to go offline because at this point it's all just mystery on how it all works yeah especially Salesforce right because a lot of that stuff's internal they're pulling it in and especially Legacy I mean if they're newer they're going into the cloud so that makes it a little bit easier going forward but those Legacy clients that yeah they can't change no and also wonder like if I am starting out today in let's say SC web development and I want to learn all the things you just described where would I even begin like how would you even get

started you know like you basically have to you have to essentially nowadays hunt for a web server that doesn't provide a fullon CMS and actually allows you to get like raw FTP access and then you need to have like Apache server site included and Apache enabled which isn't nobody even does that anymore yeah

I don't know if the browsers would even know what that is um yeah so I actually did start well now I get to plug my little site so I started a um 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 um and I try to put as much as my knowledge as possible the whole point of it is um 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 um but also explain um why things are the way they are are you know especially with Google Google changes the roles all the time um 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 and say go look at my website and they took that away um 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 is.com can find that website Google can find that website um very very efficiently if um that website's linked from another website which is why seos promote link building um then they can find it even faster and um so there's no reason to do the submitt they also have in GSC if you um 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 um but there's also um 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 um

you know scammers that are creating directories that you can submit to them um 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 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 um 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 um recent example Google said for the last several years to um 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 um 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 um 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 or yeah I I think another recent example that came about in this area is the I know there was like all this like you know interest in like Corvette vitals and increasing your page performance and making sure the performance of your site is really high and then I see like mixed answers where you know actually we may not you know

penalize you if your performance isn't all that great because it turns out certain sites just cannot be performant you know is how true is that um I think you know they change direction all the time you know so like I said I I think as far as web performance I hate to say it depends because I hate that seos use that word um but it does depend on the site so I've seen sites that that are slow that do okay I've also seen sles sites that are slow and not do okay um is it because they're slow or is there something else that's playing into that now if you've got a I mean it's bad user experience right exactly um so uh when it comes to that and there's other

factors too that um that this test can so this is what I use as a gauge right um there's seos will say that Google can see your con like see the way they're interacting on your site and know that users the balce rate blah blah blah I don't think I mean they can because they have GA and there's I'm skeptical whether they use that data or not um and they say they don't and they really shouldn't um because it's not I think that's gaming the system right um about you know taking advantage more than other search engines would be able to so um but they do have Gs or the data that you see in GSC right so they can see what's going on on the search results

right so somebody clicks um and this is getting back to the speed test thing right so um or the speed the load time somebody sees a bunch of results right so they're typing in their keyword they're trying to find something they see the paid stuff first they're like e I'm not gonna you know this stuff is crap I don't like landing pages I don't want to be marketed to they're going to go straight to the Natural results right I mean that's what I do so they go to the first result they click on it and it's not loading whether it's their connection or the site's connection whatever it is but it's taking a long time to load you think they're going to sit there and

wait they're not they're going to close that out and they're going to go to the next result now Google sees that they're clicking the first result and then quickly clicking the second result right and so that's the data so that's what I tell seos it's not that or people that ask me that question it's so and it's another thing is like usability with the page are they getting what they're looking for very quickly so let's say the page loads very quickly but um it doesn't give them it doesn't answer the question maybe it's just got like a bunch of AI crappy content which we could I just open a can of wordss right let's say it's got a bunch of just crappy written content like maybe it was

written by a human but they're not you know it's all for SEO and they just see a bunch of the same keyword over and over and over again are they getting what they want no so they're going to leave and they're going to go to the next result and Google sees that and yes I will without a doubt say that that is a ranking Factor so whether it's page load or usability or whatever and that's where we get into we talk about bounce rate I don't see they I don't think they see the bounce rate on ngga maybe they do but um they definitely see the clicks yeah that a lot of sense yeah

because when you look at single page apps for example they're but but they just can't be fast because the having the sheer app bundle they're much larger but then going back let's say your sales SC as example it's that you're looking for something very specific there is no competition for it and if you're going to like your particular company's you know page where people can like view their inventory and buy things they're not going to click away from something else because it takes a long time to load they have to be there because there is no alternative to this exactly in those cases you know does it make sense for you to optimize at a certain level of course a technology person yes the best user experience is for things to be

fast and things like that but from an you know from an end result point of view like if you just you know ignore the time Factor it doesn't really matter because you have no alternative there's no competition here whereas if space and that data that makes a lot of sense especially you know the part I really didn't think about but clearly is you know obvious in hindsight after you mentioned it is that Google does know like what you click on and the time between when you click on the next Link in that same page there's definitely a strong indication that maybe what you're looking for wasn't quite there and that's completely independent of whether Google analytics or any other kind of Beacon that sends a signal to Google

that you're spending x amount of time on

these Pages yeah well I'll give you an example I me what exactly what you're saying is um so I live on an island and I have a propane tank that P you know Powers a lot of my heat and um my water hot water my ther like a lot of things in the house right so my cooking everything and it I have a leak I just discovered yesterday and so I was out right so I was out of propane after like four months ago or four weeks ago four months four weeks ago I loaded it right and it should have gone that quickly and I have aeras as a C I'm amas customer so I go um to the amag gas website first of all I Google because I don't know where

the login is right and I just want to quickly find it so I go to Google and I say am meras login and then I see the results was the first thing there I click on it that site is so slow it took forever to load but I'm an amas customer I can't contact anyone else because I have a contract with them there there is no competition so I have to sit there and wait so yeah 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 right because they're crawling and they're collecting that data but you know for that keyword um clearly I'm a customer I'm go in there and I'm sitting there and

waiting so that is always going to be the first results regardless of how slow that D site is yeah yeah but that's that's why you got to say it depends right depends depends on the competition depends on the site depends on the keyword they're searching for what the user intent is yeah so to to make a blanket statement and say paid speed affects rankings I mean yeah I mean when I'm talking to my bosses and and you know our sit's really slow as a as a blanked statement I will say look we need to speed some things up right but um yeah there's times you don't really have to worry about it too

much to be honest yeah yep so you mentioned AI earlier I'm sure yeah I open that the latest drama around you know various like you know we've seen a little bit of it before but there's like a very popular post that came out recently where someone literally just looked at the keywords of their competitor used AI to create all the pages needed for that published it and showed the results of here's how much traffic they receive without doing really much work as a human being and then we also saw the Fallout where Google quickly derank them and remove them from all these results so you know do are going to see more and more of these things where it's going to be a you know just like before where we said

like many people in the SEO industry aren't doing things in good faith this to me is another example of that are we going to have to add yet one more signal on what we look out for when we're looking at like good versus bad SEO yeah

I mean that's been around for a while right because you had sites like text broker so I've been in this debate because they're like AI is going to ruin content I'm like really because you already have I don't know if you've ever used Tex broker I use it religiously but you have to and it's the same thing with AI you have to so text worker is a site you can go to and it's a crowdsourcing it's humans writing content um although AI has changed the game on that I'm pretty sure those humans are using AI to write now um but it's people from all over the world if they speak English they can write and they may not and I used it for I have a Vashon dm.com site

that I use for the island that gives provides information and some of the people in the island have called me out for it but I have used text broker to write some content it's 20 bucks for I think um like 900 words so it's a nice easy write a quick article I The Prompt excuse me um The Prompt was um basically so you put it out there you say I need this content and the more information you provide to the person who's writing the better quality it'll be so I put it out there hey I need an article on things to do around Bashon Island well they can and I would like find a few references you know um some travel sites or whatever that have the top 10 things

to do on the island I would mention and say go here read about it and then write me a list right and um some of the stuff they don't get quite right because they're not from the island but AI would do the same thing right so to say that um I'm an AI proponent so I will take this argument to you know to the no end um for people who are against AI in fact my own son is against Ai and we get in these debates and he's 26 years old um you'd think a younger person wouldn't be fighting with the older person about it you know you think it'd be the other way around that um he would be in support and I'd be like oh

I'd be the kenon um but no it's been around forever I mean it just it's not AI specifically I mean ai's been around forever it's just getting smart and smarter and there's cooler uses for it right um but uh yeah so te text work is an example I use um you still have to the more specific you write um your prompt the better content's going to be but it's a human doing it same thing with AI the more specific your prompt the better it's going to be so um I will give an example of something I really absolutely love is that Amazon um I was shopping for Black Friday and I noticed that you know where they have the reviews I always look at reviews before

I make a purchase like what are people saying you can kind of tell what are the fake reviews which ones are the real ones um I always go to the negative because those ones are always going to be real for sure and then see if they complain about customer service like whatever it's a good product I don't care if they're gonna you know or somebody's like I it wasn't the right size I had to return it like whatever that's your own problem but at least they had you know otherwise the product's good right so you get some good honest stuff out of there um so so Amazon is actually taking um they used to do like the tag and I think they still have it on there the tag

what's mentioned most right so easy to assemble like if somebody always says that or um was broken in a box when I got it like if that's something that's repeated over and over again they'll have that at the top right which they're using technology to surface that well now they're using kind of the next step of that is they're creating an aid driven content paragraph above those reviews and saying most people say this and and it's in a cohesive easy to understand paragraph and I really appreciate that as a user I also know it's Aid driven but for SEO purposes if more Ecom sites can do that they're getting unique content on the page it's beneficial to the user because they're summarizing what most people are saying

in the in the review so they don't have to dig through it they're getting converted faster win-win for everybody right so there's a good positive use of AI um but but I'll I'll find more and I'll preach the positive of AI to no end it just needs to be curved it needs to be curved it needs to be controlled and um it can be bad but so can a lot of SEO could be bad too right

yep no like you mentioned like the content farming sites have been there forever where just you know right about and you can spot them from a mile away as well just like bulleted list no images no you know just you see ads everywhere like yeah I'm pretty pretty sure this is not exactly the the most authoritative Source on it but I I I did click on it so kudos to them they managed to figure out how to trick you know a semis skeptical person of like being wary of like scammy links to be able to use it so yeah it is a it's a constant battle where whatever techniques we figure out right now the Bad actors will evolve so we need to

always keep oh there will always be yeah and it's not AI doing it it's the people that are behind the the use of the AI but that's always yeah that's just been just to a whole new level but I'll tell you this if uh if somebody copied my website and they beat me in rankings there's something that I'm doing wrong yeah it's not them yeah sure you know oh crap you know shame on them for getting in the first position for everything well what did they do that I didn't do that they're getting rank better rankings and that's um you know that gets down to like companies need to be paying attention to SEO if somebody can come in and scrub your site if Nordstroms were to be completely copied

one for one an AI written content and somebody did a better job than Nordstroms and they outre them and it's an affiliate site that Nordstrom now has to pay to sell their products you know shame on Nordstrom for not having a good SEO team to know what they're doing to to not allow not it's so wet scrub the site go ahead scrub the site create a copy but you know if you're outranking that other site that that other site needs to get their um snot together

yeah that's very reasonable so you mentioned that you know a lot of people in the SEO industry are are you know aren't doing it for the right reasons they are Bad actors and scammers and things like that so let's say I'm a let's say I'm a company and I'm trying to find a good SEO consultant you know and you're busy you know the person were like let me talk to Jen and See's available you know you're busy what should I look out for what should they look out for when trying to hire a high quality a CEO person to help

them um 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 I mean anyone should hopefully be able to so any affiliation with Google um 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 um teams at at Google but um anyway so there oh my my Google pixel is like what do you want um use that between that and um Alexa this one's named a different name so um things start what do you want um but anyways so what was I saying um 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 um yeah so that's one thing to look for if they have any affiliate now I um 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 um did the whole like recorded the whole conversation and posted on their website um you know I don't even say I have a relationship with them because I 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 um but yeah so

nobody should have a relationship to Google that's number one and that should be obvious but um it's not always um 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 um 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 um and no that's tricking the search engines right so um 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 um 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 um let's not just money up but with a bunch of text just because you need it so uh 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 um 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 so you mentioned you know just like there's not as a get-rich quick scheme there's probably no such thing as like rank quickly kind of a solution as well so what is the average time frame someone should expect when they engage with a highquality SEO individual to start seeing results showing up in Google

well you'll see results right away right you should um if youve create a page and that page isn't showing up right away then something's wrong in fact that happened at GitHub they created a um what is git series of pages and uh before I started the consultant helped them and it was brilliant the consultant did a great job he worked with the teams to write really good quality content um went on the site uh the downside to it was they didn't think to link to the page so it was an orphan page and so it wasn't ranking um and they said oh at this point it's been you know a month and a half how come it's not ranking you should see something you should see

something if it's on if it's not on the fifth sixth page down it it should be something right but if you're not seeing anything um that's bad so but you see like the day that it's launch you should see something um or at least two or three days after uh if um and then you have to remember that there's this is that seos try to remind people you know there's there's crawling indexing and ranking right so first is crawling um if you're not seeing anything right you should see it crawled if it's not crawled um then something's wrong right so you got to go back to the drawing board if it's crawled um but not indexed then why isn't Google indexing it what is going on so you got to figure out

what's and it's usually a technical thing right so this is where techno that whole like left brain development background that I have really comes into handy um or go to your engineering team and be like hey it's crawled but not index like what's going on here help me understand um crawled indexed and not ranked um something seriously wrong right what did you do it should rank if it's not on the hundredth page like should be somewhere literally immediately now there is a um algorithm or patent um I don't know if Google named it this but rank transition I don't know if you've seen me share that article I wrote it years ago uh I reference it often in every job I have every time I'm working with clients um

but if you if you Google the word rank transition there's not just my article there's several articles written about it there's a Google Patent that says and this is to fight the spammers right so what a spammer will do because you can see results right away you should um they'll say okay where am I ranking um they launched a page two days later they're like okay I'm on the fifth page so for this thing so I'm G to make changes and try to get up higher uh okay I move to the fourth page so I'm G to make and so like every two three days they're constantly making adjustments um and they'll be like Oh I'm on the first page I wait the next day I'm on the third page like what's

going on and keep making changes so what um rank transition does for a period of 90 days that's is why SEO say you won't see results for 90 days it's literally for a period of 90 days rank transition gives you your position so this is where you're going to be you launch your page your content Google says okay here you are let's say you get to be in the fifth position because it's a new page or like you did great your competition we're going to put you in the fifth position that's where you're holding now rank POS or rank transition basically randomizes your position for 90 days and every time you do an update it starts the clock over again so it basically is to compete with the

spammers that they're like constantly Mak so if you're constantly making changes you're never going to see good good results you're going to be randomized forever but if you so this is what I tell um my clients and bosses where I work oh love um this is what I tell them is we're gonna see your position right away and then we just want to let it sit for 90 days and then where we are in 90 days we can say this is where we're at and we could make adjustments there are times where um I will say let's give it like a week and then I'll take kind of the average position because it randomizes I'll be like we're got to probably going to be in a sweet saw in

here but at least we're showing up we can probably make some adjustments but you just have to understand that you are going to get randomized so let's say it's randomizing on the fifth page but it's always like the top or bottom of fifth page well I would I my best guess it could just be random right but my best guess is it's probably on the fifth page so let's do some tweaks or maybe we could do some link building to just sort of like give it a little boost and see if we can get it up but after that night but don't touch the page right um and so then after that 90 days being like here it is so there's some pages I say keep

testing playing around or um when I do tests at big companies and you have masses of chunks of pages and data to work with I'll say let's do like local let's just do Washington State and let's do these 20 pages in Washington state and do this test and then see where it lands and then um okay we see where it lands and don't touch that for 90 days and's be like okay it landed on let's say the fourth page right and it's like randomizing then I'll say let's do Oregon next and let's take this but let's go the next level and see um where it's at and just kind of keep playing but yeah but 90 days is really um it's a good safe bet wait till 90 days don't

touch the page or you know if you want to keep playing take that that risk keep

roll you mentioned link building you know a few you know number of times so far what is link building what is an effective way to do it and I'll mention and I give you some context as well I run a popular Forum that goes along with my with my no technical content so people post content and things like that 90% of some of the new content I get is people just writing these articles and putting a link in the middle of it as a way of Link building and yeah spammers you know it's a constant you know battle to not have them be there and even though I have like the real no Follow by default added to these things you know it doesn't deter them in any way shape

or form that not gonna do anything anyways Google still looks at it link yeah yeah exactly but I've seen great examples of Link building as well and so I'm almost like kind of curious to know because I'm pretty sure the audience right now they probably have experiences both of my kind where they just see like people spamming any kind of a common field or you know submission form like where their content gets up on the page and they some good examples of it so what is a good example of Link

building yeah um I get the same thing because my vashan Mory I have all local businesses and it's only they're only supposed to be in Bashan and I get businesses from like San Francisco and they're like you know insurance companies or um or the Rayban um business you know like anyways yeah so I get you and it's totally irrelevant no that's bad that's I mean the people are doing those links it's just horrible right because it has nothing to do with it now if they were to talk about travel um and something in the Seattle area might be relevant enough to Vashon to where yeah sure let's throw it on there um but no it's just so out there no it's it should be so a link should

be um look as natural as possible right so uh I used to say no link building because I've worked for big Brands don't need to do any link building right um Nordstrom there's a lot of fashion bloggers a lot of influencers out there Instagram you know social media Pinterest um they're going to be creating content with links back to pages so you don't have to worry about it when the blog post goes up they're going to just like love it up and you know talk about it and link back to it all the time so we never really had to worry about anything same with Groupon right um same thing would happen there usedcars.com same thing would happen there when I was at GitHub uh we were finding that we

actually had to do link building and um how do you do link building for GitHub well there's an entire Deval team for link for group uh sorry GitHub um so I started tapping into them a little bit more the first one I did which was probably really pushing is very gray is I wrote an article arle and search engine journal and I talked about using GitHub for uh using GitHub for or using or SEO and GitHub right so how um and then I did a this is that whole like what is git content that was created and there was no internal link um I actually created an external link and I said what is git and did a little explanation that article Now search Eng Journal is

probably going to take it down um but linked to but it's very of it it was usable content so this was probably my gray area um search engine land does not let me link externally ever um when I write for them search engine Journal is a little bit more flexible on those things um plus it's GitHub right it's a it's a legit you know reputable source so linking to that and like I said that content was very valuable to the user um so it was it was totally I mean I don't know if you if you can find it but um we ended up putting it in the footer of the github.com site so hopefully it's still there they didn't take it out um but you can find it anyway so those are

ways to do it but that's the only time I've really had to do it um anytime GitHub graded new content is a whole thing around that um because every time a new subdirectory was created um or a new profile on GitHub somebody new was creating something a new subdirectory was created and so when we would create content from a marketing perspective we'd put it under a subdirectory under the github.com and Google was like whoa whoa whoa we're not sure if that's legit and so you have to have all of those signals in place so you have to have a link from the website you have to have a link from somewhere else before Google would count that as legit and so I had to do link building in that case but um

yeah my biggest I will give you the blanket statement of if you're going to do link build I hate the word because it is always associated with Spam right commenting on blog posts or submitting to forums that you know whatever with content is not relevant um but link building should be um it should be done as natural as possible right so uh deal teams or if you have influencers that you work with um PR if you're in a big company I always work at the pr team and being like hey um what do you like if there's a new product launch like get was launching co-pilot so I worked with the pr team um to get links back right or at least the main co-pilot page

talked about that the marketing that I had nothing to do with right it wasn't an SEO creative page but I would like talk to them and so just try to encourage links to happen naturally um but sometimes you have to as an SEO this is where I say I get a little gray um but do it in a relevant way don't be spaming so I kind of want to like reach out to those seos that are spamming my sites and be like you know this is not going to get you anywhere right like I want to have those conversations but I know it's not going to work because they're not going to listen to me because they don't think I know what I'm talking about but yeah

no It's Tricky but yes and so if you had to give an ADV any advice for someone who wants to get into the SEO business who wants to become an an SEO specialist what would your number one advice be uh

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 um 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 30,000 a year to going to work for that agency um at 30,000 a year but I was making the same amount of money as I was managing a Shoe Pavilion so um and it was the same hours in fact

it was more hours you know I worked till late at night so um the thing is is that se is good to have as a skill um 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 um 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 um and I worked for other companies but um the the landscape constantly changes and that's what I love about it uh but um 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 um 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 um I have managed teams I know strategy I could be a director title uh but companies just don't hire directors of SEO and um when they do I don't think they quite understand what they're wanting from those directors and so um yeah if you want to have career aspirations to someday be like a VP of growth SEO is not the the path to go you can start an SEO but if you're in SEO um look to other ways like a product

manager product marketing um project manager growth is a good place to go because there's a lot of um VPS of growth that's a title that's coming through um but learn other aspects of marketing learn email marketing learn nurturing programs if you're in B2B um 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 um if you're doing it legit and a lot of people have had very lucrative um amazing careers that do

consulting or start their own agency or went from um agency to working in house uh 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 um that's you know but I was a manager so they 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 um 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 um 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 um there are technical seos there's companies that are hiring specifically technical seos now which I'm glad they're doing that um that work with Engineers so if you um

have like an engineering background you want to get into SEO then um go for it but um 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

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

you directly oh I appreciate it um yeah seot us.com that's got all of my info I do do Consulting here and there um and I love a good challenge um so yeah anyone and I'm Mentor too so and I don't charge anything for mentoring I do charge for Consulting um but yeah just reach out to me there and I have a calendly link because I used to have a form and I got spammed like crazy and so now there's just a calendly link so if you would like to talk to me schedule time with me I yeah it's in there we'll have 30 minutes and let's just talk yeah perfect

Jen thanks again and we'll catch up again soon

yeah thank you so much