Summary

In this episode of The Strategic Expert Show, host Matthew Ashton sits down with SEO professional Zach Blackburn to explore the importance of SEO as a long-term strategy for businesses. Zach brings over a decade of experience, having worked across industries from local brick-and-mortar businesses to large enterprises. Together, they break down the fundamentals of SEO, explaining its key components—on-page, off-page, and technical SEO—and why it’s crucial for organic growth. They dive into common misconceptions, like the belief that SEO is dead or that immediate results should be expected. Zach also highlights the growing role of voice search, the value of quality backlinks, and the future of AI in SEO. This episode provides actionable insights for businesses looking to stay competitive in a constantly evolving digital landscape.

Matthew
Welcome to the strategic Expert show, where we bring real world experience in marketing and sales directly to you. I’m Matthew Ashton. Today we’re going to be discussing SEO, or search engine optimization and why it is a key strategy to implement in your business. Our guest expert today is an SEO professional with over a decade of experience. Throughout his career, he’s worked in diverse industries, everything from local brick and mortar businesses to large scale enterprises, consistently delivering impactful results for his clients through strategic SEO and content marketing. We’re very happy to welcome Zach Blackburn to the show. Zach, welcome.

Zach
Hey, thank you very much. I’m glad to be here.

Matthew
No, no problem. Very, very happy to have you on. SEO is a very important topic to me. Uh, it’s something I encourage all of my clients to do. So let’s kind of jump into it. Like, what is SEO and why is it important for a business to actually consider this in a strategy?

Zach
Oh, most certainly. So SEO is your organic presence on search results, most notably Google. Obviously. That is the, the big dog, the big potato in this area where SEO aligns in the business is just like with anything. You never put all your eggs in one basket. You have your paid campaigns, you have your tv ads, you have your mailers, whatever industry you’re working in, SEO is one of those pieces. This is something I’ve always kind of explained as your website being your suit and collar, kind of a presentation to people and them finding you organically, not only do they have higher probability of converting, they also, uh, interact with your content and interact with you. Knowing that you’re an expert in that given industry, whatever it may be, I.

Matthew
Think that’s a great way of putting it. Uh, I know whenever I’ve talked with, uh, you know, marketing clients, the way I always explain it to people, I said, they’re short and long term. Google Ads, PPC, that world is a very short term, easy way to get, you know, clients and get traffic in, but you have to pay for it where SEO is much more long term. But if you can build it, it ends up being something that lasts for a very long time, if you can do it correctly.

Zach
Fully agree. I’ve always equated it to kind of like grung a garden. Yeah, a little bit to yield the results. But as soon as you do it, it’s essentially free.

Matthew
Yeah. Especially if you really do it really well, you can almost leave it for a little while. I know I had a client that I split ways with probably about eight months ago, and they’re still in that number one. Number two, spot for the keywords, and they haven’t had anybody working on it in eight months. But they’ve been able to maintain that spot as a business, which is incredibly valuable to them because they’re not running ads to be in that number one spot.

Zach
And as soon as you get to a certain pinnacle, I agree with you fully, as soon as you get to a certain point in your marketing strategy, it really works and kind of grinds through and you don’t need to do much maintenance after.

Matthew
Sure. So let’s talk about a couple of key components of SEO. Cause there is multiple types, there’s multiple ways to do this. In particular, you know, on page, off page technical, kind of, kind of run us through some of these and what they are.

Zach
Yeah. So the way I’ve always equated it, I equate SEO into three factors. So there’s on site, offsite and website.

Matthew
Okay.

Zach
Your onsite is the things that your clients can see that’s visible, videos, infographics, whatever the, whatever else you utilize. So it’s something that’s tangible, kind of in their face. The off site is your backlink portfolio. Think of it kind of like your clout online. Okay. How much authority and weight does your website provide to the Internet?

Matthew
Now when you’re saying backlinks, you’re talking about linking to other sites, correct?

Zach
Exactly. That is your. Yes, most certainly it is your authority online. And that’s how Google essentially calculates those numbers is through that backlinking strategy. Then your website is your technical, this is where your website being able to crawl and be indexed properly by search engines and then therefore users is incredibly paramount. So when you’re looking at your website, how is your site structure laid out? How’s the navigation? How is internal linking? All of these things play a major factor into the, your overall performance on your website?

Matthew
Okay, yeah, that’s, that’s really, really key. I’ve certainly come across people where their sites aren’t crawlable or, you know, their robot TXT file is blocking the robots from getting in. And you know that that can create certain problems. I think when they’re trying to rank.

Zach
And load speed, that is a huge one. How fast? We’re in a world filled with add people. It is very important that we get straight to the point quickly. People will bounce away and then you’ll never even convert them.

Matthew
Exactly. The bounce rate’s critical when we’re looking at this. So let’s talk about how SEO has been evolving. These algorithms change all the time. Certain things have evolved and I think it’s funny you bring up backlinks because I’ve seen a lot of people posting lately, oh, link building’s dead. And I’m like, no, it’s not. I really don’t think it is.

Zach
They’ve been saying that for years, actually, that’s been a very common trope in the industry, is that backlinking’s dead. It’s not quantity now, it’s quality. So the way that I actually develop my strategy is following a very similar to what Brian Dean from Backlinko did, where he goes through and provides outreach opportunities to vertical specific websites that are relevant, topical, valuable, have trusted traffic and are not from these link building farms that are made from India or wherever.

Matthew
Yeah, I’ve certainly run into those multiple occasions where I have to go in and actually work through and maybe we could talk about this toxic backlinks, because I’ve had to deal with these a lot lately that I’ve seen a lot of, like russian websites and things like that linking back in. So how does that work and what’s that affect the SEO?

Zach
Yeah, in my professional opinion, that there’s always a natural amount of toxicity you’re going to get because you can never control 100% who links to you. That’s just not the way the Internet works. But if you end up finding. I had a client a while ago who was utilizing a wide variety, they worked in multiple countries and we did an analysis of their entire backlink portfolio and 95% of them were from chinese websites that were non english, that were not valuable and not relevant, had no link authority, things of this nature. So we.

Matthew
It’s not going to be their clients.

Zach
Exactly, exactly. So always try to go for industry specific. If you’re a plumber, there is. You look at things from the vertical, so like homes, you can kind of fit in. If you’re a plumber, h Vac would also be very similar to that area as well. So you try to find something that’s close to what you are. And when you’re looking at your backlink portfolio, there’s always backlinks that you can do the analysis, get an expert, obviously, to be able to help you through this process. But what it is, is you find these backlinks that are toxic, that have been flagged by Google and you want to make sure to remove those through sir console.

Matthew
Okay, no, that’s really, really good advice, especially on the backlinks. Let’s talk about. This has been a new thing, and I’ve certainly seen a lot more people marketing this voice search and optimizing for mobile first indexing. What’s been your experience, especially with voice search in that area?

Zach
Yeah, most certainly. Voice search is the future. I’m not sure about you, but what.

Matthew
Exactly does it mean? Let’s break it down because it sounds like a voice search. What is that?

Zach
Yeah, what it is. A lot of people use this where they grab their phone and they say, hey, can you find the closest cheeseburger joint? To me, something like that. That is, voice search is smart enough. Obviously, with all the AI technology that’s kind of going around in the world today, is that Google’s able to understand what the general intent of that long paragraph is. So it grabs the key phrases from it and then gives the result on whatever it is. But voice search in general is you not typing in one or two keywords. Most people are saying phrases or paragraphs, hey, I’m looking for a house in Salt Lake City with XYZ, four bedrooms. Find that for me. And then it displays. Alexa is another prime example of that is where people, hey, Alexa, play this song, whatever it may be. Okay.

Matthew
Okay.

Zach
So voice search is very important. Very important.

Matthew
Okay. So this actually goes initially when you’re kind of talking, I thought of local SEO and, like, google my business and stuff, because it’s like pulling, you know, if you’re looking for, hey, find this near me. It obviously be kind of pairing within that local system. But above and beyond that, if you’re looking for just data and answers, I can see where the SEO for voice searching could be much bigger than that, because I certainly do that. We’re all actually ask Siri a question, not, you know, find something. It’s, hey, what is this? Or how do I do this? And so I can see that becoming a new, like that is the new big thing that people are doing more and more.

Zach
Absolutely. It’s questions, answers, conversations, and it’s something that is constantly changing. The way that it’s being interpreted from even just a couple years ago to now is dramatically different. So your website has to be coded properly with structured data so that your website can provide those answers to those questions that are being asked.

Matthew
Absolutely. I know this all gets pretty complicated, pretty technical. This is definitely going to be a technical podcast.

Zach
Yeah.

Matthew
But I think this is really helpful for people to realize they’re missing this stuff. Yes, absolutely. It’s huge opportunities for revenue. It’s opportunities to go get clients and to have clients find you instead of you trying to go out there and be in front of them and thinking.

Zach
Of it from a marketing perspective, there’s different levels of the sales funnel. There’s people that are just trying to figure things out and understand what they need to the people with the credit card in hand ready to purchase. So you need to be able to hit them at all levels.

Matthew
I like that you can actually correlate that together. I know that’s been a big challenge for a lot of marketers. I think it’s a challenge for SEO sometimes is to try to prove that ROI.

Zach
Yeah, absolutely. It is very difficult because a lot of websites going from your local, where you have like a call form or a phone call and you don’t see anything, think after that too. SaaS Industries, where they are selling the software, that’s what SaaS means. And being able to attribute SEO attribution through that channel. So it is something that’s incredibly important to work with their sales team, work with their team generally to be able to get that insight and information.

Matthew
Absolutely super key. As we’re moving into talking about how we do ROI and how we plan this, let’s talk about how we actually put together an SEO strategy. Like what do we do to actually be successful and start seeing an impact. I know it takes some time to see an impact, but what can we do to get an impact as quickly as possible?

Zach
So I am a firm believer there’s two ideologies to this. The one that I believe is the most critical is everything from a foundation level is keywords. Everything is keywords. What your intent is, what you’re trying to offer, how you’re trying to provide it, what you’re trying to be found for all of it is foundationally from a keyword perspective, which is derived from what you offer. So service or software or a product, then going from that area to be able to build a good strategy is foundation, is keywords. Then after that, we need to make sure that we are answering the questions that clients typically need. The way that I provide this is by three general questions that I try to answer on every sales page as close to above the fold as possible, is who are you, what do you do? And why should I buy from you? So if we can’t answer those questions on our sales page, we have a huge miss opportunity to make sure that if we’re a plumber, I know I keep on using them. If we’re a plumber, that we’re telling them that we have the expertise, professional know how, if we’re selling on Amazon or for selling products or e commerce of any capacity. I had a client who was selling cat litter. This is something that you need to make sure that your product is there, why it’s valuable, and why someone would want to spend the money to purchase your product.

Matthew
That’s, that’s really key and critical. I think it’s great you put that especially, you know, something like cat litter. Like why wouldn’t I just go to Walmart? Or, you know, like to really make it, why I need to buy it from you. Like that’s super key and critical. And it’s good that you build that in as part of the strategy.

Zach
It’s mandatory. You have to make sure that when you’re building your strategy, you have to look at the end consumer, what they want, what they need. I try as hard as I can to put myself in that position. I’ve had cats, I know what cats want. It’s something there. But then you look at it from, I have another client who works in the fitness industry and they are a gym and we need to make sure that we can speak to those people to get them into the gym and sign up for a membership and things of that nature. So we’ve got to make sure that we’re hitting people at every angle. And that goes back to that funnel. We need to make sure that we’re hitting the people that don’t know what they need, but they know they need something to those people that are ready with credit card in hand. So from a very top level, I would focus on your keywords, focus on your either your Persona, your content pillars, whatever sets you apart and makes you unique. And then build the website from there, making sure that the website has those questions answered.

Matthew
Perfect. Yeah. The unique value proposition. Yeah. Did we lose you? There we go. We’re good. Okay. I had a brief interruption, but we’re okay, we’re back. Let’s talk about keywords because that is a broad topic. Yes. How do you go about researching it? Are there any tools you particularly like to use? I know there’s a lot of them out there. I’ve tried a few myself. So how would you go about determining what keywords are the best ones to go after?

Zach
Most certainly. That’s a very great question. That’s the foundation. So if we can’t do the keywords right, everything else crumbles. So we need to make sure that we do it right. So there’s a few things how I do keywords, I’ll take 1 minute to explain. That briefly is I build out the service, the product, the offering, whatever it is, into buckets, either by features or the actual product itself, and then I build them out from there. So let’s use the cat litter. Example is we’ll use convenience was one of the buckets because they delivered it straight to your house, so you don’t even need to go to Walmart or wherever. The next piece that we focused on was how it actually helps the animal. So one of the major points with this product was the fact that it was, it used a very specific compound that actually told you your cat’s health. So if they were sick or something like that. So that was another key factor. So when you’re building it out, build out your foundation, make sure that you understand your product and the offering. And then the tools that I use. Obviously, I’m a firm believer in going straight to the horse’s mouth. The keyword planner in Adwords is a great tool. It gives you straight data, gives you the information that you need, puts it into buckets, and then it is an SEO tool as well, even though it is dominantly used on the paid side. One of my favorite tools, though, is Semrush. I believe that is one of the best tools out there. It helps with technical, it helps with content, it helps with your social campaign, it helps with your keywords. And you can do keyword clusters and buckets from your competitors as well. So that is one major tool I would strongly recommend. There are a plethora of other tools. You can even use some of your competitors to see what tools, pardon me, what keywords they’re ranking for, and then you can grab insight from there. So there’s a lot of ways to be able to tackle keyword research.

Matthew
Yeah, Semrush is one of my favorites, too. There’s a lot of tools within that. I know it can be a very pricey platform as you start moving up and what you’re doing, but it’s really worth the money for the ideas. And you talked about this a little bit earlier. You talked about what questions are the clients asking? What are they typing in? What are they asking on voice search. I think that’s really key and critical, and I think a lot of businesses forget that sometimes. I’ve certainly seen it with my clients where they get really tied into what they do. They know what they do really, really well.

Zach
Yeah.

Matthew
And they don’t correlate it to what their clients are looking for. Lawyers are guilty of this all the time.

Zach
All the time.

Matthew
Where they love to use big words, latin phrases, litigation. Like things like, I’m like, no client searches. Litigation, they search, can I sue somebody, you know, I got a DUI. Like, they’re not looking for criminal defense attorney for DUI. They’re just looking for, I need a DUI lawyer. Like, I think these are really key to actually pull that stuff. And I know Semrush is critical for finding that information.

Zach
Yeah. You have to make sure you meet your client where they’re at.

Matthew
Yeah.

Zach
You don’t want to get too technical and too in the weeds with jargon that’s industry specific. You want to make sure that you can hit people at every level and that’s intelligence level as well. And sometimes you have to kind of dumb it down a little bit to help people along sometimes. I worked in the medical field for a long time. You have to increase that, that skill level and make sure your content matches such.

Matthew
Yeah, exactly. I think it wasn’t an Einstein that said that if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

Zach
Exactly.

Matthew
We want to make sure we can do that and make sure it’s accessible to everybody because that way you increase your client base. If you’re only to the very small few people that can understand what you’re saying, then you’re just not going to grow your business.

Zach
Exactly.

Matthew
Okay, so we’ve built up some keywords. We’ve built up some questions and some things. So we’ve got this idea. How do we then go about adjusting the content or the on page SEO from that base that we’ve done?

Zach
Yeah, most certainly. So with the keywords, there’s a helpful tip. I’ll give it to you. Every page is isolated to itself, so you treat it as though it’s its own book. So every page has to have their own meta title, meta description, nh one that is unique to them without it duplicating from another page. So if you’re selling a cat litter, you can’t have five different pages where the primary keyword is cat litter. You have to have variations of them. But when you’re looking at your content, there is no magic number. This is a very common mistake that people make, is that they believe there has to be a set number of percentage of keywords placed in the content. That is false. That is not true. Do not do that. That’s wrong.

Matthew
That’s interesting because I’ve seen Yoast, Yoast specifically puts in that they want to see it at least three times in the content.

Zach
Yes. Wrong. What it is. And Google has said this and has said this for years, what is useful for your client to get the point. So make sure that your content explains the product, the service and the offering without fluff. If you could do that in 200 words or 2000 words, do it. There is no magic number to determine. How many times do you want to have the idea and the concept of the keyword. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s the whole point of the page. But making it to where it is. John Doe went to the plumber store in the plumber store in Salt Lake City. Like that doesn’t work anymore and it hasn’t for a long time. Make sure your content’s relevant and topical and valuable.

Matthew
The algorithms get wise to this.

Zach
Exactly, exactly. And users, users hate reading this stuff. If it’s already hard enough for people to read content, don’t make it sound like a robot wrote it that doesn’t understand what they’re saying. The next piece is metadata. This is stuff that is behind the scenes in most circumstances. Most people can’t see this unless you’re in the search results where you see the meta title and meta description, but all of the other stuff is more coded in the backend. This is where the developers are going to come in and help. SEO will obviously be the guide and the director of it. But your metadata is so important because it is conveying exactly the topic of the page. That’s where your h one is typically above the fold. It’s brighter. That’s why it’s designed different in the CSS. It also makes it to where it is more valuable for your users at the end of the day because they land on the page yet again. The who are you, what do you do and why should I buy from you? Is present in that header tag. The next part is some of the other stuff we were talking about, structured data or schema, which is marked up code where Google may not fully understand. A ten digit number, maybe a phone number. We code it and tell them it’s a phone number so your phone number could be visible. Same with your address and author. And there’s a variety of other [email protected] that you can find. But that is how we build that content. There, the maximum amount of content. I get asked this question a lot. How much contents? Well, what’s the goal? How much should I go towards? Yet again, there’s no magic number. Generally speaking. I try to shoot between three to 500 words as a foundation and then let the market decide from there. Put it, publish it, make sure it’s good and well written, of course, and then see how it responds. See how Google and your users respond to that content and adjust. That’s something that is also an issue, is that sometimes people believe it’s a one and done. No, I always say it’s version 1.0. We’re going to see how the market responds.

Matthew
Sure. And that’s something you can change over time, too, as algorithms change. I actually came across this recently. I was reading some new SEO articles and they were actually recommending, before worrying about new content, go back and re optimize your old one.

Zach
Yes. I’m working with a client currently who is in the process of redoing everything. We’re redoing probably about 150 pages worth of content because their stuff was so outdated. A lot of it was in 20, 1516. And then they even had some pre Covid, which their industry was revolutionized by Covid. So your information is so outdated that it’s no longer relevant towards the time.

Matthew
Perfect. Well, what are some of these. We’ve talked about some of these challenges, but what are their. What are other common challenges you’ve run into that, like, business just struggle with when it comes to SEO? Like, where are they failing? The most common.

Zach
Yeah, this is great question is, because they don’t see immediate results. They think it’s not working. That is a very common mistake.

Matthew
That is the biggest.

Zach
That is the biggest one. And honestly, kind of. It’s so much a joke now in the industry that people think that this is adwords. That is not what SEO is. It’s growing. A garden and a foundation for your business in the future. When you’re looking at growth, you can’t measure it just month by month. You have to look at it quarter by quarter and year over year and see where things are growing because there’s so much that changes. We’ll get to this a little bit. Google’s algorithm, there’s a lot that changes with that and throws some wrenches in our bike spokes.

Matthew
So, yeah, there’s. And I know a lot of people try hacks and there’s all that stuff. So let’s get right into that. You know, Google’s algorithm specific, you know, specifically, we can talk about penalties, too. And when Google penalizes you, how to know if you are and how to fix it.

Zach
Yeah, most certainly. This is where a lot of people are on board fully with Google Analytics. So ga four is the most is the one now.

Matthew
Yeah, universal went away.

Zach
Yeah, universal, sad tier. The next one is. That’s how. Pardon me. Google Analytics is how your users view your website. Okay.

Matthew
Okay.

Zach
Google search console is how Google views your website. Okay. There’s a little bit of information about users, but dominantly it’s about how Google views, renders and sees your content.

Matthew
Now, most people have never heard of Google search console. I’ve explained this to people. I asked for their logins and they go, what’s that?

Zach
Yeah, that’s a very common one as well. I’m dealing with that currently with the client as well.

Matthew
So what, Google search console being webmaster, what do they do?

Zach
Yeah, so what they do is that they provide an insight into the technical side of your website. It’s not a technical analysis. It is how Google views your website and bing views your website. So this will be pages that are crawled. This is actually where you will see your penalties, if there are any, that apply to your website. This is where you’ll see your backlink portfolio directly from Google saying, these are the backlinks that are actually on your website. A lot of tools grab other various things, but these are the ones that are Google sees. Then it also gives you an insight into some basic analytical data from the search results. So when you go into google.com and you type in plumber and Salt lake and those results, you’ll see impressions and clicks and the queries that people found you from where Google Analytics does not give us the keywords that people search, search console will.

Matthew
That’s really, really helpful, especially if we’re rebuilding some of that foundation because you can add stuff in.

Zach
Absolutely. And it gives you the data so you can see comparisons from it. Since it is a tool that is controlled by Google. Even if you sign into it now and you’ve had your website for over a year, it actually collected the data over that year. So you don’t start from scratch, you start from when Google found you.

Matthew
Right.

Zach
Very important. Which is such a good thing and a bad thing, because then it makes it hard for people to realize the value of it. When it comes to the penalties, though, you’ll see a lot of that in Google search console. So if there’s ever time you see your rankings just plummet and people to your website going away and sales gone, more often than not, you’ll probably see.

Matthew
Okay, now you kind of briefly touched on this within Google search console of when Google’s found you. Because I know if people don’t know there’s bots that crawl the Internet all the time. Google is constantly looking for new updated information, new sites. The bots are scrolling the Internet. My understanding of Google search console is it was kind of a way for us to go to Google instead of Google coming to find us. It was our way to come say, hey, we’re here. And a strategy I was always taught was that the sitemap should be updated in Google search console pretty regularly. How do you feel about that?

Zach
Honestly, that is the foundation. I’m glad you bring that up. It goes a little bit technical, but we’ll bring it right back. Robots file is the first thing that’s indexed from Google. That’s the rules that Google follow on your website. You tell it to crawl pages and not crawl pages. And you also give the location to your sitemap so it goes straight there. As soon as they find it, they know exactly where to go and then they see your entire sitemap, which is valuable right where you go in search console to be able to see this. This will allow you to see what pages are indexed, when they were indexed, why they’re not being indexed, and it also gives you information about your structured data and things of that nature. So it tells you if you’ve gotten impressions for particular terms or keywords or phrases. But when you’re dealing with the site map itself, this is one of the most critical parts of getting your website up running and found is your sitemap. Think of it kind of like that’s why they call it the World Wide Web. You want everything connected and a site does that and it provides it straight to Google. So instead of google going from page to page to page, it goes one page and then just sends all the bots and crawls your website.

Matthew
All right, that’s awesome. I’m glad to know at least I’m on the right track with that. And I agree with you, it is slightly technical. I think most owners don’t even know what a robot TXT file is, but it’s something that’s very, very valuable when you’re looking at these bots and these search engines trying to crawl through their site and know what it is, this.

Zach
Is the main important reason to get an expert there with you, to be able to walk you through these steps.

Matthew
Yeah, it’s highly technical. I have my own team who does it because I don’t even want to touch it. So what strategies could a business unit, sorry, business owner, use to stay ahead of their competition when they’re looking at trying to beat everybody in SEO? Like trying to rank for those top positions is a battle.

Zach
Yeah. So the way that I believe I’m going to try to condense it really quick, keywords, obviously we spoke about that foundational and then we need to make sure that we’re talking to our clients at every level, I believe that that’s a foundation. But the next piece is making sure that we go above and beyond them, making sure that we’re pushing beyond them. And that’s through a solid content strategy driven by an SEO and a well written content pieces. So typically I follow the hub and spoke content framework. I believe it is the most valuable, most useful.

Matthew
And what is that?

Zach
Yeah, most certainly. So it’s think of it kind of like a bucket right here. And then it expands out. So you take a particular topic per quarter. It’s typically how I do it. So if we’re dealing with cat litter, I’ll use that example is that you will build a content piece around the health reasons. And then a hub piece is typically longer. It has infographics, videos, longer form piece, and it answers a couple questions that are overall arching towards the main topic. And then they expand and break out into individual buckets. That. So a prime example, one of the reasons to get the cat litter is that it’s eco friendly. That was one area. Okay.

Matthew
Right.

Zach
And another piece to it is that there’s no dust. That was another major piece, so you didn’t have all the particles and then it’s odor control. So that was another piece. You would build a piece of your hub that expands upon and talks about all of those individual pieces that are in a larger bucket. And then it gives you keywords, it entices your users. You can use it through a variety of different channels. So it’s not just an SEO play, it’s an email, it’s a social, it’s a few other areas. So you could get everyone involved. And then you make sure that the pieces all inevitably lead to the sales page, which then can provide more and conversions. At the end of the day, where you want to make sure your content is pushing is the areas in which you’re lacking. So if you have all your foundation, so who are we? What do you do? Why should I buy from you? And you have that. There’s other areas that could be more technical, that could be more targeted, that could be more unique to your industry. Another prime example with the gyms, one of the content strategies that we deployed was around the health that is provided, not just physically, but mentally as well. So we were targeting a very unique subsection of content that was derived towards a very particular industry, especially post Covid. A lot of people were having a lot of mental issues. This was a great way for us to be able to bring them back and get them back to normality.

Matthew
Awesome. That’s really, really cool. You kind of touched on this a little bit. We’ve actually touched on this a few times throughout this podcast of content readability, and we’ve talked about some of the other, the other tools you can use. Semrush, there’s some other ones out there, Spyfu, things like that. This all kind of transition is something I wanted to ask you about, which was, how do you feel about AI in the SEO space?

Zach
Yeah, this is a really hot button topic right now, honestly. It is. I believe that there’s two fold that’s going to happen from this. We’re going to get a smarter search engine that’s going to be able to provide more users, more value, more information, more growth in that area. The area where I believe that this is going to be a hot button take is that a lot of people believe that AI is going to take over SEO. I actually don’t think that that’s going to be the case and I’ll explain why. The reason why I don’t believe it’s going to be the case is that AI grabs from websites that already have the information, so it’s not providing net new information. So if all of a sudden today everyone stopped blogging, AI would not have anything.

Matthew
Correct.

Zach
So AI needs SEO and content and companies to produce content. If they don’t, they will not be able to provide new information to people. Where I believe that there’s a blend because there’s going to be a blend. Google does this all the time. It first takes a radical stance and then it kind of slowly merges it down. One prime example of this is that when I in the local is probably about ten years ago or more is that we had ten results in the local pack and now we have three. They first did the carousel and then they did, I think it was somewhere in the ballpark of 15 or 20, and then they removed it down to three because they know that’s the optimal level. Okay.

Matthew
Right.

Zach
That’s going to be a very similar integration within AI where there’s going to be a subsection maybe of some questions or answers that are very unique, like WebMD type things where they already doing this to where someone is trying to buy a product. That one has to be a lot more old school search engine where it’s just going to be straight to a product, maybe Google’s product section. But it can’t be very much different. It can’t be AI generated because it won’t be able to provide the information and you can’t fulfill the transaction on Google, you have to go straight to the website to fulfill. So there’s going to be a little blend between both of those. Now how does that affect how we do and what we do and how we’re going to grow your business is really, this doesn’t change much. What it does change, though, is our attribution because there’s going to be a lot of AI and we’re already seeing this, where it gives credit and credence to an individual query. So if it says what is the best weather for Utah? It’s going to say according to Utah dot Gov, this information. So it’s giving credence to it. Where in the past it was just a small blue link that you had to know that that was the website. Google’s now physically telling you where it’s coming from.

Matthew
Interesting. Now the other part of this would be the content generation side, and I’m curious your opinion on this if you think the algorithms are going to start penalizing it. I know Facebook’s already taken this into consideration where now if you’re doing AI images and stuff, you’re supposed to actually check, Mark, that it was generated by an AI. Do you think the Google algorithm is going to start looking at articles like, how are they going to be able to tell that an article was AI generated? Are they going to penalize that stuff?

Zach
Yeah. So there’s a very common kind of structure to how AI content is generated. A very common one. At the very end of almost every paragraph it says in conclusion, and then it gives that. So that’s a very common, like, red flag right away, even if you do this naturally, I would probably steer away from it because Google’s looking at those.

Matthew
So start avoiding terms like that.

Zach
Yeah, exactly.

Matthew
Get out of your high school English, is what you’re telling me.

Zach
Yeah, exactly. One of the ways that I believe that AI helps is that it can help you build the skeleton. I know as a writer, one of the hardest issues is writing down the first paragraph. First sentence is that it’s like, what do I start? How do I start this? So I think AI is going to help our writers be able to be more efficient. Instead of taking 2 hours to write, it could take them 30 minutes because they’re able to compile everything, put it together and then add their own voice to it. Where I believe if you’re just writing content, I’ve seen on various SEO channels in LinkedIn and other Facebook ones as well, is that you see, you’ll get a shoe, you get a shot upwards in the very beginning, but then Google will always find you and you’ll start tanking in the results. So it looks good and it looks great on paper, especially to those uneducated people that believe that SEO is dead. And you constantly hear this SEO.

Matthew
I heard it last week. I heard from somebody who is a website designer and developer, was trying to tell one of my clients that they don’t need SEO. I was like, you do websites for a living. How are you telling them that you don’t need SEO?

Zach
So when it comes to the way that I believe AI and traditional websites are going to be, there’s going to be a blend. I think we’re no longer in 2015 where this isn’t a thing. I think we need to adapt and grow with it. I don’t think you put all your eggs in one basket. You make sure that you approach this in a way that’s going to be beneficial to your users and to the website, generally speaking. Because as I said before, AI grabs what’s already there. So it’s really unique. It’s not a hot take. It’s already on the Internet somewhere, some capacity. So if you have a good creative writer behind you with an SEO to back them, you will outperform your, your AI competitors way better, way easier and have the longevity that they will not.

Matthew
Absolutely. I think that’s really, really key. And I’ve always kind of believed that with, with AI too, and chat GPT, that it is a good tool to, like for ideation, for coming up with how, like you said, the basic framework, the basic structure and doing a lot of the heavy lifting and then you coming back in and, you know, because I know a lot of people who will stare at a blank white page and go, I don’t know what to type. So if it at least gets you part of the way, then you can kind of go, oh, well, I could change this. And, well, no, this isn’t quite correct. Let me adjust this. And I’ve used this with my clients in the past. I’ve used it even with attorneys and stuff, and attorneys have to be really careful using it. And I think that’s one of the other nuances I would say about AI, is it depends on how well you’ve learned to use AI.

Zach
Yeah.

Matthew
Because if you can just go into chat GPT and say, hey, write me an article about this, and it would be very terrible. Or, you know, you could come into chat GPT and say, I need an article about this. Here’s what I think about it. Here’s my thoughts and put it together and then it’ll kind of restructure it for you, which is a lot different than, hey, write me an article about this.

Zach
Yeah, the prompts are very important. You have to make sure you’re giving direct, actionable items. I am a firm believer in the data metrics that they do as well. So it’s a good foundation. But I would never throw the skeleton out there. That’s just poor. You’re not going to get the results you’re looking for. And even though you feel like you’re saving an hour or two, you end up hurting yourself in the long term.

Matthew
Now this wasn’t in our show notes, but you kind of got this in my head where you talked about the short spike and then Google always catches you. There is gray hat and black hat SEO and some people who do this. I’ve had people ask about these things. I never do it, I don’t recommend anybody does it. But can you get into what that is? You know, there’s hacks and things that people try to do to hack the algorithm, and inevitably it ends up failing over the long term.

Zach
Yeah, most certainly. So there’s three ways to be able to define it. White Hat SEO, which is providing value, providing content that’s valuable, useful, the same structure that we’ve been speaking about this whole podcast. Then there’s gray hat and black hat. So I’ll go to black hat and then gray hat, I’ll explain. So black hat is using link farms, where you buy, or you go to fiverr and you artificially boost your results to give Google one of their signals. Black hat is seen as. And there’s developer things, which is called masking or cloaking. Masking is where you take an image, excuse me. And you put keywords behind it so it’s not visible. But to Google, when it crawls it, it sees it, it sees that, which is incredibly bad. It’s bad user experience. It is not entirely AdA compliant. So your website isn’t up to scuf, if it were. And then there’s cloaking, which is you take a block of content and you make it match the exact background color so that it looks as though it’s the background and there’s not there, but really there’s content. And Google can see the difference. Those will hurt your website, most certainly, yeah.

Matthew
And the reason Google sees it is Google’s not looking at what the site looks like from a visual perspective. It’s not like us looking at it with eyes. It’s looking at the structured code and the code shows the text, which is why these people try to do this. Like, it’s not illegal, but it’s not advisable for sure.

Zach
Exactly. And you, you will get penalized for it either through. Actually, recently, Google started handing out actual manual actions again, which is so surprising. Before they would just devalue the website, so you would see an upward trend and then your website would go. So it is something that’s very unique. Now, Google hasn’t done that in probably six years or more, where manual actions are getting a lot more prevalent. But back to the black hat tactics, is that what you’re doing is you’re cheating the game. And that’s exactly what it is. You are hurting not only your website, but the industry overall because you are not doing things the right way. And that there is a natural right way to do your website growth. You can’t go from starting your company yesterday to being Amazon tomorrow. Like, that’s just not the way the world works. But when you get into gray hat, this is where things are kind of little muddled, where you see something work and it works for a long time, and then Google’s algorithm comes out and then penalizes you really hard. So one of the ways that I worked with a company many years ago that would do content spinning, what is that? They would take a piece of block of content and then they would throw it into this algorithm and it would throw out thousands of variations of those pages. So it looked as though our website had thousands of unique pages.

Matthew
Right.

Zach
And after Google caught on, that company did not do very well. And that is why I’m no longer there. There’s just a lot of issues that go along with those things.

Matthew
Yeah. So, yeah, it’s okay. Let me, let me ask on that really quick, because I’ve seen this with, especially with real estate websites where, and I’m curious about this, if this is actually what this is, because I’ve had some people want to build a site where they would have this article and it would swap out locations. So let’s say it’s a real estate agent here in Salt Lake City. You want to be able to swap out West Valley, Draper, Salt Lake City to try to get keywords, but they’re basically generating based on where you are. It changes the article. Does that, is that what you’re talking about? Like, that affects.

Zach
Yeah, that is one variation.

Matthew
It sounds like a good hack, but I think it’s actually problematic.

Zach
It is very problematic. One of the biggest reasons why is that nothing else on the page is unique. Nothing. I have built websites that are location specific, but every single one of the pages are you the same.

Matthew
Okay.

Zach
Oh, is unique. That is how you.

Matthew
That’s different. Yeah.

Zach
You don’t take. I had a garage door company I did work for, and they had a wide service area, an entire state. One of the things that we did is we built out pages dedicated to each individual major metropolitan. That makes sense because those are unique. You can talk about, hypothetically, Salt Lake City and St. George. Very unique, because there’s a lot of dynamic difference. Where you’re looking at something that is an issue is that if you did Salt Lake City, Murray holiday, and you built out 19 different pages just for one locale, that definitely is problematic. But through the strategy I just specified, going through the individual, pardon me, the major metropolitans, we were able to increase their SEO conversions by 25% in a quarter. So that is monumental numbers. And then it stretched out over the years. So at the end of the year, they saw it was roughly around 17, 18% organic growth conversions.

Matthew
Fantastic. That’s. I think that’s really key. And, yeah, duplicating content. Google pick up on it. They’re slicker than we’re ever going to be. They’ve got teams of people who do this, and, you know, I. Anytime soon, like, oh, well, this is the hack that works. It’s just like social media. There’s hacks that come out on how to get more followers, and they’re not going to last. They’re going to work for the first few thousand people who do it, and then Google’s going to look at it and go, wait, no, we’re not doing that. We’re changing the algorithm to prevent that from happening again.

Zach
Exactly.

Matthew
So. All right, perfect. Man, this has been great. I’ve learned a bunch from you. I think this is really fantastic. If people want to get in touch with you or, you know, potentially get a consult from you, how do they do that?

Zach
Yeah, so, I don’t know, use LinkedIn. I think that that’s a great way to show my professional work. I post on there quite a lot about tips, tricks, ideas, conversations, as well as some personal reviews as well from clients that have worked with me in the past. You can just find me at Zachary.

Matthew
Blackburn, and we’ll provide a link in the show notes.

Zach
Perfect.

Matthew
What is one key takeaway you’d want anybody listening to this to remember from.

Zach
This episode that SEO is not dead. SEO is alive and well.

Matthew
Yes, very, very much so. I think it’s hugely profitable. It is something that’s an investment. I will say that to any business owners out there. It’s something you can’t do without. But you need to understand that it is a long term investment that will eventually pay off.

Zach
Most certainly. And the value of it, especially if you’re doing other media, it you, they work hand in hand. SEO, paid, social, email, they all work together and they boost each other.

Matthew
Awesome. Well, I really appreciate your time today, man. This was absolutely great. I think we’re definitely going to have you to go more in depth into some of the stuff. Want to have you come back. Perfect. So for now, we’ll let everybody get going, and we’ll see you all next time.

Zach
Thank you. Bye.