The Affiliate Marketing Podcast - Is SEO dead? With Judith Lewis

In this wee's episode of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast, Lee-Ann is joined by Judith Lewis to discuss the topic of SEO and offer some insights. 

Judith is a renowned international speaker, blogger, writer, trainer and digital media consultant. She has over 24 years of experience and now runs her own consultancy. You would be hard-pressed to find someone with more experience to talk on this topic!

Listen to hear more about: 

-          How SEO can be the most cost-effective channel that we can leverage

-          New features coming this year from Google

-          The importance of content writing in SEO

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We will be adding new episodes as we continue our 3RD SEASON of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast which will be featuring guests who’ll be sharing insights on SEO, Social Media, Paid Advertising, Social Selling and so much more!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Hi, and welcome to the affiliate insider podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers in the gaming industry. Listen up as I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the insider scoop on what's occurring in affiliate marketing. Join us as we explore affiliate strategies, host expert interviews with leading affiliate and tech entrepreneurs and discuss the latest affiliate and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started

Speaker 2: 0:54

Today. I'm joined by Judith Lewis and Judah is a renowned international speaker writer, trainer blogger, and digital media consultant specializing in SEO. Hi Judith. Thanks very much for coming on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to have you on here now. I know you've got more than 24 years experience, which kind of predates Google for those of you that are listening, um, in both SEO and you've rewritten a large foundational Econsultancy best practice guide on SEO. So I know that you're going to be able to help our readers listen and understand what's happening about SEO. And we're talking about is SEO dead, which is a question that I've seen kind of bandied around the internet and, and, you know, we're all about digital trends. So I really wanted to get you on here because there's nobody that I know that knows SEO more than what you do. Um, so let's start the talk in our podcast today with that question is SEO dead. And what do you think?

Speaker 3: 1:53

Well, obviously I'm slightly biased. I am a, well, I like to say that I'm a full stack digital marketer in that I look at email marketing and PPC and social media and everything like that. Cause I always think full service is just a little, you know, anyway, the full stack of, of digital marketing tools that we have in our toolbox STL remains one of the most powerful shall I say, because it enables us to catch people serendipitously. Now, obviously serendipity plays a huge role. If you're looking for something that you don't already know, but once we get into the branded side of things, there are interesting things we can do with paid search to inject ourselves or get into the conversation on the, on the internet, uh, through paid media. But SEO is still fundamentally the most cost-effective channel that we can leverage outside of once we've already acquired people and have an email marketing list. So,

Speaker 2: 2:52

So sorry, I just wanted to ask, why did you, why do you say SEO is cost-effective because traditionally I've always thought that it was so expensive. It is well

Speaker 3: 3:00

It's expensive because you should be able to set it up and let it run. So as far as a cost per click from search results, SEO does come in substantially below paid search, for example, to compare apples to apples, it does have a, a, a large head, uh, uh, costs. So it's it's front weighted, shall we say? And then all the work has to be done upfront, but once done properly, it can last for months, if not years. Um, good foundational SEO includes technical SEO, which is the optimization of a website and ensuring that Google can spider it and can recognize the content, understands the content chunks and is therefore able to return in a search result, your website over somebody else's because it's more understandable by the machine. So that upfront load, that front loading of, of all that work and cost then pays out for years. So technical optimization, if you don't then change stuff lasts for years. Content optimization will last for months, if not years. And, um, link acquisitions always say, activities can dependent on the vertical. Last for months or years, I have worked in, uh, one was loans was a term I was chasing. And the work we did was five figures, but it lasted for over two years. I believe keeping us between two and five for the short tail term loans and some longer tailed associated words. We were one to three for two years. Okay. That's the kind of work

Speaker 2: 4:32

The thing is with SEO. It's not immediate, it's investing in the longterm and it's also making sure that technically it is correct as well, because there's so much going on in our space about, is it link-building, is it content marketing? Is it, what is it now? Can you maybe just decipher a little bit about that, especially for newer leads that are coming into the marketplace, where would you suggest that they focus their time and their effort in the kind of SEO sphere?

Speaker 3: 4:58

There's a very important bit about eat experts, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. That is, is a huge topic and, and could be a podcast in and of itself to help affiliates understand how to leverage this. Because without that, they really aren't going to go very far, but technical underlines, everything that we do, if your site is not technically optimized, not only will it not rank well, but come May, 2021, we are going to see probably although Google may change its mind yet, an icon for site experience. So user experience on your site, your site is not technically optimized, so it's not fast. It jetters a lot. The ads are slow to load any of the affiliate ads that you've got on. If they take a long time to pull down from the, um, the operator's server, it's actually going to result in your site being given an icon that says that you're a bad user experience. So from a technical point of view, if you're not well, then you can forget it. And WordPress is not optimized out of the box. So please don't assume that just because you're going with a WordPress CMS, that somehow your affiliate site will rank well, because if you know, WordPress must be optimized, technically

Speaker 2: 6:11

It's not. So

Speaker 3: 6:13

You've got to get that done and it operators as well. You have to be thinking about this because if your affiliates aren't ranking, then there are all sorts of areas that you're not getting into. Otherwise you're going to have to somehow cover off that. And you're only getting one bite out of the Apple. Whereas everybody else that has affiliates who are ranking well is getting multiple bites.

Speaker 2: 6:35

Talking about the bigger picture there, just to interject, because I know the first question I'd be asking if I was an affiliate manager, is, will the SEO that my affiliates have a negatively impact mine because there's link connection there, right? So do I need to start looking at the types and quality of affiliates that I need to have and do any design, educating affiliates about those?

Speaker 3: 6:53

You definitely need to educate affiliates about this. You can hide links, not hide them in a bad way, but you can use internal JavaScript redirects to break the connection between the two sites, because you shouldn't be using affiliates as link builders. You want to affiliates to fill up those spaces. So I would love to have an affiliate who was focused on me as an operator, or had really good results for me as an operator, filling up some extra slots in the casino or a blackjack or poker or whatever SERPs that I'm chasing after. I'd love to have some extra affiliates in there. Yes, I have to pay the affiliate, but you know what? It doesn't cost me in overhead of trying to build my own websites to then fill up those lots. Because no matter what you do, the competitors are going to get in there for best place to play poker online or best poker sites to play online. So you want affiliates in there. Hopefully your affiliates will have a good SEO and we'll know about these things, but they won't talk certify your site just because they're linking to you. If you make it in your deal with them, look like you're trying to get them to use anchor text, um, keyword, rich anchor texted linked to you. Yeah. Yeah. It'll let you in the bud because that's one of the best ways to get yourself a penalty. These days is anchor text that is rich with keywords. And before you think that you can do this to penalize somebody, it doesn't work every time. So, you know, as, uh, Ron Jeremy says, and in anchorman 65% of the time, it works every time it doesn't even work. That often is like 10% of the time. It works every time and then stops working two weeks later. So don't worry about affiliates who are linking to you directly do think about their user experience because that icon that they get will determine whether someone clicks through to them or not. And you don't want your competitors to catch that click.

Speaker 2: 8:48

Okay. So how much time realistically have we got, I mean, is this definitely coming in May, 2021? Because I mean, that's not a long time to rebuild your website and make sure that it's kind of doing its thing. So what are the short-term solutions that you can do in the mean, like, what are the key things that you can focus on right now, if you can't go do a complete side rebuild, what is it that you're suggesting people do?

Speaker 3: 9:09

Hopefully no one will lead a whole site rebuild because that would be, if you want a bespoke CMS and couldn't use, uh, something like CloudFlare, which obviously you're, if you're in sports, you can't, but, um, so sports book gear, you're going to have to make sure your servers are up to scratch. Um, but things where you can, there's always, um, CloudFlare as solutions. However you want to make sure your site, if it's WordPress or similar is optimized, your images are minified. You use lighthouse, which is a free tool in Chrome. Just go up to the hamburger menu, which is weird. Cause it looks like three hot dogs stacked on top of each other and you click on it and you go to other tools or sorry, developer tools, and then other tools. And it's in there and you can have a lighthouse report or just use the search engine of your choice to look for Google page speed test or page speed tool. And that will tell you as well. So both of those will tell you, and then Google search console. I absolutely recommend this as installed on everyone's machine. Um, and look in there in settings. So this is weird. This is where it will be challenging for people who aren't familiar with Google search console. If this is your first time, checking it, just give yourself a break. Cause it's, this is hidden. If you go to on the left-hand menu, scroll to the bottom and go to settings. Now in settings in the middle, there'll be a website, crawl stats report. What is it doing there? I don't know. I think they just didn't know where to put it. Okay. Click on that report. And it will tell you how quickly Google is able to crawl your site. If Google has problems, it'll show up there. So in order to ensure that your doing things quickly and well, that's the perfect place. Plus there's a section in Google search console called core web vitals, and it will also tell you what's happening on your site and what it is related to, to help you fix it. So hopefully those two things together in the free Google search console tool, and also lighthouse to help you measure free in Chrome or use Google's own page speed tool test, um, all of those are free. And so for free, you can check what's going on and then look at how much it would cost you to fix it. Lots of solutions are available. You should specify your image size, make sure it's compressed, et cetera, et cetera, but there's lots of places out there that will help walk you through what to do with WordPress to make it go fast.

Speaker 2: 11:35

Okay. Now the last question that I have for you is if you've got no budget and not much of a clue, what are the tools and things that you suggest that people focus their time on first to get maximum results that their SEO. So take, for example, somebody like me, you know, very, you know, just the basics about where would you say if I had a five grand budget, for example, which I think is kind of, you know, startup budget for SEO this year, what would you say? I invest that five grand.

Speaker 3: 12:03

My favorite tool of the moment is S E M rush SEMrush. Um, so some rush, they have training videos as well as the tool itself and for a solo for an individual user it's inexpensive per month. And you can use that to monitor your site, to understand what keywords you're ranking for Google search console is important for this too, but SEMrush will help walk you through what you rank for, how things rank, what is happening technically on your site. If there are any spider traps, if there are any crawl issues, a spider Trop is where you keep generating more and more URLs like a calendar you keep going next and next and next and next, and it never stops. So Google keeps going, Oh, there's another page. Oh, there's another page. Oh, and it just keeps going. And it clogs Google's ability to see the rest of your site up because Google doesn't want to take your site down. So it gives you a certain amount of, of let's say budget. So like a crawl budget is called commonly called, but basically it relates to just not soaking your bandwidth and taking your server down because I know we're used to unlimited resources, but these things happen. So if I was on a limited budget, I'd definitely go SEMrush and I do their free courses that they have online associated with each of the different tools and their tool will help you with writing content, checking your keywords, checking your technical elements, link building competitor, link audits, competitor, keyword analysis. All of these things are covered off by that one tool. So if you're new and you really need a full suite inexpensively with good support as in good training videos, definitely seminars.

Speaker 2: 13:47

Okay. And in terms of content, cause I just want to touch on that last thing before we finish up on this amazing podcast that you've given us today. I mean, I think this is probably one of the most jam packed podcasts that I've ever had in terms of advice and tools and technology and everything else. But how important is the content piece? Like how does the content writing impact the actual, um, you know, success of USU

Speaker 3: 14:12

I'm going to give you a long winding answer. Google has done a lot of research into images and into content and into language AUSAs and understanding, understanding grammar as well as words and things like Bert, the, the bi-directional analysis. Um, I won't give you the full name. It sounds scary. Um, but basically it looks at words on either side of other words, to understand what that word means and images it's able to decode what is in an image. So it's actually able to index what the images of and with videos, it's actually able to look at things like, um, w if you searched for what are the highlights of game five, um, I'm obviously Torontonian and the blue Jays versus obviously Torontonian, which versus the red Sox. Um, and it would actually come up with the highlights. So it would give you the time stamp in Google search results. It would give you the timestamp of where the highlights were in specific videos that it surfaced in the search results. So it's able to understand all of that, and it's able to understand your content as well. Now, most searches are textual in that they're either spoken or they're typed in. So it's, it's all to do with texts. So although we do do some image searches and we do do some video searches, most of it's texted without content. We have no context or very little context for Google to understand what the page is about now, passages, which is also launched, also known as fractals, which were first identified by Cindy Krum back in 2018 are sections of your content that Google will surface. So not only will Google look at your whole page, but it might look at a paragraph on the rules of blackjack. And somebody says, what's the rule of black Jack, where the dealer has whatever Google will identify the section in a page about what are the rules of blackjack. It will surface that paragraph as it does now in featured snippets. Um, it will surface that paragraph. If you click the link to go to the website, it will then zip you down to wherever on the page that content lives immediately, which is why this thing about Google's user experience icon is becoming so important. If Google wants to drop somebody exactly on the page of your content and without content, we've got no search result of where that passage is, your site has to be fast. So although it does understand images and it doesn't understand video, and it can draw people at the exact point they want without content. Most of the searches that take place, we just won't surface for. So content is if it's not the single most important thing, all three pillars of SEO, technical content and link building are important, but without content to live on the technically optimized site, where are people going? Like, how are they finding you? And without links to help Google see that you are trustworthy and you aren't recognized as an authority for this topic, how is Google going to know that your content should be chosen over some other affiliate or operator's content? So the content optimization piece is important from the point of view of one topic per page. Well, optimized use your H twos and H threes just as W3C guidelines, um, dictate, which is online. So go to the W3C site, you'll see that they talk about headings and heading number two, should sub-divide your page. So your page should be one topic subdivided by H twos, and each can be subdivided by age threes. But if you do that, Google understands each paragraph then has context. And then you're the one that gets the passage or the featured snippet. You're the one that Google will then give somebody the impetus to click on and zip them straight down to the most relevant section of content. And it's not just, um, gambling affiliates, people like MoneySuperMarket and other super affiliates have been doing this sort of stuff for years using jumped two links on the page to jump to the specific section for Google, to give them the people also ask, or the featured snippet. Now with passages, it's super important because Google is now going to start dropping people exactly on the page where they found that content snippet. So content is massively important.

Speaker 2: 18:36

Yeah. Like an encyclopedia. I'm so happy that we got you on this podcast. Thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge with us today. Um, this is probably enough content to make three or four podcasts just on, um, on snippets that will probably be SEO ranking on now. So thank you so much for coming along and sharing all of this fantastic information for our audience. I really appreciate your time. No trouble.

Speaker 1: 19:12

[inaudible].