SEO Unfiltered Podcast: E03 What Is Off-Page SEO & Why It Matters to Your Marketing Strategy with Jo Priest

Genny: [00:00:00] What’s up marketing geeks. Welcome to season one, episode three of SEO, unfiltered. This is Genny, your humble host content writer and marketer for geeky tech, a UK based digital marketing agency. Last month, my friend Alan walked me through some of the biggest website mistakes that people make that can kill your brain.

This month. I want to keep talking about rankings because that is after all, what SEO is all about. The last episode we were talking about the things web marketers do that tanker rankings. But now I want to dive into the other bits of search engine optimization that happened off your webpages and outside of your domain.

I’m talking about off page SEO. But do you know what I’m talking about? When I say off page SEO here to demystify this marketing term and to help us understand how you can help shape your online authority. I have Joe priest here with me today in case you didn’t recognize the name, Joe is kind of a big deal in the SEO industry.

Not only is he the creator of topical relevance, a powerful online tool that finds topically relevant keywords to help you rank in Google. But he is also [00:01:00] a digital marketing specialist for G five media and the head of online authority, geeky tech, needless to say, Joe priests knows a thing or two about today’s topic.

So on that note, hello, Joe, how is it going? How are you? Okay, so, uh, when I say that you’re the head of online authority, geeky tech, what’s the more appropriate title.

Jo: Um, so geeky tech, I kind of look after, or the off page, um, uh, goings on. Okay. As you mentioned, you’ve got Alan who’s concentrating on the home page and then my cell phone looking at the off page and what we can do or page to help.

Genny: Okay. So can you give us a working definition of off page SEO?

Jo: Um, so this is basically everything that you can do, um, that doesn’t relate to your weapons. So if it happens elsewhere on someone else’s website or in the press or, um, you know, uh, locally or anything like that, then it comes out of my permit.

Okay. Okay. [00:02:00] And why is it so important? I think we generally say that a link is, is a vote for your website. Um, yeah. So the kind of more votes that you can collect, or maybe not the number, but the, um, the kind of votes that you can. For your website for mentions on other websites and kind of gives your site credibility.

Okay. So with that credibility comes, uh, I suppose what you call trust and with that trust, um, Google, uh, rewarding by showing your pages. Okay. Uh, so why does Google. Give a higher ranking value to websites with credibility or authority. So I was thinking about this and the easy way to explain it to people.

Um, uh, Google is a search engine, but what they actually do is they sort out information. Okay. So if you [00:03:00] think of the internet as a giant line, Or even just a small light. We, when it first started, there’s a small library and, uh, the search engine is basically the librarian who sits in the front. And, uh, when, uh, when a new site comes in or a new page comes in or a new book comes into librarian, librarians gotta read through that book or, and then decide where it goes in the library.

So when the library starts off small and there’s just a few, few books around, um, it’s very easy to sort out all that information. Okay. No one book, if it’s about sports, it will go in the sports section. If it’s about, um, uh, politics event, politics section. And then when someone comes in with a query and wants to look something up about football, for example, and then ask the librarian, Hey, I’d like to read about football, um, which document or which book, which page, uh, is the best place for me to be, uh, looking.

Um, and they were [00:04:00] obviously directly over to the sports page or what this particular book, um, which is all about, uh, football, all about sports. So when that first came about and most search engines, it would just be doing, uh, looking at on-page factors. So if a librarian got a new book or a new new page in a book that mentioned football six or seven times, they could say, okay, this book, well, this page is about football and I’ll index it up on the football.

So that when people come in and say, I would like to, uh, look at a page about football and then the library could just direct you over to the page that she knows has got the most mentions of football. And then hopefully you’ll be happy. Um, but then obviously people who write about football, want more people coming to that, that one, one page or one book, um, And they’ve worked out that in fact, if you, uh, mentioned football on your page multiple times.

Um, and in fact, the more times that you mentioned [00:05:00] football on your page, uh, the more likely the librarian will, uh, keep directing people to your, uh, book and, um, they, it creates a kind of a cycle of, uh, people scamming the librarian. It’s basically how many times can you mention the word on the page? Yeah.

To follow the librarian and get all these people over to your book. And so that, that is, um, uh, where keyword stuff comes from. So that’s a great reasoning. And so the librarian catches onto this and builds a filter. Okay. So, okay. I’ve got this new book, it mentions a football 30 times in the space of 50 words.

There’s something going on here. I, I, you know, I’m just going to put it over to the, to the song. I’m just going to put it in. Or penalize it. Um, and so I’m not, not going to send anybody over to that page now, since the ones that I know about. So when more books come in and as Internet’s grown over to, you know, a billion [00:06:00] pages per day, the librarian starts to have problems, like, uh, things like, okay, I’ve got so much stuff coming in.

How do I cope with this? Where do I put it? How do I categorize it? I’m going to need more help and more. Um, and new systems and I can’t just do it by hand. I’ve got to automate it. And so new systems come in new, um, kind of, uh, basically there’s the original algorithm. Um, and then, uh, spam filters, uh, you know, amputate filters and different, um, uh, penalties.

Right. So that’s things to get him and then they try to improve their search as well. Um, and so with that, um, comes a authority or what you mentioned as authority, um, uh, which could you could say is, uh, um, which books can be trusted, which can be trusted. So what Google did, [00:07:00] um, w yeah, well, the original Google algorithm.

I was looking at, um, kind of citations, um, which books are talking about other books, um, which you could call links. So if a book is about football has been talked about football and is pointing over to another book that talks about football. Um, and then 10 other books around that are all talking about the same book about.

Um, then the go-to source would seem to be, uh, this book that has got all of these citations pointing back to it. Yeah. Okay. Um, and so that would be the, uh, the, um, uh, go-to book. Uh, so, um, the go-to book and then they would measure this, um, in different ways. And one of the ways was also to, to try and categorize the kind of citation that was coming in.

And so they were looking at the words around, uh, look at the words around. Uh, the, the text that was, uh, [00:08:00] citing that book, which is, which you probably know is anchor text. And so they would give credence or a measurement to that anchor text. And so if I’m, I’ve got a book about football, um, and all of these books are talking about it and naming it as a football book, right then Google was okay, this is definitely a football book, and we should show this as, uh, the number one for football book.

Okay. And then again, you run into problems with them. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Um, people caught on to that. So if I have all these books over and over here, I’m citing this other book. And if I use the architect’s football for all of them, Google will rank it for football. So what happens? And this has been, this was done in, I think in 2019 95 or 2005 or something like that.

Um, we’ll have, what’s it called? A Google bombing is basically if I use a certain anchor. To all these citations and points at a page, which is completely [00:09:00] irrelevant. I think they did this with George Bush originally, like the worst president or something like that. So if I do that and then a point, all of these Aztecs to this page of George Bush is a Wikipedia page and he’ll come up and he’d say something stupid, then he’ll come up.

And so obviously there’s a problem. Well, I’ll look up the term you feel, but, um, and so they got a problem with that and manipulation. And so they brought in another penalty for, um, Aztec manipulation. And of course, there’s, there’s a lot of, uh, kind of spam filters and maps and people write a thesis on this.

You know, people write our papers, all it. About how to, uh, basically, uh, spam detection, I guess, rather than how it’s mostly scientists write a lot of stuff about spam detection and then get picked up by you [00:10:00] go work for companies like Uber

and so other things to combat that, um, they brought in, um, who, who, who can you trust basically? It’s like, what papers can you trust? And then you can link to things like authors. So if a book is written by someone who’s credible. So if this person has got, um, uh, you know, degree or something like that, it can be linked to other things.

And they’ve got a good background and you can see that around. So if it’s a real person, a real credentials, you can look them up. Um, and it’s in one of the, uh, Google guidelines is like, can you trust. Like how they measure that could be difficult, but it’s something that they’re, that they’re trying to mimic.

Okay. Can you try and trust the person that’s writing this? Do they have the credibility to, and it’s especially important in, in thinking in the medical field and then yeah, that makes sense. Um, so if [00:11:00] you go into a library, you don’t want to, you want to read a book or medicine by someone credible, you don’t, you wouldn’t really want to trust a book.

That’s just written by someone that you don’t really know. And, um, It doesn’t really know what that’s all, you know, it doesn’t really know what they’re talking about. You want to find that credible author. Um, yeah. So in that analogy, the librarian would definitely recommend the more credible author than the, the backwater hack.

That is not, it doesn’t really have any credentials. You would, you would hope I don’t go, but because it isn’t, you know how, again, how, how would you go and measure that and how do you. Yeah. How do you measure that and how do you quantify it to be able to rank it? And then if you say, okay, this person here is a doctor has a score of 10 and this person down here doesn’t have a score.

You know, he doesn’t have any credibility. He’s got a score of one. However, there on page, they predicted that what they’ve written is very well written [00:12:00] and all of these sites around them are citing a single one, not not to the author. Um, although this guy might be more credible, this guy has got all of the other sectors.

Okay to make me think, okay, this site, this page is, is a lot better than, uh, sorry, this year, this page, this guy’s written, there’s a lot better than the, uh, the credible page. And there’s also, uh, Google also have the ability it’s again, going back to the library, I’ve also got the ability to, um, count and look at how many people are coming in and how people are searching for a certain thing.

How many people are going over to that shelf? Picking out that book, reading it, um, Well, whether they pick it up, look at it, put it back and then pick another book. They also have that. Okay. Um, yeah,

I guess that. Yeah, but, um, so they have that ability. Um, and so, uh, that can also be [00:13:00] manipulated if you wanted to. Um, and that also goes into there being different types of different types of books and different things. In the library. What do you mean? Um, so for example, if, uh, say Wikipedia, Wikipedia is, uh, would be, there’s an encyclopedia, that’s what it is.

It would be it probably in the reference section. Um, is it credible is written by, you know, uh, hundreds of thousands of different people. Um, but it’s so vast and has got, um, links out to everywhere, uh, good topics and all of those links have. Um, have been checked by someone it’s not just some random, uh, or there’s just some random person sticking it next to that.

But, um, but all they, they, you know, they’d been processed by, by human to say, okay, we checked these citations and they are good. So you would think that if, if you were linked out from Wikipedia or [00:14:00] somewhere, then, um, it’s, it’s been human fact-checked. Um, and so you would have a little bit more credibility if you were picked out from them.

Sorry. Yeah. Um, I lost my train of thought there. Uh, yeah, different sections. Um, Well different yeah, different section in terms of, so if you think if Wikipedia is just one large encyclopedia, it’s a massive thing. Upwards, any mobile will start in website would start off as basically a pamphlet or a thin sheet of paper, um, compat compatible.

So out of the vast billions of pages again, indexed, what makes, why would your site get, get any special attention? Good question. Yeah. Um, and so that kind of, uh, brings me to the kind of local sites and things, local sites. [00:15:00] So you’re probably looking at, um, if you go to the, I’m looking for say, you’re looking for a dentist in your area, you went to Google, they probably wouldn’t, um, set you off into the direction of the dental.

Um, In the library, they would send you off to the location section of the library, you know, like you’re looking for something. So you wouldn’t go information dentists. What is dentistry? What is that? You go to the, the, the, um, yeah, the direction, the yellow pages basically. Um, and so one of the things, especially local is making sure that you in there, um, that you can be read properly.

Um, your location is visible to Google and they know where to. So making sure that your category is right for local and making sure that you’ve got consistent address, it doesn’t have to be exact, but you know, consistent. Um, and they know they know where you are and what you do. [00:16:00]

Genny: I was just going to say, so for a local SEO, even though it’s off page, you still have, you still can control that, um, that information elsewhere.

Jo: Yes. So, um, if you start or if, you know, if you start, if you don’t say anything about your business, Google. We’ll just have one page to look at, which is your website and not know only know what’s what you’ve written. Um, if he’s then going back it up with other people saying the same thing, um, and pointing it back to, uh, your website and then they can get a, uh, a more, a better understanding of okay.

Um, what you do, um, and this kind of comes into, uh, what you’re linking, what the content on the page that you’re linking from. Uh, also says if we’re just talking about local, um, well you said the yellow pages that we can control, but what if it’s, um, [00:17:00] a link from a site that you, that is random, that you’ve never heard of before?

That is just linking back to your site and you have no control over. And so once you get, once you get to a website or a pay a, you know, a website of, um, certain sized and backlinks become, uh, less relevant or irrelevant. Um, but when w so again, another filter is, is, uh, speed and location. So if, if, so the location thing is if this website, all these bunch of websites that are linking to you, they would probably be already categorized.

Uh, directories or, um, sites that, that we should ignore that, you know, Google, I’ve got this site and it’s suddenly, it’s putting out all of these, um, citations to everywhere basically. And they’ll see that and say, oh, well, I presume they’d see that and say, okay, all of these, most of these links, um, probably don’t [00:18:00] will be citations.

I take the siting, everyone, like. That there’s no, there’s no thought behind it.

You know, it’s a directory, it’s, it’s, it’s a yellow pages. How much, you know, it’s informational, you telling us where, where it is. Uh, and the second point, it was speed of link-building and the quality of science that being built in. So again, if you’re, if you’re the librarian and sitting there, and Sunday, Not a big website.

So just a thin slip of paper, come in with information and then a citation to another website, the website that you’re trying to rank. And that’s fine. You take a look at it and say, okay, that’s great. I’ll put in this section over here. And then suddenly someone else comes in with that. Another bit of paper with the pretty much the same thing written on it with the same citation you go, oh, I’ve seen this kind of before I put it with the other one [00:19:00] and then suddenly.

A hundred other people in the space of five minutes comes in with the same bit of paper, slightly rewritten, um, with the same citation on it, you would just probably just get a little bit curious as what’s going on and put them all together and just say, okay. Um, that’s great. I’ll probably look at these later on.

I’m not going to do anything with the right now. I’ll just let them sit there in the corner and see what happens. And Sunday, you know, all these people are coming in and bringing their bits of paper. And suddenly you got a stack of all of these kind of just bits of paper, just websites that, that, you know, don’t have any volume or don’t have any, um, anything else pointing towards them.

And then you’ve got this massive stack of paper that you just set aside and just leave it to sit there until, um, yeah. Just waiting for you to see what happens. Like what’s, what’s the point in going through this crap when, uh, Uh, you don’t know nobody’s resources, you just don’t have the Google. Do you have the [00:20:00] resources to go through it, but, uh, why, why would you, um, you would leave it to sit there and if, if people continue to keep doing it, then you might start thinking, okay, there might be something here, but if suddenly you’ve built out, you know, a load of spam sites, 5, 6, 8, you know, And the hundreds of you can gain hundreds of thousands of links to one site, and then you suddenly stopped.

Then you’re like, okay, something’s going on here? All of these links or this massive pile of paper, that’s just built up. Um, I can just throw away. There’s no need, it’s all stopped now. And I can just say, okay, this was just a span and just way my there’s no need. And so you kind of fat kind of speed or, um, mass automated, um, Um, link-building might be, uh, uh, considered not useless because I know a lot, but, um, there’s gotta to be a question of, is it [00:21:00] worth it, um, you know, is it worth doing, is it worth building like that?

Yeah. Cause what happens to your website? If you, um, get all these backlinks, uh, At a lot of volume in a really short amount of time. And then suddenly it all stops. What happens to your rank ranking? The way the Google would like it to happen is that they’ve got this massive paper. It hasn’t, it hasn’t counted towards your site either good or.

Ah, okay. So whether they then go back and check all this stuff and decide, actually, this is, this is not good. And we can detect that, you know, this is something you’ve been doing, then they might do something. But they, I think now before they were very much, um, not against, but didn’t really want to use machine learning to, uh, uh, control the algorithm.

Um, Which they switched to you to, to not rely on, or they wanted to be able to understand what was going [00:22:00] on underlying the algorithm. Um, whereas when you’re using a big visit, you know, when you’re using machine learning, you, you might not be able to understand what’s going on. They will make a decision, but you don’t really know why, and they didn’t want to do that.

But now they switched to, to be doing that. And then in an ideal world, um, the way that Google would look at you would not have to build backlinks. Um, it’s actually against, they’re not building backlinks, but, um, on purposely purposely building backlinks is against their webmasters guidelines. Can you, um, explain that a little bit further?

What do you mean by that? Um, Google would like you to concentrate on your work. And then, you know, concentrate on the quality of your website and the quality of your content, and then let them sort out where it should go in the library, because ideally [00:23:00] speaking, if your content is good, you’ll get backlinks anyway.

Um, Google should be Google believe that they should be able to understand the content well enough. Um, decide whether it’s of quality. Um, Uh, present it to the right people for the right query, but that doesn’t always happen. What’s a whole industry built around it. Um, but for everyone listening, uh, you said that it’s against the, uh, well, let’s say Google’s, uh, their, their guidelines to, uh, build out backlinks, but is there, um, any like white hat version of link-building?

Well, according to, according to Google, I actually didn’t know that. Wow. So if you look at, uh, they’ve got a thing on, on quality guide on their quality guidelines and what you’re supposed to do, link schemes and paid links and plugging in the tip, text and linking, and you know, it’s, uh, the black hat stuff.

Uh, [00:24:00] again, it’s not, it’s not black hat. It’s just, uh, What they don’t want you to do? What’s the difference? Um, I think it’s depends on who you speak to like, uh, semantics all, all falling buildings, blackhead, according to Google. Oh my God. I did not know this at all. So, um, what you’re supposed to do is build relationships with people, which is, which is, which is if you have the time and you’ve got a bit.

Um, uh, a website then you’re obviously sharing ideas with other people in your, in your industry and your business. Um, and, uh, and if you’re creating quality content around that, and you’re sharing it with all those people. Then naturally that they should share it with other people as well. Okay. So on that, if we want to encourage, if we want our marketers to encourage customers to [00:25:00] naturally, um, share, um, and link back to their website, what are like main things that they can do to, to like, I guess, get their credibility up their authority up to.

Uh, encouraged backlinks network. Oh, okay. Now work in like the old school sense. Uh, yeah. We’ll ask, you know, talk to people, ask people. So in this world that we’re living in now, it’s probably a lot more, more called outreach. So you’re outreaching to people. Um, Hey look, you know, I’ve created this great bit of content.

Um, check it out. Tell me if you like it. Um, tweet to your followers. Et cetera. And, um, and then, you know, you can go back and then ask them, oh, you re I saw you tweak this content. Um, would you mind sharing a backlink um, on your place to listen, whatever, but I’m just making sure that people know about the content that you’ve created.

So, um, either [00:26:00] via email or, um, yeah. Twitter or any of your social channels, um, and by, um, go to industry events and making sure that people know who you are. Um, and then upkeeping that network. Well, it sounds like a lot. It is. And that’s, that’s why people, people do this. Yeah. No people want to, um, uh, find other ways or easier ways to do things.

Um, and to find, you know, how can I, or how can I save time by automating some of that? I mean, if you’re. People are probably constantly inundated with requests to review this or to test this or to, um, do a demo of this. How, I mean, there’s just so there’s just so much you can do to network during the day before you’re exhausted.

I know you just said, well, then the idea is to automate. Um, but if you’re just starting out. Do [00:27:00] you like if we’re starting from zero, like you have a brand new website, even though your business has been around for a while you have a brand new website. What, what are the first thing? Um, someone can do so again, it depends on what kind of business you are.

And, but it really does depend on what kind of business you are. Um, and whether you’ve got previous customers, if you got a list of, you know, previous customer list or you’ve got any kind of list whatsoever, um, and whether it is in fact, the right thing for your business to be doing okay. So if we’re just assuming that yes, we’ve decided that going after backlinks is, um, ideal, because we want to supplement all of the actual networking we’re doing, what is more important back link, quality or quantity.

So you’re going after a backlink you basically want to, again, talking about the library, you want to get back link from [00:28:00] the same site. That your book is in or your pages in, yeah, I’m talking about the same topic. That is a known book. So, you know, a famous book by a famous author, um, about your topic or the whole book is about your topic, talking out a specific item of the topic and then pointing over to your website, which is also about that topic.

I mean, they must get requests like that all the time. If they’re, if they’re an authority. Well, that’s the ideal situation. So then you can go something a bit lower. So then you’ve got the same section, the same topic. Um, so the same section, the whole book is about, um, you know, a similar topic, um, written by a good author, uh, mentioning your website and then you can go one lower than that.

You know, it’s in the right sector. Um, it’s about, it’s about generally the right topic and it’s written by someone, um, with some credibility, um, and [00:29:00] it’s linking to your site and then step down, you could say it’s in the right section, um, is written by some, uh, random person, but he’s talking about the right topic and it’s linking to your website, you know?

And then on the other extreme, you’ve got something that’s completely in the wrong, um, wrong section of the library. I’m not talking about anything to do with. What your website’s about what your website’s about. Um, and, uh, you know, only linking back saying go here or something, you know, that’s probably not the best quality backlink that you’re going after.

So that kind of relevance and the categorization, because, um, one of the things that Google does is, is they, they do categorize every page that comes in. And put it into place. So you kind of want to hit that, that, that category, the same category and have the whole, you know, the website about it. So if you were just starting off, um, you would try and create a, uh, a pamphlet, so to [00:30:00] speak.

Um, you’re not trying to cover everything in that topic. So if you’re talking, if you want to build a sports website or. Uh, you probably, so if you were thinking about starting a sports website, you probably don’t want you probably in the wrong ballpark though. You probably want to niche down into something much smaller than sports, so you could take that to football, um, and then take that even lower to like, um, Uh, it say premier league, but you know, premier league football is probably the easiest.

Um, uh, or then you could take it down to a club level and say, you know, man city and then just become right. A whole, a small pamphlet or a whole website concentrating on that one particular team. Uh, you know, just becoming the, the, um, the note all in that one particular. To start with your website. If you were building some, some sort of information, then that’s, that’s the way that you’d probably style.

And then once you’ve got that credibility of the go-to place, and [00:31:00] you’ve got all of these places that, you know, this critical credible website, credible author is talking about you as the expert on city that. You know, you’ve got that. You’ve now got that kind of credibility about knowing what you’re talking about about that certain subject.

And then you can start expanding on that. I mean, you can then start talking about, you know, men United or whoever you want to spread out to other teams in the premier. If I was a new site, I would probably niche down as much as possible, become the go-to person in the area. And, uh, yeah. Let’s start small and specific.

Well, again, it’s a budget thing. Oh, if you’ve got the budget, you go everywhere at the same time. Um, you know, it’s a question. Would you, would you allocate that budget again? It’s that? It’s a business trust. Okay. So, um, just to reiterate what we’ve talked about to [00:32:00] boost your authority, you would definitely want to be in listed in directories, especially for a local SEO.

But if you’re, if you are a site that is a, like, you know, a dentist in Cambridge, then you want to be, you want to be in that you want to be listed somewhere. Yeah. So Google knows who you are and you would be listed with all the other dentists. So again, again, relevance, relevance thing as well. Like if you go to a directory site and you look up dentists, then you’ll have a list of all the dentists and you want your dentist to be there and Google my business.

Uh, yes, like, uh, would have said that that was a, yes. You want to claim, claim as many, uh, Google properties as he could, or even, you know, any, any. Any property that’s under your lane. You want to claim that that’s just a branding thing. If you’re, if you’re a brand or you’re in, if you’re a company, then you want to control anything that comes out, uh, So that means grabbing, [00:33:00] do trust signals factor into that, because if I’m looking for a dentist and I see one that doesn’t really like the phone number doesn’t work, there’s no pictures of the outside space.

The there is no office hours or opening hours that doesn’t really give me any confidence that this dentist is bonafide. So does that factor in? Yeah. So you’re talking more of, of, of, um, business page. Yeah. Yeah. So the rec not the requirements, but the best advice for, for a business listing your Google. My business is to fill it out as thoroughly as possible.

Okay. There’s no, but why would you skin Google is giving you this opportunity to present your company in the best light. Why would you, um, why would you half asset, um, you know, uh, build out, give as [00:34:00] much information as possible, um, talking about what you do, um, but maybe not in depth, but using again, using terms that relate to.

What you do. So again, dentists, do you want to be talking about, you know, implants, crowns, and you know, all of those things you want to get into the right. You want to choose the right categories for your, uh, for what you do. Again, dentists, they’ve just like six, seven different categories that you can be in.

So you want to be in all of those. You want to make sure the picture’s there. And especially on top of that, you want to make sure that, um, your reviews are there and that they are active. And active and positive, but if they’re not positive and so there’s different ways to not get around, but to deal with reviews, obviously you’re going to revise it to them.

Try to swap out the problem again, obviously you don’t want to do that public. So one of the things that you can do is to create a, um, you know, a kind of a feedback loop. So if you have a [00:35:00] customer come in, you’re going for review. So you obviously are already asking people for their reviews. So when you do ask April for the reviews, either in the email or by text, and you don’t send them directly to Google, you send them to a page that you.

Oh, okay. Um, and then on that page, you can ask them, how was your experience? Was it a five star, four star, three star? Yeah. And if they say it’s a five star, then you can say, okay, go over to Google. And could you please leave a review? If it’s three star, two star, one star, then you can say, okay, that’s great.

Um, his speak to our customers. And which one, so out the issue and you don’t send them to Google, but then again, there’s sites like Yelp, where it’s all, it’s just people leaving reviews of your product or service and you can’t really, I don’t think you have any control over who leaves what there. So if you’re that’s more public.

Yeah. So, um, for those ones, I would take issue with not issue. I would take notice of what the people are saying and whether it [00:36:00] is an issue, obviously you’re applying, you’re trying to sort out and you’re trying to try to sort out and you’re actively showing the community, um, that you are you’re active.

You’re trying to sort out. Um, and you’re trying to, uh, uh, uh, improve whatever, uh, service or business that you do, but it is. Like you might think that a lot of it is spam or love is unwarranted. Um, but if there’s enough of it, then maybe you need to look at why, what they are actually saying. And whether that, whether it.

It is, could be true. Um, and then, uh, yeah, and, and listen to listen to the feedback that you’re getting. Well, that w are, I mean, how many bad reviews is it take for your rankings to really drop? So there’s lots of things we’re talking, um, uh, maps. Are we, when you say rankings drop, you’re talking. Okay.

Rankings in the maps, but there’s look, there’s a lot of other things that I forgot, but things like, okay, [00:37:00] how many people are actually going through the. Um, so if you ever seen the, the busy times, so is this place busy? They’re doing that by, um, seeing how many people are there. So what are your thoughts on the quality of, uh, press releases?

Basically, there’s a couple of types of services for press releases. And again, it’s about relationships, um, or the one type is about relationships. Do you have relationships or you build relationships to, um, publications? Um, again, critical, uh, publications that people, uh, can watch curried. Um, you know, we’d wake up in the morning and go to, um, for.

Um, and then you’ve got, um, other places where maybe they might be entitled, uh, they news, but people won’t wake up in the morning and read them. You know, they wouldn’t be that wouldn’t say credible more popular. Um, and [00:38:00] so getting onto, you know, the BBC or something like that, um, is a lot tougher than getting onto a small, smaller.

And with the BBC is quite, um, uh, getting a story onto the BBC. Um, you’ve got to know, um, reporters or people who have already got a relationship with the BBC and these days, if you actually try to get their story on VC, you’re probably better off to go with videos. But again, it’s, it’s about having something newsworthy to, to say.

Um, and so it’s not just a. Talking about your company and how great they are. And if you’ve, if you’ve got a company that has done something worth talking about, um, and again, you should get it out to as many places as possible. Um, to try and get it picked up by, uh, reporters of journalists to gain, get some attraction.

If you have a newsworthy newsworthy story, [00:39:00] um, and you don’t show it to anybody, nobody’s going to know about it. So if you do have a newsworthy story, then you want to shout from as many places as you can. And. Uh, eventually we’ll, hopefully it will get picked up on enough fame. What about, I mean, I think for guest blogging, that also depends on the quality of the back link as well.

Right. Um, so it goes guest guest, guest posting again, is, is, is it, is it difficult? It’s probably the first thing. Is it difficult to get that? Backlink, if anybody can do it, then everybody probably has done it. So if there’s a nice big button saying bright for us, or, um, a guest post for us or something like that, then you can be pretty sure that the other hundred thousand people or have many people have seen that site.

And. You know, and that kind of dilutes the whole point of, of getting us a link from that side. That’s why it’s probably not very high quality anyway. Right. [00:40:00] It’s just pretty easy to get. Oh, okay. Um, you just be wary of things that are, see life, be wary of things that they easy.

Yeah, and then it makes sense. Okay. Is it, is it, is it, um, is it easy to get? And so you could grade on that. Uh, so like, um, listings and the local listings are fine cause you’re getting in there, but they’re very easy to get, um, forum posts and block comments. Uh, anybody can do that. They’re very easy to get.

If it’s very easy to get, um, you can be pretty sure that it’s been automated. If that automation then becomes something that everybody can get hold of. Then it just becomes a useless some the search engine or the library is going to fight back and social media, I guess you could see it as just a really easy way to, um, build, add more pages about your website on [00:41:00] other platforms.

Is that, um, good for back, uh, SEO off page SEO. So again, it’s for social, um, and for, uh, building content for social, you’re always looking to talk about what you’re doing. That’s what it’s there for is for you to be social it’s it’s, that’s the whole purpose of platforms like Facebook is for you to. Post something interesting.

Talk about it, share it with your friends or share it with the people in your, in your circle or your industry and get people talking about it. And then they talk about it. Then they’ll share it with their friends and, you know, they might have a website. Uh, linking back to you, you know that, to me, that’s a point of sideshow.

And so when you’re creating content, you can do kind of SEO content, which is built for search engines, not built specifically. And then to back up that content that you built for, uh, You can build social content underneath it, which again, talks [00:42:00] about the same topic or a similar topic, um, which compliments the, the SEO piece and that social content is, is, is built to, um, to be, uh, shareable and say, you know, like funny humor or, um, interesting enough in a funny way.

Um, and then that hopefully would get traffic and then they also have the opportunity to, um, uh, consume more of your content. So with social they’re coming to your website for entertainment. And so you don’t want to be passing them a sales content, um, a lot, you know, um, in your opinion, what off page SEO tactic gets the fastest and best results.

Maybe those two aren’t the same. It depends on what the website is. It depends on what the page is. It depends on the competition. It depends. It depends. So one source of good backlinks is your own website. So to create that and, and also, uh, what you’re connecting your page to and how you’re connect. [00:43:00] What do you mean?

So if you’ve got a website about a cats. Yeah. So you’ve got the page, you’re a brand new page about cats. Um, and if you just put it on your website with, uh, basically like an orphan bay, just there, there’s nothing pointing to it whatsoever. Um, number one, um, Google that doesn’t solely rely on backlinks to find new pages, but, um, Google.

Uh, have other means of finding new pages, but the main way is that they’ve got to be able to find the page in the first place. When you’re building a page, you’ve got to make sure that it’s linked from somewhere that Google already knows about. Um, and they’re interested in, or they’re also interested in what are those pages that are linking towards.

So, um, if you’ve got your dog category page and your, you know, your turtle page and your, um, uh, lizard page or linking to your cat page, then, um, [00:44:00] Google might find it difficult to decide. What category this, this page should be in. Whereas if you’re linking to that page from your cat food, your cat beds, your, uh, how to green cat page and things like that, then there’s no, it’s quite obvious.

And it’s talking about cats and it’s quite obvious what that page is, is, is, is about and where you should put it. Um, and so you can do that from your own website. Um, so you’re saying the best off page SEO strategy is really on page, uh, internal, internal, the. Yeah. And then also, um, from, from the page that, that you’re trying to, that you’re the new pace that you’ve got, the links that are going out, uh, also relevant to the topic you’re talking about.

So if you’ve got your page and then you’re citing a page about, um, you know, tennis balls or something like that. Google will look at that and think, okay, what’s going on? How are we talking? Is sports. I don’t know. But if I, if the page that you’re linking to is, is again [00:45:00] on cat food or different types of cat or something, then they get a fair picture of.

Uh, what that page is about. If you then, um, site similar sites to other people that are in that same category, you know, if you know that the, the expert on cats is this book or this website by this author in this page is the one thing that you should be reading if you’re, and you’re linking to that page.

And that connection is made somewhere in Google’s database, they will have your page and they would be, uh, linked. Can you go overboard with that? It depends. And then obviously, It’s all changing. It’s always changing every day. So there’s, you know, there’s rolling updates. Everything’s changing. Okay. We have, I think we, I did actually venture into the deep end, but this, but I find it really fascinating.

Just generally speaking. Do you have any advice for marketers out there who are about to take on off page SEO? And they’re not quite sure how to get started, concentrate on building relationships, whether that’s [00:46:00] relationship with the list that you’re building. Um, so if you’ve got a list of past customers or list with, um, uh, prospects or anything like that, to concentrate on building a relationship with them.

Yeah. After all of that, even though there’s, there’s so much you could do, um, To, well, I guess manipulate the year backlinks. It’s really all about networking. Yeah. And then, uh, then the question becomes, especially is how can you do that effectively over, over a large number of people. So it’s easy if a small business and you’ve got, uh, you know, local clientele, you know, a local newsletter to going through the doors that, you know, that could be fine.

Um, and you can reach, you know, a hundred people doing that, whatever. But, um, Uh, eventually you’re going to have to come up with a system or a framework to, to get your message out to, um, a lot of people. And, um, the quality of that relationship will probably decline with the amount of people that [00:47:00] you’re talking to.

If you’re just starting out, um, start off, start out small, start out with the people that you know, the people in the people that you know, that you’ve already got a relationship with.

There’s a lot of people that will take your money and not, not produce all those people. You know, there’s a lot of middle men as well. So you’re still people selling the same sort of links. Yeah. I was going to ask you about buying links. Yes or no about her. Good depends. Well, like really? I thought it was just automatically bad.

The industry is built on. Are you like direct buying directly or sort of like an indirect sort of you do me a favor. I do you a favor type thing. Well, originally it was more like, like, like that, you know, you’ve got a friend, who’s got a website and you want to have a back thing. So you make that exchange or you will speak to them.

You buy them a drink or, you know, if you link from here, then from this site over here [00:48:00] on LinkedIn, Um, you know, you’ve got their scheme, so that that’s where it starts, but it’s evolved to that so people can see actually people are, yeah. If people are looking for it, there’s a market for it. And so people are willing to pay money.

It’s interesting. The way you describe it, because when I was talking to Ellen or, and even Ben, we were talking about how buying backlinks is just not a good idea, but you’re, you’re making it sound like it’s just an every day part of the SEO game. Oh, but do you recommend that people, especially new tech companies or new marketers go down that route?

No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t, you need to buy if, um, if you’re, if you’re a market, if you’re in marketing or marketing, then you have to be talking about your product and you were concentrating on your product. You don’t want to be, um, spending money on buying things from other places you want to be spending that.

Uh, concentrating on trying to get the word out about your, your, your [00:49:00] product. And the world isn’t SEO as an SEO is like you are, your job is to, um, uh, optimize content and make sure that it ranks in different places. Then it becomes different because that’s how the industry, this, this, this is how the industry works.

Um, if you’ve ever done any time outreaching to other websites. So say you’re, this is the point that, um, now that you’re outreaching, and as he said that, how do you get people’s attention? So people who’s got this, you know, the cat website, who’s, who’s a specialist in cats, Sunday’s getting hundreds and hundreds of emails saying, Hey, you know, I’ve got this great website about cats.

Can you link out to me? Uh, you know, I’ve got this site about dogs. Can you link out to me? And then at the beginning, people will be like, okay. I, you know, I don’t mind doing it for the cat one. I’m not sure about the dog one, but suddenly hundreds of these. And you’re thinking, okay, There’s a, there’s a, there’s a demand for it.

Um, what happens if I start asking money for asking money [00:50:00] to banks that people want? Um, you know, I just price it at, you know, 20 bucks or 50 bucks or 50 pounds. And then, um, I’ll make some money out of my website. That’s why I created my website. I want to, it’s a business. I want to make money from it.

People are sending me requests for all these links. So why not? I’ll just sell, sell the link for 50 pounds. It doesn’t mean the work doesn’t mean the link is. Um, it just means that you paid for it and that payment, um, has gotten nothing to do with Google whatsoever. Google will probably never know about you handing over the money to someone else for that link.

But just for the record, we don’t do that. I didn’t touch it. I think that we’re veering into a territory that might not be relatable to many people listening. So I might have. And it there, but on not, no, thank you for giving us the analogy of the librarian that really helps. So I let, that really helped me at least, uh, understand off-page [00:51:00] SEO.

Um, and I think our listeners have definitely gained some clarity on the topic. And it’s interesting that you basically just said network can build relationships because it’s, it’s so simple, really. Um, I mean, at least it sounds maybe it’s not. So, Joe, do you have any last minute words before I end the episode?

Um, yeah, so I think especially for marketing managers and social media managers, is that, um, your, your job is probably there to share information about your company and to promote, um, get the word out about your company. If you’re an SEO, then your job is, uh, to worry about building. Um, you know, that, that area of the, of, of what we do, um, that’s not as a market manager, that’s not your job.

Your job is to get your message out in the most effective way and most, uh, uh, budget-friendly way as possible. And our job as SEOs is to, [00:52:00] is to worry about all the on page and all the off page and all of the schemes behind it to, uh, get you where you want. Okay, well, thank you very much, Joe, for speaking to me today.

Um, and we have a few blog posts about this topic. If you want to learn more, which we will be dropping in the show notes. So for episode four, I think we’re having strategy expert, Mark Hawkshaw-Burn on the show. So stay tuned. If you want to take a deeper dive into your keywords and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @GeekyTechGeeks for all things SEO and advertising related. And lastly listeners, just a small favor. If you like, what you heard today, be sure to subscribe like and follow us on apple podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That’s all for today. Thanks very much for listening later, geeks.