[00:00:00.730] – Speaker 1
Hello. Thanks for joining ‘Your Body Advocate Podcast’. I am Ruth Cummings, your host. And today I am interviewing my friend Stuart Vickers. We’re going to be talking about the magic of SEO. Let’s take a deep breath to relax. Ready? All right, here we go.

[00:00:24.110] – Speaker 2
You’re listening to your Body advocate telling your body’s side of the story. The podcast dedicated to supporting and improving your body mind connection so you can live a pain-free, passion-filled life dissolving one body tension at a time. Discover the healing properties of your own body language and together let’s explore ways to support and improve essential self talk. Now, here’s your host, master of encouragement and body mind life coach, Ruth Cummings.

[00:00:59.390] – Speaker 1
Stewart, how are you? How are you today? You’re in London, is that correct?

[00:01:03.620] – Speaker 3
Absolutely. Good, thank you.

[00:01:06.190] – Speaker 1
So, and what time is it there? We’re doing this 01:00 my time. And so it’s 08:00 to your time.

[00:01:11.840] – Speaker 3
Just until 08:00 p.m., yeah.

[00:01:13.380] – Speaker 1
Oh, that’s amazing. Well, I’ve always been fascinated with seo and I know what that means, but I also wanted to let our audience know just in case they don’t. So, first of all, what is seo?

[00:01:26.950] – Speaker 3
So it’s basically what sounds a search engine optimization fundamentally is about getting traffic from Google. Now, most people who apply that retrospectively that they’ll have a business or a blog and they’ll build this website and actually expect to get traffic from Google over time. Now, when you first start out, there are tools out there within most website builders that talk about this as in some sort of magic fairy dust. You can then apply to the website. In reality, if you’re not writing about what people are searching for, then you’re not going to get any traffic. And so it was a big game changer for me when I realized if you can just find out what people are already searching for and just write that, then you’re actually going to get a lot more results. Whereas I think most of us come to the perspective of blogging. We’re talking about the day we’re having or what the weather is like, and it’s just chat, which is great if you’ve already got an audience, but no one’s actually going to be looking for you based on those kinds of topics. So search engine optimization fundamentally comes down to addressing finding out what those search queries actually are and then writing the kind of content that’s actually going to rank for those searches on most search engines.

[00:02:38.430] – Speaker 3
In theory, that could be all search engines. Even something like Amazon is a search engine, so you can optimize your product listings like that. But in reality, Google completely dominates the at least at the time we’re talking. Google has something like a 95% market share. So fundamentally, seo in most cases is all about Google, which uses a secret algorithm in terms of how it ranks content. But over the years, people have put a lot of work into trying to reverse engineer that to work out what works. And the fundamentals are really quite simple. So it’s basically writing the content to be as good and comprehensive as it can be to answer a particular question. And then you’re looking at basically trying to get recommendations from other websites so that you basically get voted up higher up on the Google search results.

[00:03:32.830] – Speaker 1
So when you’re talking about, is that backlinks, is that what that means? Is getting people to look at you too? That’s a backlink, is that correct?

[00:03:41.750] – Speaker 3
Exactly. So as seo professionals, we talk about back links all the time, but most people don’t that’s jargon. They don’t quite understand what that means. So the best way to think of it is basically votes of confidence from other websites. This is how Google started 20 years ago, trying to work out if there’s all this content, both targeting, all targeting the same topic, then how do they decide which one should go higher? And so there she took the methodology from academic publishing, where the more times you get referenced and cited, then the better, basically. So in the beginning, it’s very much a case of a link was a link. And so all these seo professionals who were able to work this out then came up with all these ways of exploiting loopholes in the system, basically using software to create thousands of back things. So even today, if you own a blog, then you’ll know that you’re constantly getting all these spam comments, things like that, and it’s all these old methodologies for trying to manipulate the algorithm like that. But fundamentally, it still comes down to if your website gets featured in a major publication, major news site, then that’s a pretty good sign of confidence to Google.

[00:04:54.140] – Speaker 3
So that is a good quality backlink.

[00:04:58.570] – Speaker 1
Yeah, I’ve been studying backlinks for a little while and just seo in general, and I just find it fascinating, but it is quite complicated. I mean, it feels simple, and then I try to do it, and then I fail. And on some of the sites I’ve made, I’ve done really well, but I feel like I’m shooting in a barrel. I’m sorry, not shooting in a barrel the opposite of shooting in a barrel. Like it’s very difficult. I remember years ago, sports massage, it shouldn’t say sports massage. When I looked at a trend, it was deep tissue. So I changed everything on my website to say deep tissue, and then all of a sudden it ranked, and I was like, wow, it worked. And it was very interesting to recognize that it’s really important and it’s a machine and it’s doing that and it’s counting. But then everybody would stuff everything, member would say sports massage, deep tissue, deep tissue. And then I did deep tissue to remember. And there would be more and more of those stuffing, the words keyword stuffing that I don’t think is helpful now. I think probably even dings against you.

[00:06:10.150] – Speaker 1
Is that true?

[00:06:13.170] – Speaker 3
They said the answer to all seo cruises. It depends. What you were saying about the relevance aspect is really quite important, actually. So when I was still learning, I was working for an insurance company, so obviously we were trying to sell home insurance, but you’re not going to rank for home insurance. But over time, we actually dug down into the product and there are tools out there that tells you what people are actually searching. On Google, I found all these little niches of different types, those little sub niches of home insurance. And there might only be 100 200 searches per month for some of these, but if it’s a decent policy at the end of it, obviously it’s a high ticket product, so we don’t care. Much better to sell those. So it’s exactly as you say with the deep tissue massage that you’ve got a broad match of home insurance. I’m not going to compete on that. But as soon as we dug down into these little sub niches, so insurance for a certain type of property, then we’d be number one for that and the big players wouldn’t be competing there. Getting back to your point about in terms of the keyword stuffing.

[00:07:16.710] – Speaker 3
Yeah, there are all sorts of a lot of the old tricks which people say don’t work anymore. A lot of people are still testing them out and often get mixed results, sometimes positive. So I always say you don’t want to be ignorant of any of these little hacks you hear about because quite often you get people with an agenda saying there’s only one correct way to do seo. In reality, what you’ll find is we’re still all dealing with this unknown algorithm. So those who win tend to be the ones who do the most experimentation in testing, which fundamentally comes down to being open to all these old techniques. To actually answer your question, there are now a whole range of what are called correlational tools, where basically, if you take your search term deep tissue massage, this will then scrape the search results for that particular query in that location, and it will look at your top ten competitors, and it will come up with the word count and all the different words that use not one keyword, but multiple keywords. And how many times do you use each one. So that way you basically come up with this perfect recipe based on what’s already working for your competitors.

[00:08:28.600] – Speaker 3
The only issue with that is, of course, it’s a snapshot of what’s working right now. And with all seo, you have this issue where what’s working right now might not be what’s working in two years time. See, after the time being, I definitely say keywords are still really important. Google’s saying what Google says and what actually does often very different. And they’re always talking about they want to move away from the pure keyword based searches to more entity based semantic searches where supposedly it understands the underlying meaning of the words, in reality, it’s still a machine. It’s a machine that’s having to deal with a huge amount of content. So in reality, if you’ve got one listing that matches the actual search term perfectly and uses the same keyword throughout, and another one which has the same meaning but uses a different thesaurus terminology for that particular topic, then you’re probably going to find the more relevant one is at the top. Because it’s a machine that’s yes, no, yes no. So if it’s a perfect match, that’s going to get the benefit.

[00:09:35.010] – Speaker 1
I mean, a flowchart is a flowchart, right? I mean, I agree with you. Like the machine can only go so far. I know the conversation of AI is a totally different conversation, but it is getting closer. But it still, you can’t tell with a lot of search terms what people are actually searching for. If they want an apple pie recipe, apple pie, places to eat. So like there’s different ways that I think they miss. Of course, right now at least still, the machine is going to miss what.

[00:10:10.690] – Speaker 3
Humans feel and so fascinating and very entertaining. It’s a bit like with chat gpt. I’ve spoken to a few sort of AI experts on what they think is happening. And the best explanation I heard was it is just a more advanced version of predictive text on your phone. It does not understand the underlying meaning of what it’s saying. It’s simply good at generating text based on what it’s seen and observed before. So it’s about the sequencing of words, basically.

[00:10:43.770] – Speaker 1
Yeah, I agree. And it’s interesting because there is so much predictability with the texting that it can look at so many, so many different ways of talking to ourselves. What, I mean, ourselves like human to human. But I always wonder about you look back at movies like terminator and how intense this is going to get in the next decade. Look how far the internet has gotten in 20 years. I mean, I remember sitting in my massage office with just a phone waiting. There weren’t even any cell phones, so we couldn’t even leave the office. And that’s a different world than it is today and it is really interesting. So what got you into seo? What started this whole process for you?

[00:11:30.350] – Speaker 3
It was basically by Hangston. So I’d always wanted to be, I guess, some sort of decadent poet, writer, artist type personality. So I always like the idea of being an author, being a writer, just like many young people do grow up that way. And I was studying history of art in London and at the time I just needed a job of some sort. History of art was really not very demanding in terms of contact time. The medics were in every day of the week. I was in I think, one, maybe two days a week and only for a couple of hours, if that. But I was absolutely loving London, so it’s a sense of, I’ve got a lot of time to utilize here, but no budget. So if I could just reassess that a bit, have slightly less time and a bit more budget, then I can make the most of my time in London. And I actually got a job writing. I found a job board that’s specifically for creative jobs, and there’s a men’s accessories brand looking for a menswear blogger. And for years I’ve been busy obsessed with menswear. I was really into the vintage scene victoriana.

[00:12:39.790] – Speaker 3
Her client encyclopedic knowledge of the history of menswear and what went into the modern suit. So it’s absolutely perfect job for me. Very poorly paid, but I could literally sit in the university library, do a bit of my academic work, and then immediately switch over to doing a blog for this company. And they basically explained to me that by writing in a certain way and literally just including these keywords, bear in mind this is quite a few years ago now. So going back to your point about keyword stuffing, there wasn’t any of these correlational tools. It was just can you use this keyword five times and it should be 1000 words long or whatever. That’s when it really struck me that actually, I thought that writing was this fading field, this art, where you struggle to monetize and make a career out of it, and then found there’s a whole field of digital marketing that totally relied on it, at least at the time. Now with chat gpt. It’s interesting. Quite dark to think about that now, but it was a particularly demanding job. And I then joined an online magazine startup, but they were struggling to monetize and eventually they pivoted into what’s called affiliate marketing, where you basically promote products and get a commission if they sell.

[00:14:00.660] – Speaker 3
Bear in mind, it’s digital, so everything is trackable. So you see these on the internet all the time, top ten leather jackets, things like that. It’s all these people who are out to get these commissions. Now, I struggled to see how, again, that point about going deep versus going wide, I struggled to see how this little startup could possibly compete on top ten leather jackets. So going back to my interest in historical clothing and subgenres like goth and metal and cosplay, I thought, I wonder if I could pivot that model to my own website. So I tried doing that instead of doing top ten leather jackets. It was a lot more niche. And like I said, I had this awareness of seo, but I wasn’t exactly sure how it worked. I was still doing what we did as a magazine, which was this was the era of basically BuzzFeed clickbait. So write what you think is an interesting topic, give it a suitably, engaging headline, throw it on Facebook, post it in all the Facebook groups and then get traffic that way, which does get really good traffic. I had one post really go viral, got something like 10,000 views within two or three days.

[00:15:16.290] – Speaker 3
It just burns out until about six months later. I noticed there were certain articles that were continuing to get traffic over time and this one Fortnight really took off. So I think I did an article on fortnite cosplay ideas and somehow down the line that ranked really nicely and ended up getting all these people buying these fortnite cosplay products. So that was the real game changer when I’d seen I’d been grinding away trying to write these short form articles posted on Facebook and then get nowhere, versus one single article that ultimately ranks on Google for a commercially inclined search term people were ready to buy. And that massively outperforms. It’s true pariso principle thing there, where it’s very little work for a lot of long term gain. So I kept trying to make that website work there. I found out there’s a whole community of people out there building these kinds of websites. So I then started another one all about traditional shaving with a bit of an eco friendly emphasis. So I was trying to rank for best shaving brushes and best safety razors, basically the whole niche of wet shaving. But you’ll notice that every single article was either a product review or a best X type article.

[00:16:39.190] – Speaker 3
But that’s because 2000 people a month were searching for best shaving brush. And at one point I think I ranked at number two for it. So that was a real learning curve. I was still working at the insurance company, but at the same time I was building the shaving block on the side and two cross pollinated very nicely where we’ve got this big insurance company struggling to sell home insurance. But then I’m saying I’m setting however many hundreds of shaving brushes a month through. And this is part of the battle with seo that people they just see blogging. Like I said earlier, that blogging is just writing about your day or how the weather is. And it’s this very sort of soft subject that looks good for the brand but doesn’t actually have much to do with sales. But once you see that connection between simply serving and connecting with people already looking for your product, then it makes sense. So we tried some experiments with the insurance company and like I say, it took off both professionally and personally with my side hustle. Those are two very big seo wins.

[00:17:46.770] – Speaker 1
Wow. My husband is in life insurance and so I totally get like that people do not look for home insurance. Like it is not that word. And it’s funny that you’re saying about the shaving. That’s a big thing. I don’t think there’s enough attention to men’s just their looks the way there is for women. My gosh, it’s just oodles and oodles. But I think it’s a great niche that you found. I think it’s really needed. Still. And I just have to point out that my son is also really into the same types of clothes that you are. And he just cut off this much hair to give it to a place that makes wigs for little kids. I know, yeah, very proud of him. And then he also loves fortnite. Same with that same time. And he was, I think he was twelve years old, he started a YouTube channel about something. It was a star wars it was a Star wars game. And he made $2,000 at one penny a view. And I was so shocked, like, what? And it came through my account, of course, because he was like twelve or something. But it’s interesting when you find that little word that people are searching for, like you said with fortnite, just like, it explodes and all of a sudden you’re like, okay, wait, I can figure.

[00:19:22.110] – Speaker 3
This out, is often a complete accident. I feel like I’ve certainly tried hard manufacturing niches. Basically, once I’ve done this in the past, I then thought, right, how can I scale this? How can I automate it? It can be quite cynical about it. You could say I’ve lost that personal touch and I’ve got friends in the industry who are exactly the same. But meanwhile, you just hear this one anecdote from some hobbyist who decides to just blog about their hobby. You think, oh, that’s cute. What sort of traffic are you getting? How much money are you making? But you are making significantly more than I am with a lot more traffic.

[00:19:57.210] – Speaker 1
Yeah, I guess I believe I agree with you that it doesn’t feel like you can or else everybody would be doing it. I feel like I can choose the word. If I study enough, if I study hard enough, if I study seo hard enough, I’m going to know what to choose. And it’s only the ones that like the blog posts that seems so insignificant to me, that blow up. And I’m like, acne was one of the ones that we and all these other we had family love and family different types of trips we’ve done. And the one that was very it is a huge issue with teenagers is acne. And it was really interesting. It was like a side. It was very small. But you’re so good at it. What is the method you’re using? It’s called the power level method. And that’s what your book’s about, right?

[00:21:00.750] – Speaker 3
Yeah. So the Power Leaver method is basically the framework I’ve created for coaches on the basis that ever since I started my agency, I’ve traveled to lots of mastermind conferences and they joke about everyone being a coach these days. It does seem like pretty much everyone has a coach, but who can blame them when we’ve got this information economy, basically, where more and more jobs are being automated. Therefore, everyone’s got to go up a level become a strategist? And why not, when you can serve across the whole world rather than most people still have this idea that you’ve got to work for your local firm down the road, live near the office and go in every day. The coaching methodology is fantastic in that you just take your own unique spin, your own unique framework and apply it, and then you can scale that across the globe and help thousands of people without necessarily having to leave home. So, yeah, I met a huge number of coaches when I first started the agency and I was coming from my perspective as an seo, talking to Public Speaking Coach, that was a great example, actually. I meet this real mix of different industries, different specialisms, and each of them, it would come as a bit of a challenge, but I always say that every niche basically has an opportunity.

[00:22:27.610] – Speaker 3
In seo, you’ve got access to these keyword tools that tell you what people are googling all around the world. So it doesn’t matter how niche someone is, there’s going to be some sort of angle there and often it’s really quite surprising. So I’ve met, like I say, public speaking coach. There are 600 searches per month in the Us. For public speaking coach. Now she’s offering these programs at $10,000. I’m saying, why are you not showing up for Public Speaking Coach? And have a look at the website. Obviously the website looks great, but it’s not from an seo perspective. It’s from a brand perspective. So it’s got her name, it’s got lots of images, but it doesn’t have lots of text saying, I’m a Public Speaking coach by my public speaking coaching. And then the further I went down this rabbit hole, the more opportunities I saw. I met someone who was an intuitive life coach and I had a look and there were search terms out there. Again, 250 searches a month or something like that. So, yeah, I’ve yet to so far I’ve seen a lot of coaches who have got these really high value, high ticket products that are really appreciated by their audience, and yet they are not marketing them effectively through seo.

[00:23:40.620] – Speaker 3
As far as I can see, they rely on basically this social media grind of everyone needs to build a brand and build a personality. But they all talk about the frustration of having to constantly post on social media or rely on referrals, which is this whole art of pitching other people in your industry and trying to get on their email list. Whereas what I can see from my perspective, certainly having been trying to sell home insurance in the past, then seeing some of these coaching terms, I could quite happily sell plenty of $10,000 public speaking coaching programs, given the level of competition I saw for that search term. Far easier than a lot of niches out there that most of us are competing for. So, yeah, I was basically trying to think the way to do seo for coaches is very slightly different to how I do it normally, because, like I said, with an affiliate approach, we are basically trying to build like a media brand. The Shaving site is a perfect example of that. You want to try and cover every single product in the industry, basically. And Google rewards what it calls topical authority.

[00:24:55.690] – Speaker 3
And that’s quite simple in that if you’ve got two websites competing with the same search, and one has ten pages on the subject and one has 1000 pages on the subject, then obviously the 1000 page is showing more expertise, so that gets the benefit. The interesting thing about so it’s always a volume game, and there’s always this debate in seo whether content or backlinks is more important. If you’ve got this set budget, how should you divide it? And there are some people who are absolutely convinced that you should put all your budget on content and just ignore the links. Now, that’s the approach I took for a long time because I was taking this wide rather than deep methodology. It was only when I started link building, because it’s quite technical, quite difficult, I realized just how powerful it was. And I realized that for all the efforts trying to get 100, 500 pages to rank, wouldn’t you rather if just the five most profitable ones actually ranked? In which case you still need to do enough to get that topical authority. But once you’ve got there, make sure you put as much power as you can into your most profitable ones to push them higher up and get the roi.

[00:26:05.550] – Speaker 3
So how does this apply to coaches? Someone who’s a public speaking coach, an intuitive life coach, one of these niches I’ve mentioned, there aren’t really 500,000 topics out there to actually write about. You got what we call the bottom of the funnel content, the sort of commercial intent search terms that people are making who are already looking to buy from you. So if I’m searching for a public speaking coach, if I find a public speaking coach, there’s a good chance I’m going to buy. And then you go slightly higher up in the funnel, and then you got the more what we call info searches, such as things like, how can I be more confident about speaking on stage? How can I find speaking gigs? So generally, I’d say most coaches don’t actually have that much content. They really need to write. It’s probably perhaps five or so commercial search terms. Obviously, there’s different ways of basically summarizing what a particular coach is. He might be intuitive coach, he might be a life coach or confidence coach. So you want to target each of those, and then you want to pad that out with some of this info content, which tends to be lower competition and higher volume, and gives you that topical authority, that sense of expertise.

[00:27:18.070] – Speaker 3
Once you’ve got that there’s probably about 50 pages in total. Then you just want to get as much power as you can into the site from links. So you can basically do that with a mix of PR, outreach, press releases, and this is why I call it the power leaver method. It’s basically rather than just a constant grind, whether it’s little blog posts that people aren’t actually searching for but look good on your website or posting on social media, relying on referrals, checking out your email list if you can just get a couple of these pages that instantly connect with the people who are already looking to buy from you and then hit them with links so that Google actually ranks at the top, then that public speaking coach can unlock that potential traffic of 600 people per month. Now of course, most of those aren’t going to buy, but it’s generally shown that seo actually converts the best because no one likes the ads at the top. They’re never that relevant, whereas the top organic results tend to be really relevant. So it’s not unusual for an seo landing page to convert to 20 30%.

[00:28:24.270] – Speaker 1
That’s amazing. I didn’t know it was that high. For me personally, I always go past the ads if I search or something, I go past all where it says ad and I go for the first organic, first ten. Sometimes I even the dead space go to the next page to see what’s on that next page ranking. But I didn’t realize it was that high. It would be 100%. But it really makes sense to me. If I’m searching for something like that and I find something that matches what I feel I put out there, then I’m very intrigued. So if they then continue to match my emotional desires, if I want to, especially in coaching, like if I really want confidence, or if I really want to find someone who can help me with business strategy or different types of entrepreneurial issues, then I will follow that 100%. So that’s interesting. How much is the emotional, I don’t know, the emotional pull of people, how does that play into seo? Can you predict that? Because that’s what I work with is just the emotional body and how we hold things in our body. If I know what my client how they might feel in their body.

[00:29:48.950] – Speaker 1
Can I use different words, do you think, to draw that certain person towards me? Do you think I could use that as an seo tool?

[00:29:58.410] – Speaker 3
Yeah, I always say that Alex talks about telling people what they need, so you can then provide them with other way around it’s, sell them what they want, so you can then provide them with what they need. So yeah, I’ve actually got a spirituality website. So you get this huge mix of again, it’s not really my field, but I’ve got basically recruited writers who are experts in those fields. And I think fundamentally it. Always comes down to what is this person searching for? But not in the simple sense. We can see exactly what they’re putting into Google, what they’re actually looking for, what they actually want to need, is another matter. And if you can unlock that, then that’s huge, both in terms of how you can help them and how you can potentially monetize that.

[00:30:51.530] – Speaker 1
How do you get good at that? Because you obviously are good at it and you might not even know that you’re being good at figuring out people’s emotions, I think, because it’s not just the words that people are searching for, but the meaning and emotion behind it. What do you think about that?

[00:31:07.040] – Speaker 3
Yeah, to your point about how you can type the same thing into Google but have very different meanings, and then Google’s struggling to work out which of those options you’re actually looking for, especially when you’re building a team. It’s quite difficult to outsource that bit when, again, you can see the words on the screen, but the underlying meaning might be slightly different. So going back to the point about skipping past ads, got to remember that Google, this is our whole business model. They do say Google is a user experience company, not an advertising company, obviously drives billions in revenue through those ads, but only does that because of that massive market share, and it’s got there to maintain the quality of its search results. So therefore it’s not always perfect, but it is very good. If you compare it to, say, I’m saying this before, chat gpt has been integrated, but we laugh about being just not being very accurate and that’s why it’s not got this reputation. So, yeah, I always say to people, if ever it’s unclear, especially my writers, if you’ve been given this topic and you don’t know quite which way to take it, put it into Google and the machine will tell you which results have been getting the most engagement.

[00:32:25.920] – Speaker 3
Because Google is working in all sorts of different ways when it ranks content, so it’s looking at all the people who are making that search and what they’re actually doing on the page. So Google will be basically constantly a B testing with different results. So if there’s a word or a phrase with a dual meaning, probably try out both those meanings and then work out which one gets the better engagement. That way, when you talk about is.

[00:32:52.850] – Speaker 1
A phrase or a word better? If someone’s building their website, I’m redoing a website right now. Are phrases better as my main keywords or as one word?

[00:33:07.590] – Speaker 3
Yeah, I would say that a phrase is a keyword, basically. I don’t even like to use the term keywords because it is a bit simplistic like that. I do think of it as search terms or search phrases. I try to be quite clear in the book about that, because if you’re typing in this long question search and then you can provide the answer to that question and that’s really powerful. But equally, all these keyword tools try and condense all this data and say there’s 500 searches per month for Public Speaking Coach for example. In reality, none of these databases are capable of tracking all the different variations of that keyword that people are searching. So if you actually already have a website for getting traffic and you go into what’s called Google Search console, it’s like the back end access Google to your website. You’ll get all this data on all the different searches people have made. Now when you’re optimizing, you can only really pick one of them. You’ll still rank for the others by default because someone who’s trying to rank for Public Speaking Coach will therefore also rank for how much is a public Speaking Coach.

[00:34:20.910] – Speaker 3
Where should I find a public speaking coach? Who is the best public Speaking coach? So I’ll generally pick one of those. Quite often the answer, the one you want to optimize for might not necessarily be Public Speaking Coach because that might be people who are searching for jobs or how to become one. As opposed to this is a buyer intent, which is, I want one. Quite often there is no perfect answer and yeah, you will have to accept some dilution there that you’re casting your net wide and any sum of those will represent your perfect customers. But yeah, I always say when selecting keywords, when you’re using one of these tools, you want to go for a mix of basic good volume, high commercial intent, so high likelihood of actually wanting to buy, and low competition. If you can get all of those as best you can, then that’s your best bet.

[00:35:19.170] – Speaker 1
What is your favorite tool? Do you like Ahrefs? Do you like Ahrefs or ubersuggest now is on the market these days. I guess it’s all yeah, I use.

[00:35:30.370] – Speaker 3
Them ahrefs all the time. I think a lot of people are moving over to Semrush. sem. Everyone has a different way of pronouncing these Semrush. Semrush I still like AHS. Yeah, I don’t think there’s a huge difference in the tools they come and go in in fads basically. Semrush actually is quite interesting. I think they’re phased out now, but they had a 40% recurring affiliate program. So everyone was promoting Semrush way back before it was actually deleting tool when you say hrus was much better, but because everyone was this is an interesting thing of how Google works in terms of how language processing works. Again, just understanding the relationships between words because of the machine, because every article was saying semrush is the best keyword tool out there, therefore Google is actually rewarding. If you then went and says AHS is the best, then you’re kind of out of kilter with how Google had interpreted that data. So that’s basically why all these web pages look the same on Google. Not only because the writers are basically semiplagurizing each other, but Google has actually got its understanding of how the information structures work, how this concept of entities.

[00:36:58.050] – Speaker 3
So, yeah, getting off topic, that’s very always very interesting. But yeah, you notice that these all these articles have the same structure and that’s because basically we’re educating Google on information. So therefore, to rank on Google, you need to reflect the same information back to it. But yeah, for me it’s ahrefs bm. I can’t really comment further than that. But if it works for you, it works for you.

[00:37:25.690] – Speaker 1
Yes, I like, I mean, I only use it one month a year for $100 and then you can use it for the rest of the year because you can put in one website and it’ll check it for you for the whole year. So that’s pretty nice, but it’s not something that I can afford all the time. But tell me more about so for your book, why did you write it? It was because you had all these ideas and so many people want to write a book. I want to write a book. How did you get to that place where you were able to take all this information and go and be able to get it so that it’s understandable for all these coaches out there that sure need the seo? I very much agree with you that we could all utilize your services. So how did you do that?

[00:38:18.730] – Speaker 3
Yeah, it’s definitely not a grand work of literature. There’s still a big part of me that wants to be this literary figure, author, whatever. I insist that the paralegal method is not part of that ambition. This is purely a strategic business move where, like I said, I noticed I was saying the same things, having the same conversations with all these coaches. So I find out, just put into a book for you. I will literally lay out all my recommendation because it’s the same recommendations I’m making every time. And in my mind it’s pretty simple. So if you can just lay it out in that framework and of course, there’s a commercial interest, if people then struggle with implementing that, then they can come back to me where my agency can basically implement it for you. Yeah, fundamentally it’s a very simple framework. So it’s actually at a mastermind that I was motivated to write it and someone said, how quickly do you think you can have it done? So I thought, Well, I’ve got this six hour flight back to London that night, so let’s just open a beer on the plane and start typing.

[00:39:28.050] – Speaker 1
That’s amazing. Good for you. That’s great. Focus.

[00:39:32.450] – Speaker 3
Yes, I did finish it then, but I got about 5000 words in. Frankly, the problem now is I think it’s still that emphasis on substance. I’m still in the final stages of it, but it’s still not a particularly big word count, which of course is totally fine. People prefer information rich as opposed to being nevously padded. But there is still that pressure of people do get physical copies of it there and you want it to be reasonably substantial. So you look at lots of these business books for entrepreneurs, there’s lots of bullet points. All these methods of expanding it a bit. If it’s too thin, people won’t value it. You got to give the sense that the substance actually reflects in the physical mass of the book itself. But no, the actual approach is really quite simple. It is just finding out what your target audience is searching for. I think that’s the biggest challenge we all have to overcome. I certainly did in the beginning, going back to the fortnight thing where I was probably writing something like Top Ten Top hats or, I don’t know, best steampunk Boots in the early days of the website.

[00:40:47.880] – Speaker 3
Without realizing that barely anyone was actually searching for those. Not realizing there’s these other niches and cosplay things like that, which had huge volumes. So I think there’s a danger in ignorance and that you think you know your audience and you start writing for them and sometimes you’ll be right, but I think most of the time you’ll be completely wrong. So it’s a game changer when you realize there are tools out there that tell you exactly what people are searching for and so you can tell what’s got ten times the volume and often possibly less competition. You can be much more strategic that way. Then you just got to write that content in the right way. So, like I say, there are tools that do this for you. You basically look at the top ten results in Google for that search term and basically try and mirror it. So the headings, the views, the structure, the word count, then we get on to actually pushing those articles up the search results, which is just the the backlinks. And that’s the the context bit. Because even top seos still struggle with link building. And basically what it involves is reaching out to hundreds, typically thousands of websites.

[00:42:00.220] – Speaker 3
The conversion rate is really quite low. Anyone who owns a blog nowadays has got these emails saying I will write a high quality guest post for you, et cetera. If you say yes, you then find it’s not that relevant, not very well written, and then it’s just big time suck, basically. So it is quite difficult to do. And in the first place, you need to basically try and scrape a list of websites to reach out to in the first place. So it’s quite a long and technical process. I pushed off for years and then started it. It was only a couple of years ago that I finally started it. And that’s basically when I started the agency, when I realized this is a very scalable process, it’s intensive in order to basically reach out for one website. But as I then had a portfolio of websites I was then basically building these relationships with all these different webmasters. So it’s almost like a PR network, if you like. So therefore the recommendation in the book to coaches is, yeah, try and reach out to all these other bloggers and website owners in your niche. But equally there’s a very subtle call to action that we can assist you with that if you struggle because it definitely is a grind.

[00:43:19.130] – Speaker 3
Got to be careful in terms of what I say. But there’s always the issue over paid links. Lots of people think you should never pay for a backlink because Google says you shouldn’t. In reality, everyone has to pay for backlinks these days. A few years ago you could do some genuine outreach with guest posts, things like that, and you could get free backlinks. But these days people know the value of those things. So I do know people. You still do it entirely that way, but it’s very difficult to do at scale. Payment is one method, but you’ve also got all these other methods of different modes of exchange in order to negotiate with the webmaster, whether it’s social traffic or linking to them so they link to you. I would not shy away from any of those tactics just because Google says you shouldn’t. Because as we know, Google says a lot of things that are actually very difficult to police. So ultimately you do need to grow your backlink profile, otherwise you won’t rank.

[00:44:24.590] – Speaker 1
Can you get a backlink without knowing it?

[00:44:27.650] – Speaker 3
Oh, definitely. I often get clients reach out to me saying I’ve got all these spammy sites linking to me. Whether it’s almost like fake medium blogs or voucher code sites, things like that. You get some that come up over again that just almost I think they’re basically just bots creating these little links, saying it’s fine, every website attracts these links over time. Also, people who are using these automated there are automated link building tools out there which will basically create fake blogs. Now in that they’ll typically link, they’ll link to their own sites to give themselves backlink. But in order to disguise it and mix up a bit, they’ll link out to other sites as well. So websites are linking to each other all the time, quite naturally. That’s one reason you don’t need to worry too much. People always think you need these perfect links, otherwise you’re going to get penalized by Google. In reality, every site out there has got a whole basket of different links. Some are good, some are bad. There is a bit of a mess for that sign. That’s natural.

[00:45:39.610] – Speaker 1
I didn’t realize how important backlinks were. I guess I’ve known, but it does sound like quite a tedious chore to get to get them without I guess that’s why you’d hire someone like your agency, because that’s definitely not something I have time for. I could do a few, but those would be the organic ones that.

[00:46:07.390] – Speaker 3
In an ideal world, we’d all write the very best quality content we could. The ranks gets visibility, and then other people naturally link to it. But that is a very slow process. I’m always saying to people, yes, there’s an expense involved with link building and a degree of risk, but I take both of those over. Sitting on the sidelines with a website that’s not actually getting any traffic, whereas, yeah, you only need one or two pages to really push up to page one to totally transform your business.

[00:46:41.450] – Speaker 1
Wow, that’s so very cool. I wanted to you and I had talked about a question, one of my we’re almost out of time, so I just wanted to ask this, and I know you might not have thought about it, but in my opinion, I see seo. I equate that with how the body reacts to the world. And so, like, a website has good search engine optimization, so it’s optimized to communicate. And how would you compare that to a human communicating and any insights on that conversation?

[00:47:21.450] – Speaker 3
Definitely element of sort of alignment and manifestation with it. I think I always say that. Again, big problem I see with coaches is they’re just not writing content. So, like I say, your public speaking coach, intuitive coach, whatever you got, your very nice, beautifully designed homepage, it’s all about your brand, your personality, but it’s not saying, this is what I am, this is what I do. Here are the services I offer. And so, yeah, to your point, I think it’s much the same with the rest of our lives. We’ve got to show up in order to actually get where you want to be.

[00:48:04.150] – Speaker 1
Interesting. Yeah, I agree. Anything else you want to share or where can we find your book? And I know all the links are down below, but just in case someone can’t see the links, how can they find your book? And how can they get a hold of you if they want to hire you or ask you more questions?

[00:48:22.430] – Speaker 3
Yeah, very simple. So the books@powerleavermethod.com, it’s all one word. You can also, if you Google me, stuartvickers.com information on how to reach me there. Now, in terms of any of those, just think about your last question. Actually, I think there’s just a sense that we’re always looking for answers and certainty. And so I think the aim with all this is just try and become an authority. And that doesn’t matter whether you’re in person or on the Internet, and be become an authority by fundamentally answering the most questions in your niche, in your field.

[00:49:02.890] – Speaker 1
Okay, let me repeat that to you, because that was very important to my little brain. So the most important thing is to have to create authority, whether it’s online or in person. And how you do that is by answering the most important questions. The most of the most important questions that people are asking in my niche is that correct? Did I say it correctly?

[00:49:24.180] – Speaker 3
Yes, I say it’s qualitative as well as quantitative.

[00:49:29.410] – Speaker 1
Okay, yeah. So not 80, but like you said, eight, but very quality and right on point. That’s way better than spending all that time on the 80 that no one might be looking for.

[00:49:43.350] – Speaker 3
People wonder, is seo dead? Is it a fad? But people always have questions, and like I say, seo can be applied. We talk about Google, but there’s other engines out there, just like Amazon or YouTube itself is a search engine as well. Even though it’s owned by Google, it’s got a slightly different own tricks in terms of ranking. So, yeah, people will always be looking for answers. So it’s just a case of digging down and working out how these algorithms work so that your answers can reach them.

[00:50:15.390] – Speaker 1
Do you know anything about the pinterest algorithm or not? Algorithm? The search engine, I mean, pinterest, I.

[00:50:20.930] – Speaker 3
Don’T I know it used to be really good and powerful and then it updated and lots of people got very frustrated. That sounds very aged, but actually it was only a couple of years ago, people were saying, Google can update any time, so make sure you build a pinterest following as well as a backup. And then since then, I’ve heard people just got completely annihilated on pinterest.

[00:50:42.810] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s as if they were fighting Google and pinterest. Who knows if that’s true? But one didn’t like, well, Google of course is higher ranking in all respects, but pinterest was doing really well and just kind of quietly having a huge search engine. It’s really fun for me. I mean, my daughter and I think we almost have 100,000 pins on our page. It’s so much fun. But it’s all visual. It’s all visual and not all you can find really great recipes and really great places to steak, incredible craft ideas. It’s a really fun place for the things that I like to do as hobbies. But I was just wondering if you knew anything, is that a good place to rank? Is it the same type of thing or you just kind of find the best what your audience is looking for and then using those words, same thing, would you suggest?

[00:51:37.770] – Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, not an expert, but every algorithm is just an algorithm. It’s been trained on how to rank these things. So if you can just reverse engineer it, basically, you don’t have to. There’s already going to be a huge number of people already doing that. Just in the last few weeks, there was a major leak from yandex where basically the whole code for yandex’s ranking algorithm was released. So that’s the Russian search engine basically equivalent of Google and actually employed a lot of ex Google employees to build it. So the seo community has completely dived into it on the grounds that it’s believed to be a very close mirror of Google’s own algorithm.

[00:52:19.350] – Speaker 1
Wow. The little spy stuff happening all around us.

[00:52:24.250] – Speaker 3
Most of them is not even that difficult. It’s simply work out what’s working and break it down. Simple as that.

[00:52:31.290] – Speaker 1
I love that simplicity is best. Well, Stewart, it was great to have this talk with you. Thank you for being on my podcast and talking to our audience and I will see you in Miami again. This is very exciting and I have all of your links down below in the show notes and I hope that if people need information about seo or you, they will contact you. And thank you much for being here.

[00:52:56.580] – Speaker 3
My pleasure.

[00:52:57.260] – Speaker 1
Thank you.

[00:53:01.750] – Speaker 2
Thank you for listening to your Body Advocate with Ruth cummings. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today and truly believe you can live a pain free, passion filled life. To connect with Ruth, work with Ruth, or to grab your free e-book, go to ruthcummings.com. We’d love to hear from you. Don’t forget to rate, review and subscribe so you don’t miss our next episode. Until till next time, friends. Be open. Include the unincluded, think outside the box and spread love and kindness one smile at a time.