Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content for traffic and authority.

Speaker 1: 1:06

I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello, welcome back to another episode of SEO is not that hard with me, ed Dawson, your host, as usual, and today it's part two of my SEO emergency questions. Now, if you've not listened to the previous episode, the first one about SEO emergency questions, where I explain where the concept of emergency questions comes from and then, just quickly, it's for I'm hoping to start inviting some people on the podcast, create podcast episodes with you know, another voice, another seo expert or another person with any kind of experience level in seo to give sort of different opinions, and I wanted to do something.

Speaker 1: 1:48

I'm trying to come up with a format that's a little bit different and I'm trying to create these emergency questions which came from a podcast called richard Herring's. That's a Square Theatre podcast which is a comedian's podcast. I love listening to it, but he uses emergency questions in his podcast to sort of get different answers out of people, try and learn a bit about people and trying to just do something a bit different. So I'm building a whole lot of questions up that I'm hoping to start using. So I'm running through some of them now just with myself, with you. Obviously, if they're on a podcast with me and somebody else, then they might spark dialogue rather than just being a monologue for me or for the person who's guesting. But I'm just running through some now and seeing how they work with just me. So first one for today. Let's have a look. Where was I going to go?

Speaker 1: 2:38

What's the weirdest backlink you've ever seen, pointing to a site? So this is weird. It kind of made sense when you thought about it, but um, it's to broadbandcouk, to one of its mobile broadband pages. This was during covid and you know, I was looking at backlinks pointing at the site and I'd come across a new one which was from a funeral, a specialist funeral provider, which made me I don't know just I don't know, it shouldn't be weird to think that it's coming from your funeral director's books.

Speaker 1: 3:10

Um, yeah, this funeral director was was pointing links to the mobile broadband part of the site because they had started a specialist service of live streaming funerals um during covid and they would. They would live stream from any any church place of worship and they obviously relied on mobile broadband. So they were saying to people if you want to book us, go to this page. It's got. It's got links to um all the different providers and you can check the coverage at your uh, your church place of worship and see if we're suitable. And it was a good backlink. It was good um, because it was targeted. I had a good anchor text, all these things. But, yeah, coming from the specialist funeral provider who who were doing these live streaming um anywhere in the country they would go to to do live stream of funeral was I don't know, I just found that weird.

Speaker 1: 3:59

Anyway, that's the weirdest one for me, okay. So next emergency question is what's the most outrageous seo request a client or boss has ever asked of you? And for me that would be back at the very start of my SEO journey. That would be back when I was working as the technical director at a London-based marketing agency. I was in charge for the digital side, producing websites, that kind of thing, and they had a very good client base. Um, you know very well-known uh names as well, especially in the uk, things like bafta, who's our equivalent of the oscars, um, and city world cinema is a big, massive cinema cinema chain, interflora in the uk. And we'd have american airlines. We had lots of other airlines and loads of holiday companies, but we had real big sort of blue chip clients.

Speaker 1: 4:50

At that point, se, seo was becoming, you know, search was becoming more and more important for these companies. They'd caught on, basically, and it was coming up more and more, you know, with our bosses when they were pitching and getting requests for information that SEO. We had to stop giving SEO answers, essentially, and strategies and yeah, how. I was basically told yeah, ed, you're now our seo expert. Um, you need to go and pitch what we'll do for seo to some any big cleaner, some big client, and I was just like, oh my god, I've got a lot of learning to do really, really quickly, especially as these were massive brands, and I was like we could just screw this up completely. I'd really have no idea. And that's that's essentially what got me into seo in the first place, and that was a real drop in the deep end. Um, so, yeah, quite outrageous, especially as this was a um. You know they're a very credible company and, yeah, all these big clients and you know they were just shows, they were winging it a bit. Um, I can say this because, fortunately, this company doesn't exist anymore. As is the thing with agencies, they all get bought, sold, go bust, and this agency actually, very fortunate for them, they got really badly hit by the um 2008 financial crash because they had all these travel clients and airline clients especially, and they just lost so much business because of that, because all those clients were pulled back. They limped on, they phoenixed a couple of times, but eventually I think that they disappeared as a company in 2012-ish, I think, maybe a bit later in 2014, but that's just the way of agencies, isn't it? It can happen they can outgrow themselves. But yeah, that was certainly. It felt pretty outrageous to me at the time. I had to sneak and pitch to all these very senior people in these companies and make out that I knew what I was doing. But I'm probably not the first seo that's ever said they knew what they're doing, when really they didn't, because there's a lot of them out there now still okay.

Speaker 1: 6:45

So next emergency question what's your seo superpower and what's your kryptonite? So I think for this, my superpower is probably patience. When it comes to SEO I've said this a lot of times there are no quick fixes. You've got to build for the long term. You've really got to think long term, especially if you want to get the very best results. It's really really hard to do stuff quickly and see results, especially do things quickly that will sustain and last. So having that ability to think long-term even to the point where I'm quite happy to build and put resources into building a site and then just leaving it for a year or more until it starts to build that kind of trust, authority and that time parameter I think that's definitely within Google. The longevity of a site and of pages definitely, I think, counts in Google. It also helps you do things like build up links, build up your content, but not worry about having to monetize it. That's, I think, a superpower having that patience and it pays off in the long run.

Speaker 1: 8:00

I can now look back and think oh yeah, I've got sites now that make really good income and when we launched them maybe eight years I got more of some of them. They did nothing for 18 months, two years, if even more in some cases. So having that patience to just keep them up there and keep plugging out them a bit when we needed to now pays off. So that is, I think, a superpower, because patience is hard with some people, I think. Um, my kryptonite, I think, is outreach. Um, I've never been great at putting myself out there.

Speaker 1: 8:37

Obviously, this podcast this is, you know, it was always a start. This was me thinking how can I outreach to people, how can I get talk to people, meet new people, without having to, you know, go places? Because essentially, as I you probably know, I live in a rural area. It's difficult to get to meetups. I'm not working in office with lots of people. I'm not going to lots of conferences. I do go occasionally, I do try and go to things, but it is harder, especially, you know, a few years ago, when the kids were young. My kids are not teenagers, so it's easy. It's easier to get away. It's easier to get away. They're self-sustaining, they can look after themselves, they need less time than when you've got toddlers, for example. So, yeah, you have to go through that period of literally working at home. Obviously, we've got a team, but everyone works remotely, so you don't have that day-to-day interaction and we don't necessarily have to go out there to outreach clients and stuff. So, yeah, I think outreach is difficult and that again, outreach for some people is brilliant because it, um, it works really well, um, in getting backlinks and those kinds of things. There's, there's people who literally they gain backlinks by just by outreach, by networking, and, yeah, that's probably my kryptonite. That that's probably my kryptonite. That's where I don't do as well and where, if I could be a bit more personable, maybe, you know, meeting more people out, you know going to conferences and being that network which I'm not. So, yeah, so that outreach network type thing is probably my kryptonite.

Speaker 1: 10:07

Okay, next emergency question what's your guilty pleasure when it comes to procrastinating on SEO tasks? So I'm sure everyone procrastinates now and again, some more than others. I don't know how bad I am on the spectrum of procrastination. Sometimes I feel pretty bad. I think I have days when I procrastinate more than others, but I've got two.

Speaker 1: 10:30

Really the one that I do probably all the time is ending up looking at stats, looking at analytic, looking at sales, um, things like that, on a probably much more frequent basis than I should. You know hourly, if not. You know more frequently, and it's a terrible waste of time because you know these things are important to look at and analyze. You know, occasionally, you know when you're gonna get time to really look at what's happening, but just doing it on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-by-minute basis, when you should be creating a bit of content or recording a podcast, or, you know, making calls or anything that's actually productive and useful, whereas you know just checking sales in the last 20 minutes or any sales in the last half an hour, how many people came, how many people on the site right now. These kind of things are not actually productive and they're they're a time suck. You're looking for you're really looking for dopamine hits, aren't you? So that's that's one, that's my, that's my more seo related one.

Speaker 1: 11:29

The other procrastination thing I have is obviously working from home and you're sat in your home environment and I find right, okay, I live in a house with my wife, fiona, and you know I've got two, two daughters to their teenage daughters. They're 14 now, they're twins and you know they all are really into horses. Okay, um, now I don't know if you ever met or spent much time around horsey people. They you know horses take up a lot of time and they spend a lot of time riding, spend a lot of time cleaning and caring for the horses and looking around things like that. So their focus, a lot of the focus on sort of chore type tasks for them, is all around the horses. And we've got our horses at home on the farm and you know that's off. They're doing that job.

Speaker 1: 12:14

So horsey people I find, generally don't do a lot of housework, they don't prioritize housework very much, things like, you know, cleaning the house, sort of the dishwasher, that kind of thing, whereas me I'm not into the horses. You know I do lots of horse related jobs where I need to, like mending fences and, you know, holding onto a horse at certain times when they have to run in the house to get something, but I don't spend a lot of time on. I actually care for the horses. So I end up being the one in the house more and I have a much lower tolerance threshold for dirt, mud, you know untidiness, than anyone else in my family. So I tend to be the person that will go and clean, go and hoover and um. It can be what I. I actually enjoy it, though that's the crazy thing. I actually enjoy cleaning. We've have in the past had cleaners that come in um and I will find that I don't like how they do the job. I don't think they do it well enough. They don't like how they do the job. I don't think they do it well enough. They don't do it often enough.

Speaker 1: 13:12

And I can actually find it relaxing to clean, put on a podcast, so I feel like, whether I am or not, I feel like I'm working. I listen to podcasts better when I'm doing something physical, so I will often be listening to podcasts and cleaning the house. And yeah, that's procrastination and sometimes I can sit here and especially in the morning, I can go. All right, I could do this. I'm tired of that. Clean this. I could sort this out when really I need to be at my desk doing some work. And I had the same thing this morning. It was like, right, I need to record some podcasts today and I did a little bit of housework beforehand, listen to a bit of podcast beforehand, and there was like right now, I've got. I'm going to record some podcasts before I do any more housework, and I said I've got to record too. So that's a long way of saying why procrastination. Um, guilty pleasure, yeah, is probably cleaning the house. Don't know what that says about me.

Speaker 1: 14:09

And before anyone says, yeah, I know that you're meant to all the business books, all the productivity people say outsource anything that you know is repetitive, that someone else could do. You could spend your time doing something else more productive, um, but I think I, I like, I enjoy it, I like getting away from the desk a bit. It gets moving about and, um, yeah, I do listen to podcasts. It's thinking time. So I don't think it's just completely wasted time, but sometimes I can probably spend more time cleaning than I should. Anyway, that's, I think, it for the emergency questions. Today I've still got a load more.

Speaker 1: 14:47

And, yeah, I hope you're finding these interesting. Let me know. I mean, are you learning something? Is it teasing something out about me personally, about my approach to things, how I think about things, how it works in terms of business as well as SEO, that kind of thing? Anything useful coming out of this? Do let me know. Feedback's really important. So, please let me know, but no, until next time, just keep optimizing, stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics.

Speaker 2: 15:17

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleuseilusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.