Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfugleusercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and then how to optimize your content for traffic and authority. 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 and welcome. Back to another episode of SEO is not that hard. It's me, ed Dawson, here, as usual, and today I'm doing SEO emergency questions, part three. So hopefully you've listened to questions part one and part two, if you haven't. Just briefly, these are some questions that I've come up with that I can ask future podcast guests, which are aiming to get slightly different answers out of people and to be a little bit different from most other SEO podcasts, and so some of these questions might sound a bit weird, but hopefully they're trying to just tease something out of people that you wouldn't get otherwise. So yeah, and there's sort of a bit of either or questions and things like that, but you'll see, we'll start, we'll get into it. So first question today what's the most ridiculous myth about SEO that you wish would just go away already Now. There's loads and loads of myths in SEO, but the one that probably gets my goat the most is that all you need is links, and it's not that links aren't important. Okay, everybody knows that links are important, but for some people, all they're about is links, and people don't concentrate enough sometimes on the content. You can have the greatest links in the world pointing to a blank page. You're not going to rank for much. And likewise you can have the greatest content in the world pointing a blank page. You're not going to rank for much, okay, um, and likewise you can have the greatest content in the world without any links. Yeah, you've got a chance of ranking. You can actually rank a page with great content that has no links. Will it do better once it starts to accumulate links? Of course it will. Yeah, it will work better and improve as it starts to pick up links. You've got to have the content in the first place. So that's why I think and always have believed, at least since Google Penguin. Anyway, my philosophy since then has been very much you've got to have great content first and you can do a lot with content without worrying about links, and good content will attract natural links. Great links will not create great content, so one doesn't beget the other in that way around here. Links don't create great content, but great content will create links. So that's why, personally, I prefer to focus on the content more than anything else, and I think that's really is the way forward to getting the best long-term results for your web.

Question two today so this one is all about links again. What's the weirdest thing you've done in the name of building backlinks? Now, obviously, as I've said, I've always tried to come for content for back, to create content for building backlinks. Um, I've not particularly done anything that I'll call weird.

Probably the one that was most left field for me, most weird for me was when we did the Brighton SEO sponsorship, which allowed us to put an insert into every delegate's delegate bag and, rather than just being a boring leaflet of hello where keywords people use and this is what we do we actually did something completely different, as we put in a scratch card with um prizes. So you know, you've got to scratch the scratch card, see if you're a winner and then you have to claim your prize and obviously, with the scratch card, we made sure everybody was a winner of something, even if it was only a two-week trial of um keyword people use, without any, without the payment. That was the minimum win, but there were so many good wins like year-long pro prizes. We had tickets for future Brighton, seos, hoodies, things like that all sorts. So we did actually put some good prizes up there and it was done twofold One to raise well, threefold really. One was just to raise awareness. Second was to get people to register and to part of the claiming your prize process. It registered you for an account on keywords people use and we got those email addresses that way all up to them, which was great. And also I knew I was hoping that it would also mean we'd get some backlinks where people talked about it and people who saw us with that way for the first time would then go and link to us. So in a way it was kind of like a PR piece aimed at getting users and links and things like that. So for me that's the most left-field, weirdest thing, because it costs quite a bit of money a few thousand pounds to do that and it was a big gamble because I had no idea whether it would work or not. So for me that was weird and very out of my comfort zone to do.

If you want the true example of who does the very weirdest things in the name of building backlinks, I would look at Mark Rhodes, who is kind of the uber genius of doing this. He's done things like he flew from flew from barcelona back to the uk just to get a nando's at gatwick airport and then fly back, flew back immediately to spain, um, and that got in the newspapers. Got in the sun newspaper and lots of other newspapers in the uk, got loads of links. He's put himself on a billboard, a big advertising billboard, looking for people to, you know, to to date him basically, would you date this man? And with a link on it, and that got loads of like pressing, loads of links. So he's done loads and loads of really weird stuff, um, in the name of getting backlinks. So if you want to see, see lots of examples of how weird stuff will work, yeah, go and follow him.

Question three today, emergency question number three if you had to give up one forever, would you stop using keyword research tools or analytics tools? Now, okay, this is I'm going to right. You might think I'd say I'll give up analytics tool being, as we've got a. You know there's a big part of keywords people use as the keyword research tools part of it. But I'm actually going to say no, I wouldn't give up keyword research tool. Sorry, I would. I wouldn't give up analytics. I would give up keyword research tools. And that's because for many, many, many years I didn't use keyword research tools and still managed to do incredibly well build sites to, you know, millions of users, um per year. Sold, you know, sold sites for big, big, you know, chunks of cash. I've done all that without using keyword research tools. I've only gotten into keyword research tools when I was building keywords people use to to answer the question, part of my philosophy. Okay, before that time I never bothered with keyword research tools because of the issues I've always. I've spoken about a lot on this podcast which I won't't go over again what the issues are with them.

But analytics you need because without analytics you're flying blind. If you don't know what pages on your site are getting traffic and from where, then you really have no idea on what's working and what's not. Keyword research tools only go so far. They only give you so many clues into what people are searching for. If you're writing good content and building a good site that makes sense and is answering people's questions, even if you're having to think of those questions yourself. So I'm saying, if you can't use keywords people use for questions anymore, you're still going to do better than not having analytics, because that analytics you do not know what what content is performing well and what is performing poorly and what needs working on. So with that I think you can still.

I would count our content optimization tool and keywords people use as it's more analytics than it is keywords. Because the analytics side of it, you know where traffic is coming from, which pages are getting traffic, which pages are getting impressions, which pages are getting clicks. That is analytics and analyzing the page. Has the page matching keywords? Because those keywords when they're coming through google search console, that's not keyword research, that keyword analytics, because you know you're people are searching for those keywords. Now it's not just a guess, it's not just a keyword research tool telling you what, what's, what this is, that this is the analytics that your site is driving, which is completely different. So when you know you're driving content in a certain topic area from your analytics, that's when you can go through and improve on it. So I would definitely, definitely, definitely say in this case, ditch keyword, ditch keyword research tools, we'll just have analytics tools. If we had to give up one forever and I know who's going to do better, and it's going to be the people who've got good analytics rather than good keywords research tools.

Okay, so on to emergency question number four for the day if you could time travel, would you go back to fix an seo mistake or forward to see future algorithms? Now, this is a really interesting question because it's a case of what's going to give you the best opportunity, because really, one is going back and thinking well, if I just not got that wrong in the past, if I could fix that mistake, would it be better off now? Or, knowing something that's going to happen in the future, could I prepare for it better? And, thinking about it, I think I'd go back and fix a mistake. And the mistake I'd go back and fix will be penguin, because we got, as I've mentioned many times, we got really badly hit at broadband, at credit uk, by penguin because we were doing lots of dodgy link buying and spamming and all sorts okay, which you know quite rightly but then we got slammed for okay and it took a long time to recover. Um, probably a couple of years or more to fully recover. And when we did recover, we did so well, so much better than we were doing before. We were buying the links. So it's a case of, actually, if I could go back and say to myself don't buy those links, don't do that, don't do this, concentrate on the content instead. Then, a, we never would have got hit by Penguin B, we would have probably grown our traffic much better in the time preceding Penguin and then, once Penguin hit everyone else, we would have flown even higher and we would have made probably a hell of a lot more money. So I would choose that because I know what and why.

Because going forward, my initial instinct was probably to go forward and see what, see a future algorithm update. But imagine, a few years ago someone gave the option to go forward and you saw the helpful content update and you knew that was going to come. But, like right now, does anybody know now, even now, how to fix that helpful content update? You know it could be an update like that where there is like you have no idea how to fix it. You have no real even google themselves a bit have no real idea how to fix it, judging by the reports of people that have actually had interactions with them and were invited on those away days to go and talk to the google search teams and stuff.

So I think my fear would be very much going forward. I could just see something that, a I could do nothing about and, b even knowing how it was going to hit, would not necessarily have any clue how to fix or prepare for it coming up, whereas now I could go back and say I'll go back and fix all the issues that led us to having Penguin and I know I would be in a much better situation now. So, yeah, definitely I would go back and fix all the issues that led us to having penguin and I know I would be in much better situation now. So, yeah, definitely I would go back and fix a problem, rather going forward and potentially just giving myself nightmares that I don't want to think about. Okay, that's it for emergency questions today. If you would like to be a guest on the podcast and answer some of these emergency questions in a future episode, then please just get in touch. I'm building a list of people who'd like to be on and, yeah, it'd be really great to hear from people who want to be on, and that's it for today, so until next time, please keep optimising, stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mention here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson on both.

You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online. Post those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority and finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize and continually refine your content and targeted, personalized advice to keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO. Is Not that Hard.