Bad Competative Analysis and Keyword Prominence Vs. Stuffing - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 14

Hi, welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Yes, thank you for joining us again for another fun-filled edition of our SEO Podcast. I think I left out eWebStyle from our title there. Oh yeah, by the way, we are eWebStyle. I am Chris Burris, the owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, sales manager at eWebStyle. We have a wonderful, fun-filled podcast for you today. You guys are going to love it. We've got lots of information. We're making it all up on the fly today. Is that right, Paul? That is right. So what are we going to talk about and why today? Well, you know, we didn't select a news source today. Is there any piece of news that you can talk about? We don't have a title. You know, here's something very interesting I just learned from a very good friend of mine. It's Easter Friday. We're the only people in here. That's right. And it turns out, apparently, that Easter comes from Ishtar. I didn't know that. The phrase Ishtar, goddess of fertility, et cetera. Oh, okay, I've heard of the goddess of fertility. Right. And the name Ishtar, Easter. Easter. Okay, makes sense. Easter, Ishtar. I just thought that was pretty cool. So this will be our Ishtar Easter podcast. Ishtar Easter podcast. What kind of word is Ishtar? Ishtar is Eastern. Okay. Eastern, that works for me. I'm not going to debate that. We've got, it's actually pretty cool. My neighbor has, like, his entire yard is full of all the plastic eggs. Like the little Easter eggs for our kids? Yeah, yeah. And it looks really cool. I'm surprised the kids don't run and steal those. It's really festive. Yeah, well. See what's in them. Our neighborhood has a history of shocking kids. Oh, okay. So they're well-behaved in our neighborhood. Oh, wow. It's a good thing. I didn't grow up in your neighborhood. So a little bit about what we did last time. We talked about the Google Keyword Selector Tool. And we went in pretty good detail. It's

a very powerful tool. If you're looking for, you know, good keywords or good alternative keywords or you're having a hard time just kind of brainstorming and coming up with keywords, definitely try out that tool. And if you're doing any kind of SEO, you should be using a keyword selector tool. I would not recommend selecting keywords on the fly. Or if you select your keywords on the fly, then go back and research them using some keyword selector tool. Because you might, you could be surprised as the words that might apply to your industry may not be relevant or not relevant. But they may not get. Yeah. It may not be obvious. Yeah. They may not get a lot of searches. I mean, we're pretty creative here. And so, you know, we usually come up with really good keywords. And then we like to go back to that keyword selector tool and just make sure we didn't miss anything. And there was a really good example of HVAC and mechanical contractors. Heating contractors, air conditioning contractors, HVAC contractors. And plumbers. Yeah. I mean, they all kind of do something similar and have a similar expertise. And they can all kind of work in each other's fields. And that's something I didn't know until I actually went and did the research using a keyword selector tool. And if you're confused, just check out our last podcast. What is the title of that podcast? I don't remember. I don't remember the title. Just go to the one before this one. I know the title. It was The Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. So find that one and you will be able to find that example. It's actually our podcast 13. 13. Unlucky 13. Okay. All right. Well, we're past our 13th podcast. This is really awesome. We're moving on to our podcast number 14. That's right. And this one is going to be on competitive analysis. Now, what is competitive analysis and why does it matter to me, little old Joe the plumber? Well, first off, aren't you just

really intrigued? We're competitive analysis. That sounds like, you know. We're going to beat down the competition. We're going to be watching the football films before we play the team. I like that. This is the competitive analysis that we're doing. Like football film. I like that analogy. We're going to take them out. So first, we've got to do a little competitive analysis. Well, competitive analysis, of course, could mean a whole lot of things. We did some research and just wanted to see what other people thought. So we Googled competitive analysis of websites. We found some, frankly, useless tools, unless you're in a huge corporate environment. So let me, you know, I say useless just because we typically are in a dynamic environment where we don't have to create fancy and almost useless graphs so that we can prove that we need to redesign our website or that a customer needs to redesign their website. And so this tool really just went in and said, okay, give a ranking of your website on aesthetics, give a ranking of your website on ease of usability, give a ranking on your website of, you know, language errors. And then you would do the same, you know, one to five analysis of your competitors and then that would make a real pretty graph and you could take it to your boss and say, look how desperately we need to redesign our website. Right, this is ridiculous. So you mean I have to actually input all of these values and this software just graphs my values. But really nicely. I'm sure the graphs are really, really impressive. I'm sure those graphs are worth 400 bucks or however much that software was. Yeah, and, you know, your boss is used to really fancy graphs. If they don't look fancy, then the information must be useless. Yeah, of course. Blah, blah, blah. We are talking about, you know, maybe you're presenting to them AIG. Yeah. Executive. And if AIG is looking fancy, hey, you know, come on. What is this napkin graph telling

me I need? I need, you know, paper and reams of color printed out paper and it's got to be glossy and then I'll look at the data. And then give me my bonus. Because I know how to look at really good graphs and make you work hard for that. All right. So competitive analysis, you know, that is obviously one way you could do a competitive analysis. And really kind of that's the foundation. You know, you want to look at other websites that are maybe, if you're not with us, beating you on search engine optimization. So they're in position one, you're in position 30. You're like, okay, well, why is the guy in position one? Why are we in 30? Here at eWebStyle, we actually take competitive analysis another step further, which is, okay, you know, position one may be great. It's actually potential, and this is a stretch, but let's just use something more reasonable. Position one and, say, position five. It's possible that position five could make a whole lot more money than position one. I think that's very, very possible. And the reason this is what we talk about in eWebStyle every day is, okay, great search engine placement and great traffic does not equal sales. Of course. You're 100% right about that. It doesn't equal, you know, the call to action. Maybe sales isn't your goal. Maybe you just want people to sign up and get a free membership or whatever your goal is. Because if you've got, you know, position one or five, I'm telling you, the website that is better put together, that has clear calls to action, that is less distracting but still very informative is the one that's going to get better results. Of course. You know, I like the, I've heard, I'm sure everyone's heard the phrase, you know, if you build it, it's not, you can't just build a website and expect traffic. And I'm going to borrow from that, just because you're in the best position doesn't mean they're going to convert to a sale

or do, you're not going to get a goal or a newsletter sign. Call to action achieved, yeah. No, that's a great example because it isn't just about traffic. It's, you know, we want to work towards traffic and then we start the process on day one, but we specifically meet with our clients on a regular basis to see, okay, now that you've got great search engine placement and you're realizing in your reports that great search engine placement and the traffic that it's bringing, let's see what we can do with that traffic. So that's where we really get into competitive analysis. But typically competitive analysis has more to do with, you know, why are you on the first page of Google or why are they, you know, typically in this scenario, why are they on the first page and you're not. And what are they doing that I'm not doing? What are they doing that's helping them? And if I'm not doing it, let me do it so I can beat them. Exactly. And there's a couple of things that you're going to look at. You're going to look at, you want to pull up reports on what are inbound links, you know, how many inbound links do they have, what are the value of those inbound links. And that's specifically for Google. You also want to look at, well, there's a lot of tools out there. There's a whole lot, if you Google competitive analysis websites, you could go ad nauseum. There's a tool that we've used here on and off for a very long time called Web Position Gold. They have a really nice tool where it's called Page Critic and it actually will go in and say, and this is the advantage of a company whose focus is to write the software. What they do is they go in and they say, okay, we believe that one of the things that Google looks at, because it's not published, but they believe that one of the things that Google looks at is the frequency of

a particular keyword in your title, in your heading, in link text, in hyperlink URLs. That would be the actual URL of the web page, and in body text, and so then they say, okay, well, we think those are the important things. Let's kind of create some ratios and understanding about that. So let's go, let's say, to the person who has the number one position for a particular keyword, and we're going to analyze that web page, and we're going to say, okay, how many times did they use the keyword in the title? What was the word count, so how many words were there in the title, and what is the ratio of the keyword to non-keyword words in the title? And they'll do that analysis, and they'll do it in the heading, they'll do it in the link text, and they'll do it in the body text. And so when they do all of that, they come up with these guidelines, and they say, okay, well, you know, we looked at, we analyzed 100 of the number one position websites, and according to our analysis, these are the optimal amounts of keywords that should be here, they're the optimal amounts of word counts that should be there, and ratios. And then you don't only compare to the first position, you also compare to, you know, the 50th position, just to see if your assessment is correct, and, you know, having a different value than that which succeeded on the first page actually causes you to fall off. Is that, if that, is that what makes sense? Did I explain that well? To me, that sounds great. In our previous podcast, we've stressed, you know, keywords, keywords, keywords, you can't really put enough importance on keywords, and this tool is phenomenal, because it'll tell you, hey, this is what the other team is doing with their keywords, like watching film. What are they doing with their keywords? Let me make sure that if their website is quote-unquote successful in their ranking, what can I duplicate, what can

I borrow from them, so to speak, to duplicate that success? And I think that's a, I think it's a great tool, and I'd recommend anyone use it. Now, I'm not sure if, I mean, if you're Joe the Plumber, Mom and Pop, are you going to actually have the time to, are you going to take the time that we take to actually sit and do this? I'd probably say for the most, most people, probably not, which is why you'd come to a company like eWebStyle and say, hey, do this for me, let me run my business, but it's a great tool. And there's always, yeah, it's a great tool, and there's always a learning curve, right? Of course. We have already climbed the learning curve, so, you know, we don't, you don't get charged when you're working with us for climbing the learning curve, and you're not wasting your time trying to climb that learning curve. And one of the things that's particularly challenging about search engine optimization is the, typically, the way you climb a learning curve is you try something, and you look at the results. And you try something, and you look at the results. And you wait, and you look at the results. Exactly. With SEO, that wait, that wait period is you try something, you wait two weeks, three weeks, maybe a month. Then you try something else, you wait that same period of time. And so you're really, your learning curve, it's not that it's any steeper, it's worse. It's actually longer. It takes more time. It's slower. It's not, you know, you don't have to be brilliant to be a good SEO person. You know, we got our webpage up in a week. Yeah. That's easy. The challenge is actually knowing what you need to do, and then doing it over the long haul. And so that's, you know, that's where we say, hey, use a professional, because you're going to spend a lot of time, a whole lot of time, doing that optimization. So, for an example, we

just ran a report on one of our clients on one of the pages, and it gives information like, okay, keyword frequency. It says a keyword frequency of one is suggested for your title area. So that's just saying, whatever your keyword is for that page that you're optimizing, you should at least mention your keyword once in the title. To me, it seems obvious. Obvious. Yeah. I mean, if title's important, and you're trying to optimize for a keyword, maybe we should throw our keyword in the title. The next thing it goes over is word count. So its recommendation is to have six to nine word count in the title area. So although you may only be mentioning your keyword once, you should have a total of between six and nine words in the title area. So that makes sense. And then a keyword prominence is where it starts doing the ratio of your keyword to words that are not keywords, and its recommendation is 60%. So this is a really good tool because it tells you, okay, this page is spot on, this page does have the keyword in the title, or it doesn't. How many words are there in the title? And I see on this one we actually need to add a couple more words to that. We can do that before we're done with the podcast, actually. And then we'll see the results in a month. We'll wait. We'll see how it goes. And then keyword prominence is, again, the right ratio. And, again, these are not hard and fast numbers. This is not like Google came out and said, look, in order for a page to do well, you need to have your keyword once in the title. And you need to have between six and nine words in the title. And your keyword must be 66% of the title. Those, you know, Google doesn't say that. This is just what they've kind of figured out or extrapolated from running their analysis of existing page one web pages. Keyword frequency of one is

suggested for the heading area. So then it just does basically the same thing in the heading area. Word count, one to 15. Keyword prominence of 68%. Interesting, very similar ratio there. We don't want to read all of this. One of the things that's also interesting is the URL. You'll often hear, in fact, we get customers who are approaches. We actually have one customer who's like, I want all these domain names because these are potential search terms. Ironically, he's the guy we can't convince he should be doing SEO. He kind of wants to do his own. He's old school and, you know, he has a very successful multi-million dollar business. And, you know, he just doesn't see the value of SEO. Kind of does it his own way. Yeah. I guess if it makes sense to him. It's working. He's got billboards all over Houston. He's one of our prominent customers. So we usually tend to highlight him because people have seen his billboards when we're in and around, you know, pitching to clients in Houston. And people are typically aware of him. And in case you're listening, you need to call us for SEO. Oh, exactly. He's great potential with his website. Great potential. And he's got the budget and there's just all these reasons to do it and he doesn't. Anyway, let's totally sidetrack. So he came to us and he said, oh, I want all these domain names because, you know, potential keywords. I think one of his sons, who's now getting involved in the business, kind of read something about this, which is not wholly untrue. And so now he's got all these domain names that point to his regular website. What his son doesn't realize is that actually doesn't generate much value because Google just sees it lumps it all into the same thing because it's the same text. So it doesn't actually say, oh, here's a web page with this keyword in the URL that has all of this web page. Because it's a duplicate web page. It gets thrown

back into what's called the supplemental. So that's kind of a misnomer. But this software web position gold in their page critic package, you know, talks about, okay, is the keyword mentioned in the URL? Because it, you know, it can be very valuable. Now, it's not just that the domain name defines your URL. Of course, you can have the URL be involved in the web page. So the web page, in this case, we were looking up Stop Smoking Hypnosis. And, in fact, Stop Smoking Hypnosis is in the URL. And so that's actually good. And that's what it's supposed to do. The next thing is, again, it gets into the body of the text. So you've got title, header, and then body, and then kind of total frequency, et cetera. And then there's actually a very long list of really good advice for this. You can get a free trial version of Web Position Gold. Just go out there and Google Web Position Gold. It's actually a very, very powerful tool. Gives you a lot of good advice. And we use it from time to time. Most of this information, we're kind of live and breathe it. So we really don't need to see the report anymore. All the time. But it was a good tool when we were getting started. You know, the thing that, to piggyback while we're on keywords, I like the tool. And I know we use so many, I forget which is which. But looking at, being able to look at your particular keyword that you're interested in and find out who the major player is. And I think it's on one of these screens. But you can actually go and look up, okay, for Plummer, Houston, who are the major players? Who's in first position? Who's in second? And who's in third? And where am I? Yeah, that's it. That was it. It was it. It was it until we switched it. But I think that's a great tool because then you can find out who are the players for this

particular keyword. You know the keywords. You've done your research by this point. You know which ones are important to you, which ones you want to go after. Okay, who are the players for these particular keyword phrases? And then now you can kind of go back and do analysis on their sites and see, okay, well, which, you know, who's, what is his keyword frequency? Does he have it as title tag? Or does he, is it, you know, you can do, I guess, do your film work and watch the film on his website and see what he's doing right and potentially not doing correct. But I think that is a great tool just to be able to look and see who the major players are for these particular keywords. Because that's, they're obviously doing, if they're, you know, the guys on the first page for that keyword, they're obviously doing something right. But I just, I personally just don't think that to get on the first page for like, for big terms, happens by accident. No, no. Someone's doing something right. Yep. There are some really smart decisions going on there. Which ironically is counter to how Google's whole premise is, which is the premise is we're supposed to be searching for people who aren't tweaking for us and we're saying, okay, somebody who just puts up a page, what are they going to do? Well, they're going to put the keyword in the title. That makes sense. They're going to put the keyword in the header. That makes sense. They're going to put the keyword some number of times in the body and they're going to have outgoing links that link to it and incoming links from it. All of that makes sense. The reality is, is when you do go out and just make a webpage, because we've seen, you know, our customers come to us all the time, it almost invariably doesn't have any of that. Like, none of those decisions are going on. Of course. You know, you know, so. You're building a

webpage, you're not thinking, should I put this keyword in the title tag? So you're thinking, what color do I want? So you're a plumber and you write about your service, like on the front of the page, your service and your years of experience or whatever in it, and you're three paragraphs into your page and you haven't said plumbing once. Yeah, of course. Right, and that kind of makes sense for you because you're pitching, you're thinking about who got you there. And that's where search engine optimization comes in. You're like, okay, this is great text. You've got three paragraphs of why I should use you as my plumber. And at the end of the day, you don't have the word plumber in the text and Google's not going to give you any. I'll never get to your website because you didn't put that in there. Exactly. So, yeah, those things are really valuable. And on this, we're actually looking at one report. This particular tool we're using is an advanced web ranking. Very good tool. We use it for reporting. We use it for all sorts of things. One of the nice things we can see here is, and we monitor this on a regular basis, we can see that the websites in position eight and nine on this particular keyword, key term in Google, just popped into the page. So, the last time we ran this report, those two web pages were not on the top ten. They weren't on the first page. So, if they're a competitor of mine, the first thing I'm going to do is, okay, well, what did this guy do? What are they doing? What is he doing? Because he obviously got to the first page. And the guy in position seven, he bumped up one from position eight. So, what are they changing? What are they doing that's getting them that placement, that put them on that first page? And you also want to be mindful that it's always possible there is some little breathing room. So, somebody who's

on position seven, this time we were on the report, in a week, they may be at nine and then up to five. They may be oscillating back and forth just as people make subtle changes to their text. And if I could just add a side note, you don't want to copy exactly what other people are doing. If you are not an SEO professional or not in this industry, you may not know that the person ahead of you might be doing something that they shouldn't be doing. And I'm referring to black hat SEO techniques. Yeah, that's a very good point. So, you don't just want to go and if you're the kind of person that can look at their source code, I'm just going to cut and paste and copy this here. They might be doing something they're not supposed to be doing. So, be very careful. You want to do your research, but you don't just want to take exactly what your competitor is doing. Because he might not. He could get you banned. Yeah, absolutely. Well, there's another thing that kind of pops in your mind. Wow, if all it takes to get onto the first page is this kind of proper ratio of title and header and keywords and all of that, why don't I just take the webpage that has position one, copy the entire webpage, rename it, put it on my site, and then we'll be good to go. The challenge with that is you'll end up in what's called the supplemental because it's identical text. That's an awesome way to get into the supplemental. Yeah, exactly. You don't want to be... Directly to the supplemental. So, yeah. So, you don't want to do that. Again, though, there's a lot of value in understanding what the competitors are doing and learning from them. So, you know... I have an example. Last week, I was talking with a client about a website and they were interested in SEO. And I'm showing them a couple different examples. This was a realtor and at

the bottom of this website, so it's a realtor out of Austin who had actually contacted us for about some SEO. At the bottom of their website, and I always see this on realtors, they had stuffed just tons of keywords. We operate in Houston, Beaumont, Austin, Dallas, Sugar Land, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was in tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny text. It was... I mean, you couldn't read it. I had to cut and paste it for someone to see it. Now, she sees this and she goes, oh, look at all those keywords. I'm going to do that. And not knowing about the industry, she just thought, hey, the more keywords, the better. And had I not been there to say, hey, you know what? There's a better way to... To do that. To do that. A better way to do optimization. Don't just copy what you see other people do. Now, Google may not consider that particularly keyword stuffing. Some search engines may, some search engines don't. Well, there's a fine line because depending on the size of the text and certainly the color of the text, they very well may have a problem with that. It was miniature. And I mean, it may have been like in a four-point font. It was tiny. That can get you banned. And I saw that and I was like, you know, that's why you don't just want to... Hey, there's a better way to do it. You don't just want to copy what this person sees. And that, to me, that was a classic example of why you want to have a professional company at least consulting with you. If you're not going to use a professional company, which I recommend, have someone consult with you and say, hey, and just run ideas by them. Hey, I want to stuff keywords. What do you think about that? I want to try some black hat techniques today. Let's do that. No. Let's think about that. No. You really don't want to do that. No, that's

a great example. And it's good that she was on the phone with you when she was going over that because that can be disastrous. That literally can get you banned. Those are considered... Again, depending on size and color of the text, it is considered keyword stuffing. Now, in general, Google isn't going to have a huge problem. They have software that will go out and say, okay, given these constraints, we want these people not on our list just because it's clear that they're using these kinds of techniques. Now, if you escape that and then one of your competitors complains because you are keyword stuffing or something, we find that Google will like, well, they're stuffing them with relevant keywords. It's not like a porn site is stuffing real estate terms at the bottom of their page to try and generate traffic that's irrelevant to what they do. So, in general, they'll let that go by. But, yeah, you've got to be really careful. There's a lot of ways to get banned or thrown into the settlement. A competitor can... Someone can report to you. A competitor can. And I think we've said this a while back on a podcast. You might get away with it for a while. It might be a long while. But the one... When you get caught, getting out of the supplemental is a pain. And if your website, if your business depends on your website to function, you are going to take a hit. So, I definitely wouldn't recommend it. Another way to look at it. Look, if the growth and your business is dependent on Google and you're using any sort of black hat techniques, you may last a year. You know, maybe throwing cash in your pocket and that's great. And then, that day when you get caught and you get banned, everything changes, right? They cut you off. The 10 people you hired to support the business that Google was sending you, what are you going to do with them? You know, everything just falls totally apart if

that's your business. You know, one thing that she did say to me when we were talking, she goes, well, why can this guy do it and I can't do it? And my response was, you know, Google, they said, if they say we're going to ban you, they're going to ban you. They can do whatever they want. Right. Because everyone wants to be on Google and if the one guy gets away with it and you want to do it, I mean, I don't think it's making sense, but you just don't want to do it. You don't want to make Google mad. Well, what you're kind of saying is like, okay, so when you're speeding and you're like four miles behind the guy who's also doing 120, not that I've ever done that, and the cop pulls you over and you go, well, why can he get away with it? Exactly. Right? Well, he just didn't get caught. The cop, you got caught. Right? And you know you have no leg to stand on. You were doing 120. You might be going to jail. Exactly. You don't want to make the cop mad. And in this case, Google is the cop. If you get caught, then you are going to suffer. So, kind of in summary, definitely do your competitive analysis. Understand what they're doing or just use us so we can do that for you. And, you know, be mindful that there are a lot of techniques that you might be trying to copy because it seems to be successful that are actually not good for you in the long run that will actually end up getting your website banned. It looks like we're done with our podcast. So, until our next, well, let's remind you, if you've got any emails, send us any questions. We're getting questions. We love to hear feedback from you guys out there. We really appreciate you. You can send that feedback to podcast at e-webstyle.com. We do have another podcast. It's not up yet, but it's coming soon, and

that is the killer website design and development. We're mowing them down with our AK-47. Going to war against bad web design. I like that. Going to war against bad web design. So, that will be up soon, so keep an eye out for that. Please subscribe to that. We love giving back to the community. We feel like we have a lot of valuable things to offer. Until the next podcast, I'm Chris Burris. This is Paul Hanson. Bye-bye for now.