Episode 513: 8 Google SEO Tips for Page One Results by Mark Traphagen #513

And welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners of EWR Digital. And my name is Matt Bertram. I'm the head digital strategist at EWR Digital. Just so you know, I am one of the co-hosts of the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I think that guy over there is the other co-host. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of the podcast. We appreciate you guys checking in. We are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas, and there's no review. That's okay. We're here and we haven't been here for like three weeks. We're sorry. We are sorry. We know that we need to be more consistent. We're planning on doing that. I'm planning on if Chris is busy, I'm going to start interviewing other experts in the space as kind of a special edition. I am doing another podcast full-time. So that is for the Better Business Bureau. So that is taking up a lot of my time. And we're aggressively growing. Maybe not aggressively, but like people are aggressively knocking on our door saying, we want to do business with you. And so we've been aggressively hiring. Um, and we've hired people from the likes of Google, from the likes of Facebook, um, from the likes of GoDaddy. Um, we're really stepping up, um, you know, the, the, the level of service we are spinning off, um, a hosting company. I'm not going to give the name yet because the site's not completely done. We plan to launch it next week. Um, and we're going to be offering SEO, uh, related services again, everything we offer like pro testimonial, which I think we may or may not do our commercial because it's very long. We need to get a short commercial, um, our services that we've developed for ourself and we want to share, uh, with other, um, people in the industry. Uh, and we feel that it's a great service that we're working for ourselves. We built the product we want to, you know, uh,

offer it to everyone else, but I'd be interested to hear, uh, anybody in the audience, if you've had like, what kind of problems have you had in the hosting space? Uh, right. So reach out, go to EWR digital.com and, and fill out a form and let us know, like, what are the problems you've had when you're, you know, dealing with hosting companies? Um, what has been the solution? Are you kind of all independent? Um, do you, do maybe you have a hosting solution that you actually haven't had a problem yet, but you just, it doesn't let you sleep that well at night because you're not sure if they're focused, if they've got the right horsepower behind your website, uh, and if they have any focus on SEO. You know, that's interesting. That's one of the things, Chris, you just made me think about it. One of the things that, um, I think is missing if you're using like, uh, you know, hosting provider, uh, that you don't really have a lot of controller access on the backend is surfers, server side optimization, right? And so, um, you know, if you're really strong with on page or really strong with off page, um, you know, and you want some little help on the technical side of things, um, we certainly have those capabilities and we are, um, really, we like to host our own sites. So this is kind of came out of our, our own kind of desire and need, uh, to do SEO is to be able to do that server side and technical optimization. We're actually working with a rather large client right now that doesn't have, uh, the infrastructure and kind of the, the way to be able to push updates and changes on their backend, that infrastructure. Um, and, and you really need that, uh, when you're getting to enterprise level sites, uh, but for people that have agencies that they're using, like golly, I've heard horror stories from host Gator. Well, I shouldn't talk about names, uh, but you know,

also like GoDaddy, um, was really great before they went public. Um, there's certainly some other, uh, uh, hosting companies out there, uh, but we really didn't see what we were needing and we developed our own capabilities and our own skill sets to be able to do, uh, the heavy lifting on the technical, uh, optimization. And that is becoming more and more important from an SEO standpoint, site speed, absolutely critical now, uh, with web vitals updates, uh, it has been moving that direction. Um, and, and there's certain things that you just can't do unless you have access to the back end of the server. So. Yeah. And we found that out over time. It's kind of like, uh, this is, uh, Amazon launched AWS because they needed like heavy duty hardware behind their, uh, e-commerce platform. Uh, we're launching a hosting company because we needed a heavy duty hosting company behind our, behind our, uh, digital marketing agency. So Chris, I have a deck that I put together and I can't remember the statistic exactly. I might pull it up here, but I know we're going to be talking about something else, but something like Amazon, if they lose one second in load time of their site, I think it's equal to $1.6 billion a year. One second. Yeah. It's got to load fast. And there's probably a team of like a hundred people figuring out how to make it faster every minute of every day around the clock. Like that's probably happening. Hey, we just went live. Did you, did you notice that it just went live five seconds ago? No way. No, it says it's been live five minutes. Oh, mine just came. I think you have a, if you're, if you're pushing it out there, I think it's a delay of you were able to grab it or what are you talking about? I don't know. The, the little live icon that you're probably seeing the red one in the upper left corner. Mine says six minutes. Mine says 26 seconds. So anyway,

whatever. Good. There is no review. And maybe that's partly because we haven't been consistent and maybe it's because you just haven't taken the time to leave a review. Please go to EWR digital.com forward slash review. The plural version reviews does not work, but review. And it'll take you right to our Google page. We'd love for you to take that time. Matt and I at this moment, do not get paid to do this podcast. We get paid in reviews. So we really paid to do this podcast, Chris. Huh? I would like, shouldn't we? I feel like, I feel like it takes some time. I feel like we do some research. I feel like we're sharing some expertise. That's usually a situation where somebody is compensated, but you know, we'll get there. We'll get there. I mean, I, you know, I'm looking at some of these crypto podcasts. I'll tell you right now, they're making quite a bit of money monetizing it. Okay. We're doing our commercial. Sorry guys. I got it. I'll stop it. I got it. Pro testimonial, your one-stop shop video marketing tool that captures and creates video. Okay. That's it. I was just, I was just, you know, I just felt like getting paid, like go check out pro testimonial.com. It might be helpful to you. It's a hundred bucks a month. You can do unlimited testimonials. We set it up with COVID. It was an issue, but let's get into it. It's super easy. Fast forward through our banter and get right into the meat and potatoes. All right, here we go. So this article is from search engine journal from Mark Trafagen, Google SEO, eight tips to achieve page one results. Who would like page one results? Like, I feel like there we go. Everybody would like results, but okay. SEO has evolved in a lot of ways, but one thing that hasn't changed is the fundamental value of showing up on page one of Google. For sure, the days of 10 simple blue links and a few ads are over.

That's not what gets you there. Well, that's not what's on the search engine result page. It's a lot more complicated, but according to a 2020 study, the click-through rate for position 10 results, so that's the bottom of the first page, is 3.11%. It's low, but it's still higher than the typical ad click rate. I never heard that perspective. I don't know if you've heard that perspective, Matt. And after the first page, we all know that's a great place to hide a dead body where nobody will ever find you. Hold on, Chris. What was the statistic? It's 3.11%. The 10th position, organic, so the bottom of the first page, gets 3.11%. It's low, but it's still higher than the typical ad click rate. So I'm looking at a study here that talks about, I'll share my screen since I can share my screen for those of you that often. I know, I know. So I'm looking at this study right here. It's an older study, but it shows me the 10th position is 4.2.4. Oh, I hadn't shared it. All right. This study, this study right here is showing me 10th position is 2.4%. So 3.11 is actually a little bit higher. Yeah. So maybe it's gone up as adjustments have been made. Maybe it's gone down, depends on what report, you know, it's a, it's a, so it's plus or minus. That means since time has gone on, it's gotten better. So that's good. If you just can hang out and get on that first page, you're going to get more traffic than you did maybe a couple of years ago. If you were and more than if you were paying for ads. So that's, that's pretty good. So let's look at some of the best proven methods for helping your page get onto that first position. And frankly, our target, excuse me, on the first page, our target is never the first page. It's the first position. Cause if you were, if you glanced at that report that Matt just showed it's exponential. So

as you move from position 10, nine, eight, seven, six, you get exponentially more of the traffic and it has an exponential impact on your business. We've got a number of testimonials that prove that. Yeah. And if you look at like a heat mapping on sites, right. Probably the top 50% of the page is where, you know, there's a 90% drop off. All the eyes are focused up at the very top of the page. So you certainly want to be as high up as possible. I think the only reason it started to come down on the page is Google started to run ads like in that visibility. And a lot of people don't totally trust ads, right? So they had to start scanning down on the page. And so that makes a lot of sense on that, that keyword position, people really scanning the whole first page because they're not finding what they need at the top because it's getting covered with ads. Yeah. Their mindset is already, I got to scroll to find what I'm looking for. So they're more apt to scroll lower down to that. That's what I, yeah, that's what I think. So I agree. All right. So we're going to look at today in this podcast, four of the tips to achieve page one results. And the first one is improve internal linking. The thing about internal linking that is so important to stress, if you want to talk about links and links you have control over, it's the thing you have the most control over. So like going out and getting links from other people, writing that content that is so significant that other people are going to link to you, right? That's a lot harder and still out of your control. But what you can absolutely control is the links that are on your site. So you want to spend time optimizing those links on your site. You just talk so great, Chris. You like in your background, you pop out. Like I really, like, I think we just,

we need to, um, we need to move you over here. No. Um, but anyways, so essentially, uh, what I would say with internal linking is I've been able to rank sites, large sites with just internal links, creating the signals to let Google know, uh, what's going on and really how powerful on pages, how powerful anchor text is, how powerful, uh, site architecture, um, is, is, uh, how far, you know, I mean, on page is extremely powerful and even more powerful. So, you know, I think the pendulum from off page, uh, has started to certainly swing to how people are interacting with the site and they're looking at referral traffic and, you know, where people are going on, uh, on the site, the dwell time, how many pages they look at, are they taking any action? Are they clicking the back button? There's a lot of different things that Google is looking at, but they're basically looking at how you interact with the site and the internal links give kind of the customer journey or also point to where you're trying to drive, uh, people as they experience your website. And that gives Google a lot of signals on, um, uh, where, where they should be spidering the site, where they should be going and how people are interacting with it. So, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is the way Google identifies the content on your page, uh, on your site. And the better Google understands things, the more that they're going to find reasons to rank you. Um, internal linking means linking pages together that make the most sense really for your visitor. It's not just linking any page to any other page. You want to make it sure that makes sure that it makes sense. Uh, look for opportunities where specific pages add or enhance the information that exists on one page. And this always goes back to not only will no users benefit from accessing more relevant information, but search engines appreciate it because it adds more value to the end user. Um,

we say that all the time, add more value to the end user. Well, so one of the things that this kind of address, but, but mainly from an internal linking perspective, it also is important from an external linking perspective. If you're, you know, providing a link out. So, you know, people typically in the past, maybe didn't want to link out because they wanted to keep the link juice in, but Google wants there to be this equitable relationship online. Um, that's a lot of how links are generated as relationships, right? Um, people, um, linking back and forth. Now, if you're linking out, um, you want to link to an article or a piece of content that supports what it is you're trying to say, right? It can't just be something random now, you know, something high authority is great, but it should really support what you're trying to say. And the anchor text should really explain what you're trying to link about that same thing, um, can be done on site with maybe other blogs or other services or other things that, Hey, naturally you might want to check this out. Or you might want to check this blog out. And then why you're linking to that is it's supporting something that you're currently saying. I mean, I think you got to look at this, like from a journalistic perspective, uh, from a white paper perspective, why the internet was built, what is important, what is authoritative and figure out, um, you know, how do you, how do you continuously serve that up? Because that's what Google is looking for. And your internal links need to justify why you're linking. There's not, there's got to be a rhyme of reason to it. You can't, uh, just randomly link, uh, to a site because you're having a conversation with Google and you're trying to understand, you're trying to communicate to it what you want. And so you don't just be like, go here, go here, go here. Cause then like you're yelling at Google doesn't like that.

And then like, you know, they don't respond. Google doesn't respond well. See, I kind of think like Google's live. Um, you know, so I don't want to talk bad about it. It's just a child. Like in some regard, it's very mature and others. Yes. Yeah, exactly. It is interested in money. That would be very mature. That's like training. Like, what is it? A Doberman or, or whatever it is. Like, you know, they're like very docile animals, but they get trained to, you know, be a crap money. All right. So the second tip for page one results, find your threshold pages, Matt. Have you heard the phrase threshold pages? I have, yeah. You have? And what's it mean? As you read the article. No, I'm just telling you, um, like when I, when you hear me, when I hear you say that, what I'm starting to think about is, um, how much, uh, like, uh, bandwidth do you have? Like when you get spidered, you know what I mean? Like what, what is, what is the number of, uh, you know, pages that, uh, you have a certain allocation, right. Um, based on the authority of your site. And so, uh, I don't, I don't know if this is threshold of like how you're competing against. I don't, I don't know what this means exactly. So what Mark, we certainly know the concepts, right? Just not that particular phrase threshold. What Mark is referring to is those page that currently rank just below page one, right? So what he's talking about is identify those pages, those pages that are ranking on page two, page three, uh, because those are going to be the pages that are easiest to get to page one over new, fresh content, right? Um, and in fact, you should do a search, use whatever your keyword ranking tool is that you want to use. We often use SEM rush and find, identify those pages that are in second and third page, and then take all of those pages and sort them by

what the search volume is for those particular pages, and then work on those pages. Cause they're, they're close. Like it's, how do you push them over the edge is really the point Mark is making. No, I, I think, um, you know, the terminology sounded familiar to me, but certainly I was thinking about something else. Right. And, you know, I, I never called the pages, uh, like 11 through 20, uh, threshold pages, but it, it makes sense. I think, you know, there's a lot of SEOs talk about like, we're going to get to the first page. Yes. And, and I, I don't, I don't even play in that realm. And so, um, I'm like, how do we get into the top three positions? I would be like, what are your threshold positions? It's like top three positions threshold. You're on the threshold. So that's how I would rewrite this article. Let's focus on those that are in say position six, seven, eight, nine, 10, uh, and figure out how to get them into that first position. Yeah. We can make a whole kind of nomenclature here. Yeah. Yeah. Patif is one of them. All right. Number three of the four tips for page one results that we're going to cover today, research competitive content. If you have important pages that aren't making it to page one, there's a simple truth. You must accept other pages have stuff you don't have. So get in there. And he gave us a nice bullet point of, as you're looking at those pages that do have that position over you or those positions over you, look at these things. Is the content noticeably better? Um, is it better written? Does it contain keywords and topics that your page doesn't that maybe it's more comprehensive? Uh, does it have better internal linking to other pages on their site? And do other relevant pages link back to it? Is the external link profile that's the backlinks bigger and of, or higher quality, uh, does it contain extras that might be helpful to

visitors like images, charts, videos, tables while you do want to copy the pages outranking you what they are doing, not the actual pages. Cause you don't want to bump into that duplicate content issue. Um, any comments? Yeah. Well, I just think he's using different nomenclature terminology. I, you know, if I was to write this, I would be like reverse engineer what the competitor is doing. Like, I mean, if you were to replace that with research competitive content with strategic intelligence, like, you know, it's kind of the same thing, but yeah, I mean, that's, that's really what it is, is like, why is Google showing this page some love? Um, how do we reverse engineer what they're doing? What do they have that we don't have across the board? And, um, that like, once we get to the first page of Google, uh, uh, be on the threshold, uh, with any of our clients, um, that's what we start looking at. Well, you know, it, now it's getting really competitive. How do we move up? What do they have that we don't have looking at all those things, comparing those things? What can we, um, competitive link building, what can we get that, that they have, is there things that they have that we can't get? Okay. If that's the case, uh, what can we offer that's better, uh, more worthy content than, than what they're offering or laying it out or more information or what have you. And that becomes more of a, um, you know, reverse engineering. And I think, you know, that's where, uh, potentially CRO starts to also come into the conversation as well, because really what Google is looking for is all those things. And then anything beyond that would be, how are they responding to your page versus this other page? And they're looking at like CTRs and blow time and all that kind of stuff, uh, to value it against what you're currently doing. So at, at the end of the day, you may, might be trying to figure

out what, why doesn't Google like me? And the reality is it's going to be because you're not treating the Google user the way the user wants to be treated. Right. So not like, that's what you need to dig into. Uh, and that's what you need to provide. I would almost say, and I agree with what you're saying. I mean, my answer would be math, like math, basically math. That's, that's actually why you're not ranking higher because the math is not adding up. Yep. That makes sense. Yeah. All right. Number four, this is a shorter podcast, but we, but we wanted to get one out there. Number four. And this again is four of the eight tips to get to page one, move important pagers, pages, not pagers. Pagers. People don't even know what a pager is anymore. Right. Uh, pages higher insight navigation. One way Google assesses the relative importance of a page is its distance from the homepage via your internal navigation back to number one, that internal navigation and how important that is. If you've got a page that's actually more valuable to you or close to that first page, if this is your target or close to that page one, make sure, uh, that position one, make sure that that page is linked high in the menu structure because Google uses that to figure it out. Like how important is that page? Well, you know, I think they want to be able to get anywhere on the side in like three clicks or something like that. And so there are a lot of these big sites get really deep and you continue to break apart, uh, different, uh, subcategories. And, you know, uh, just like when you're reading a page higher up on the page is more important, higher up in the, the, the menu structure is more important. It's about, uh, site architecture of how you want to set that up. Also, there are certain things that you can do too of like, Hey, if they click in this category and

they click this, you can build the page where it's right off the homepage. Right. So there's a lot of things to consider when you're kind of, uh, archetyping up that information of how you want to deliver it to the user. And that's something that Google pays a ton of attention to. And it's really something that a lot of thought should go into. Um, you know, I don't know how many times, uh, you know, people even come and then like, they don't have a page, a dedicated page to the word that they're trying to go after a keyword phrase, um, or, um, you know, if it's, if it's a service or something in a menu, it's the last thing in the menu. Right. And, you know, again, these are all just signals that you got to tell Google, Hey, this is important. Um, the important things are typically at the top. Yep. And what Mark says is like that pointing to that page can increase its authority. Often that homepage has the most authority because it's where a lot of the links go to. And by getting it closer to that, you're, you're transferring some of that link juice, uh, to that now a higher ranked page. I, if you're, if you're wondering, Hey, should I focus on this page? Should I focus on that page? What, what I would ask you is just to think about your business and think, okay, love these two questions. What do you sell the most and what makes you the most money? Cause sometimes they're not the same. You may sell, you know, 300,000 widgets, but if you can sell one car instead of a hundred thousand widgets, it can be easier. It's one transaction and it can make you a lot more money. Uh, so ask yourself, what do you sell the most and what makes you the most money? Because that's, what's going to put focusing on those two things is going to be, and maybe even on the one that makes you the most money first,

depending on search volume is going to be the thing that actually generates the most revenue for your business. Yeah, no, I, I think that those are really, really important questions to ask. Um, when you're thinking about online strategy, it's really an extension of business strategy online, right? Is, is how you should look at it. Um, going back to one of your points of like the homepage, uh, having a heavier weighting, um, in like Google has been very busy and it's been making a lot of updates, um, that, uh, we've, we actually have only had one site affected, uh, by, uh, the most recent update that, um, went in and, you know, uh, changed some things and now it's coming back up. But, um, you know, you like Google's just been very, very busy with a lot of this stuff. Um, they did flip it to where like, uh, the homepage was getting a lot more, uh, waiting again, how it, how it used to be. Maybe there was equal waiting or specific pages were waited more. Now the homepage actually waits more because more people interact with the homepage. They're probably testing some stuff out. Um, but Chris, uh, with that being said, and for everybody that's stayed till the end, um, uh, there's a really important update that's coming, uh, from a pixel standpoint, uh, that I think, uh, got pushed out. And I thought it might be good for you to kind of mention that and, and how that could impact people in the future. Cause I think it's incredibly important. Yeah, it's absolutely. So Google was pushing to get rid of cookies, right? They were pushing to make it so that, uh, you wouldn't be able to track people and they had actually kind of put forth, Hey, here's how you'll be able to do it on our platforms moving forward. And there was a lot of protest about that. And a lot of it has to do with like all of these other parties who don't own YouTube who don't own

google.com and whatever other platforms that Google actually has access to and is in charge of. Cause obviously Google can share inside of its platform. According to these new rules, it's a, it's about third party cookies where you may have somebody land on your site and then give a cookie for Google to know that they landed on your site. They're going to end that. Um, and they decided to push it out until 2023. They're saying they've got enough pushback. They're saying, Hey, we need to, what they're saying is we need to educate the community as to what this alternative, uh, option is going to be. Um, but, but really it's the community going like this is ultimately what you're setting up is just something like nobody else can do what we're doing, but because our properties are so big, we're basically going to continue. It's going to be for us. It's going to be business as usual. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to, you're going to, you're going to have, I mean, they're doing that with AdWords, right? You're having to pay like analytics is not showing you where the search terms are coming in and yeah, you know, people are changing how they're doing it, but people are setting up boats. I mean, Google's talking about any kind of, um, like public links that you can publish. Um, there's going to have to be like, based on privacy, you're, you're going to have to, um, uh, have some kind of authentication to be able to access those links now. So, um, I, I know with us, right. Um, from a, uh, email standpoint, um, they're starting to like, we, you had a legacy account where we got like 50 Google emails and they told us they're discontinuing that, even though they said we would be able to have it forever. And we had to move to, um, a more, um, robust program. Yeah. I mean, they're just, they're just finding ways to charge you more. I mean, there's other impacts of course. Um, but yeah, they're

just finding ways, uh, to have you pay for licenses and, you know, um, and I mean that this was a freemium, uh, model, right? Like you come out with the freemium model, you, you, you replicate basically what Microsoft is doing in a little bit different functionality. Um, you get enough people using it. Then you start, uh, raising the pay barriers to charge people to use it. Right. I mean, so a lot of changes with Google. Um, you know, if you've been listening to this podcast, um, eat was a, uh, quite a big change, uh, like your money, your life kind of sites were, were certainly affected. There was the web vitals update. There's just Google, you know, there's a lot of things coming down the pipe, uh, with Google, um, with these, let's call them Fred or core updates. Right. And so, uh, keep your eyes out for those. What did y'all used to call them? Call Chris algorithm cataclysm. Yes. That, uh, we got to get some kind of, uh, you know, uh, uh, board after effect or yeah. So thank y'all for, for, for being on this, uh, Chris, uh, why don't you close this out and we'll hit the official outro of unknown secrets of internet marketing, the best SEO podcast.com. We would like you to leave us a review. EWR digital.com forward slash review. Um, I'm surprised Matt didn't start the commercial as soon as I said that. And you guys have made us one of the most popular internet marketing podcasts on iTunes, the most popular SEO podcast, and we really appreciate you. So thank you very much until the next podcast. My name's Chris Burris. My name is Matt Berkshire. Bye-bye for now.