James Dooley: Hello and welcome to another Market Muse content strategy webinar in our series I'm Jeff Coyle the co-founder of Market Muse um and today we're speaking to an amazing guest uh you know good friend of mine amazing SEO amazing business person investor just Steward of digital marketing uh and I'm going to tease who that is in a second uh while we do a little bit of housekeeping uh while we're here ask us anything um if it's directly relevant to our conversation I may be able to weave it in um and ask our guest the discussion topic if it's not we'll save some time at the end for a Q&A um and when you go back um you're going to get an email from us with some follow-ups U some links and also a link to this uh webinar replay share it uh tag us uh do everything that you should be doing uh and while you're at it go check out our webinar archive we've got hundreds of replays from amazing thought leaders like Andy Cadena uh Pam didner on sales enablement Nick Eubanks on keyword research um so many different webinar replays that you can learn from uh no matter where you are in your content marketing journey and no matter what type of content You're Building or what sites you're putting out great quality content on um again thank you so much for joining us today uh today's discussion is from black hat SEO to Quality content production Powerhouse and I'd say I definitely I'm not going to say I have the best example of blackhe hat SEO on here but I definitely have somebody who can speak the language of investment in digital marketing um P owns PPC agencies search engine optimization agencies a thought leader in the space James douly thanks for joining us um currently the founder and CEO of promo SEO but you've got a lot of things going on uh can you give us a little bit of details kind of how you got to where you are what you're currently working on and you know your current Mission.
James Dooley: Yes so I mean all started from um owning a construction company um back 15 years ago and I realized I needed um inbound inquiries so I needed a website I needed to rank the website and then from there then I'd got into the Realms of SEO um started to rank it took me quite a while I failed miserably for many years um I I ended up going down the road of being the blackout route because that seemed to be working the best back then with like Warrior forum and blackout world and stuff like that um and I just did what what worked um and I wouldn't say but I wouldn't really call myself a blackout SEO back then or a white SEO I just call myself a return on investment kind of H H SEO um and then from there then from there then we um we started to realize we could do what we've done for our own sites for other people's websites and then we got into doing lead generation for for customers who who give us work and then we just built it out from there and then roll on like Panda and Penguin and every other update that there's been um there's been a lot of ups and downs throughout the journey um but we've learned from it we've built our own in-house testing team to see what's working and what's not working um and yeah I mean the the money that we've kind of earned along the way we've reinvested quite nicely in um bricks and Mort type companies digital companies link building agencies content agencies social media ads agencies PPC agencies we we're trying to do a whole holistic approach of everything related to trying to generate inquiries in Business Online.
Jeff Coyle: Nice and yeah that's what I always love about speaking with you is that there's a focus on testing there's a focus on is this speculative is this a reasonably tested or is this truly conclusive um and and that's been you know really consistent um and then you know you are not just focused on you know one channel you know you're looking at paid you're also focused on lead generation you know being one of the leaders in a number of verticals in the UK um so I really appreciate that and that's why I wanted to have you on this discussion today because there's a lot of uncertainty in the space right now um I've actually saw today um a number of posts about how you know businesses that were recently impacted by quality uh constraints can't to recover or they're not going to recover or it's going to take them you know years to recover I mean my response is that it's going to be difficult if you've made lots of you know choice bad choices or choices that are now vetting as bad but you know that it's not a it's not an lost hope here there's there's a path to high quality and so I would love to learn more about your approach to content and then again how you see recovery um right now prevailing.
James Dooley: Yeah so I mean back back in the old days I used to cheap out on content and then I used to just hit hit it with bat links and that's kind of how how it used to work um roll on to today's algorithms and with regards to NLP and and the passing of key words and and words that are needed on on the page Google have come become a lot better understanding um intent and and content in itself so now you you've got to make certain that you're looking to do quality content not just on the single page but topical Authority and having lots of different topics all being covered in a nice format clustered together very nicely um so I think we've used pretty much every single one of your competitors when it comes down to Content optimization tools I remember back back in the hey day I used to think oh Market moves is expensive I could just use another tool that could do what you do but the but the truth of the matter is and this is why I'm on I'm on the podcast is because I'm a massive advocate of Market moves um the topical modeling system of what it use it's not just copycat content it's not just doing correlation of content which does not work and I think people have have ridden the kind of waves for a few years of copy content and I think Google done a good if in my opinion and you know what I'm going to get a lot of grief for this in my opinion they've done a good job of clearing out a lot of CopyCat sites so if I cck on number one result for best 10 lawn mowers and I didn't get what I wanted and I quit turn to the number two result and it gave me the exact same list and the exact same type of content I didn't like number one result so I'm not going to like number two result neither and then number three results copied from number one and number two so Google's got to put a diverse kind of set of results in there it's got to have some Reddit kind of discussion forums and stuff like that and there's a lot of people slandering him at the moment and I feel like there times where there's certain results that may might might not shouldn't be there maybe but actually all these people it's like some people I'm asking who whove built these Niche websites out I've said to them have you bought these 10 lawnmowers this has just been one of the examples that you're reviewing no right so you've not bought you've not you've literally not bought any of them you've not used any of them but you want to rank number one for best 10 law mowers even though you've never used one of them and you just put it in order of who pays the most affiliate it's like you don't deserve to be ranking right and then and then they've just done copycat content they just if anything and obviously off off this um conversation mean you've had several conversations about over optimization of content um obviously I've got my own in-house testing team and this is why I'm continuously trying to talk to people like yourself that's got a lot of data and and that's what seems to be recovering sites if anything I'm I'm on the lookout at present for buying sites that have been penalized and it's because these people have built sites on quicksand they've cheaped out exactly what I did 10 years ago they've cheaped out on links they've cheaped out on content they've got a lot of content out there is it recoverable absolutely of course it's recoverable everything's recoverable is it easy no it's not but if you understand what good quality content looks like and you can turn around and build an actual brand behind the website and build good quality clusters nicely internal links and get the right topics on the page then it's recoverable.
Jeff Coyle: Yeah I mean I can't shake my head more on most of those topics than I did uh but it's a it's it's it's tough right now because it's a lot of it could be a lot of work or it could be not a lot of work and the the the stress of not knowing how much work it's going to be to get your you know your house in order um but it's you know you say it very elegantly if you know if you would know what quality content looks like um but it it goes into you know I always like to say you don't deserve to be there at the bottom of the funnel unless you were there at the top of the funnel um but it speaks to your best your best lawnmowers example and we've had I believe we had a a webinar um speaking specifically to reviews content and how it was impacted and um you know I you know I've been preaching on top of the soap box for about four years on this it said you know like no it's not a good idea that your dog ate all 10 of those different dog foods that day um they probably you know your one dog shouldn't have all 10 of those dog foods um and so if you're a oneperson show and you know it's highly likely you haven't tasted it and when you're discussing how delicious that dog food is you know I know you don't really have that experience um and so you know you get into the the the lawnmower example no you didn't you know it's so hard to build a real product testing framework I used to U manage soft uh U notebook review um storage review a number of sites I was I managed the traffic through through those sites and we had to have a lab right real tests proof of those tests right that's the stuff that's going to win in the long term um and you know in the short term you shouldn't be surprised that you're I call them stock blur you know stock blurb link Pages stock imagery little blurb affiliate link stock imagery little blur affiliate link you know doesn't have doesn't have longevity it's great that you made money when you did um but it's not the future and I know what other types of um you know page structures would maybe at one point you know we talked about roundups um reviews uh maybe aren't aren't going to have that type of longevity but maybe had some long had some strength at one point um.
James Dooley: Yeah so this there's lots back then I mean programmatic SEO like literally duplicated content used to work great um you could literally do duplicated content hit um hit hit them with links and it used to work there was lots of different where you could do white text on a white background you could like put lots of keywords in um div tags um in alt tags and all this there's lots of ways how you could manipulate getting um entities and keywords and scram dominant keywords and stuff like that in in the page but the truth of the matter is like you said if you've not got the top of the funnel you shouldn't be ranking for the bottom of the funnel you should be trying to cover every everything and not only that is that that time on site of people clicking through to those different pages and that user experience and the behavioral signals that is happening um also the top of the funnel the top of the funnel kind of articles are the ones that seem to get your most social shares that seem to get you the most traffic that seem to get you you can then do like videos you can do Unique Images those Unique Images get used in a lot of other places might get you natural back links and stuff like that so it's just about do it and and this sounds very it sounds hard and to be fair nowadays it is hard but if you if you're looking to grow a website online you've got to treat it like a real business you have to do good quality images good quality videos get yourself a full topical map being created um which is like via good keyword research make certain you're covering the topic in its entirety categorize them nicely together and cluster them and then use tools like Market moves which is going to give you using stuff like Market moves gives you the cheat sheet to get you what is needed like um it was only when I properly started to to dig deep properly into the Infantry section and I put the site in and yours is the only tool that I know that efficiently tells me my topical Authority score and what I love about it is how I can load in my we it put the keyword there and check the keyword difficulty that is ran against my own website everyone else runs it against tools like H revs or sem Rush right and looks at the the keyword difficulty in the Dr of the website and looks at a keyword difficulty score no one's even looking at with regards to how quality is that content and how good is that topical authority of that whole domain and yours does that and then what it does is it allows you to to make certain that you're going what's going to give me the best bang for my book right if I go and create this page on my website where I've already got some topical Authority I'm going to win I'm going to create this page and I'm going to rank pretty much position number one very very very quickly and that's going to get me traffic and then there's certain like things where you can move through your traffic tiers and TR and traffic is a huge indication to Google of trust and then it allows you to work through and then start going after the more difficult keywords but nobody else talks about this topical Authority score and it's so key to to get the growth of a website otherwise too many people are going after the really difficult bottom of the funnel terms to start off with and then they're demotivated because they're not ranking and I'm like you've you you've got so many easier ones to get going and get the traffic for you get the historical data which then funnels through to then go after the more difficult keywords.
Jeff Coyle: No I think you've you've really nailed that and it's increasing your efficiency rate can have impact on your confidence like you said you get demotivated because you're firing at this and why isn't this working because you can't be about you can't be the best solution for pricing for seven different types of product overnight you know you have to put in the labor of of the love of of all of the pieces um I I'd love your sense of and and something that you been very successful in is keeping your content differentiated even when or explicitly when you see that a market is maybe copycat or or or or or diluted by copycats and you know I always like to say right now especially with the Unlimited Supply of content that generative AI creates it's even more important for your early stage awareness content to be wildly differentiated it's you know you can't you you can't live on a generic what is and I used to run what is.com I know you can't live on a generic what is site you can't live on a generic definition you can't live on a generic guide or a duplicated guide anymore it's got to be different how how do you take something that the industry might think it's cut and dry right it's a simple answer or it's a simple page and turn it into something differentiated how do you make that your standard and I know you do that well.
James Dooley: I mean I mean the biggest part of it was um when we when we actually first start and we employ content writers we get them to play the game Guess Who and guess who's where you're trying to guess you've got a game and you've got all these people in front of you and you're saying oh have they got blond there they got glasses they the um and and you're trying to find out who it is and we get him to do that and the reason why we start to get him to play that game is because we want to try to come up with ideas that's Information Gain and the information game Paton is key and we knew that AI was coming out and we knew that everyone was doing copycat content and we was like we need to do something that's different like if everyone's one two three four five six seven eight are all the same if everyone's saying how amazing this review is maybe we've got to go against the grain and say what's bad about it right we can say we can still give a few the positives but we can say well wa on a minute this isn't good and this isn't good and this and and sometimes go completely against what others are saying and and Google likes running a wild card and especially when you're only one of two or three others that are saying that you don't like X Y and Z about it and you're doing like sentiment analysis and checking to see both sides of the argument when when you're starting doing stuff like that then you are different and Google loves you for it because you giving something back to the readers which is different if you don't like number one result well they want to show number two result it's different to number one result so be different don't just do just just solely do AI content make certain you've got a tone of voice and the brand voice that you're going to kind of give your Authority so people want to come to your site for the reviews because you give the most honest reviews that they are out there not just yeah this lawm is amazing because I earn affiliate link yeah this lawm is amazing because I earn affiliate commission yeah this law is amazing because I I own affiliate commission and that's what majority of him was doing.
Jeff Coyle: Yeah it's right on and and I think that you gave a good example of a um a point of view having a point of view at all is critical right and then is it differentiated um the you know I think that that's where the human in the loop components um become so critical so you can use artificial intelligence to um to augment these processes but they should be injecting your point of view or you should be you know making sure that it follows through so I love the examples you use because it's you know if I land on this page I don't get what I expected that's critical you don't you know you don't make a decision you these are the best lawnmowers and you don't actually tell me what you think the best lawn mower is that's a huge red flag right you don't have an opinion I you're not actually following through um and then it's does this query deserve an experience I think that's what you got that's what you need to be thinking about so did you actually have to push that that lawn mower or are you acting like a journalist like did you can you prove that you actually talk to people at the lawn mower companies or somebody that did have that experience where maybe you can't feed all of those 10 dog foods to your dog which you should not do but you know you actually did the work to know whether they actually are good dog foods so I think that that about product reviews but this is a fit for anything whether you're in B2B sass you know um why is your definition of this topic blue ocean for your SAS company how does it represent your business right when you write differentiated content it should also be IP that people can't replicate even though it's in plain sight so that was what you referenced like your experience with the lawn mower I can't steal it I can't pretend I had that experience right and and be authentic and have you had any experience with um you know situations where maybe you've been tempted to not be authentic um or people have given you advice to not be authentic with these things just like pretend you actually reviewed them you know what's what's been your experience with that.
James Dooley: Yeah I mean all if I'm being honest with you back seven or eight years ago I I I was doing affiliate sites and I was doing it exactly the same way as what everyone's doing now I was I was building sites of here's the best gaming chairs and i' not once bought any one of the 10 gaming chairs here's the best 10 lawnmowers here's the best 10 head streamers here's the best and like even like we in the casino Market here's the best casinos and it's like the casinos only just come out yesterday and we're like oh we've got all this experience on this casino and we're like we we hadn't right and you could see right through it and with our R&D testing team and and then the the biggest one that we came across um which is off page kind of solutions is we actually built up our own social media team as well and what we try to start doing is we'd have people that was living in Reddit quar um on Pinterest um sharing stuff on like flicker in LinkedIn on Twitter and stuff like that and what we'd start to do is if there was let's say a new casino site had come out we'd start to do a poll on Twitter and we try to start saying what's your thoughts about this kid casino right and we'd send it back to our review page and that traffic from Twitter that we was getting was actually helping our our review page rank as well but actually what we tried to start doing is we'd set up like um discussions in Reddit and in quar what do you think that this brand could do better and when people was coming back to us saying that stuff that they didn't like we would put into our reviews's disadvantages but we was linking through to this forum and people was going back and forward from The Forum and and engaging with it and in a way we was getting free content and we was allowing the whole Community to give their honest opinion if someone's won big money we'd say that they'd won big money someone didn't get paid out for two weeks and they had to verify the ID we were saying make certain you verify your ID so all this information wasn't even there was no correlation nobody else had got this information in it was all real information from online and social media that we' gathered from our groups and the traffic back to our site became the most authentic and we kind of fell into it I would say almost at the time because it because because the traffic was helping us we was doing it more and as we started to do it more we naturally got more information getting if that makes sense and and this is where I'm a massive Advocate now this is where it's come from being a black at SEO to a a Content production Powerhouse we're getting so much content and we're getting asked so many questions now that we're like I don't minut if we're being asked this question on Reddit surely someone's asking Google as well so then we'd start even though search volume might show zero in in your kind of keyword research tools we would um we would write articles because we know people was asking those questions and before you know it these zero search volume keywords was getting 1,000 two 2,000 3,000 monthly searches on the page and stuff so we then was the first to write about it and then we're then getting that information gain of new content that's then obviously going going out as well so yeah it's worked really well for us.
Jeff Coyle: Well I mean you're describing community community or user-led journalism or you know an editorial team who embraced that you know a decade ago those folks are really happy about themselves right now right you know they they're like hey but it's not necessarily because though that content is being boosted now it's just being treated fairly I mean over time it will it will also be stratified by good and bad you know that's Google's job right they have to figure out what's good and what's bad to them at this moment you may like it right now you may not but but for a long period of time those types of sites were um not being treated fairly now the realization that they are pro producing potentially high quality content and low quality content gives them a unique Challenge and that's what you're seeing uh happen right now is um where but you got to be careful though right if you're if you're living and dying by user generated content your moderation becomes king and maybe your sight about that casino is also about you know um you know speculative stock picks I'm just making that up but you gotta be careful like you don't want to live on that topic you're living on the other topic so it's there you just got to acknowledge it much like you would have if you had you know a low qual low quality section of your site um and that's something people aren't used to um you know nobody has been moderating those things I I I also I love your example of creating those discussions and I I think some folks are looking at that on first glance and they say that is that a black hat technique why would it be why would that be a considered a black technique a great example of that you know over a decade ago um um would in SEO um I think it might have been the original I forget who originally said it was you know can you create a situation where a reader you're answering the reader's next five questions right Y and or you're stoking them with additional questions to be part of the community um in a publishing uh sites site Network that I I worked on and managed while you were reading you were hit with important next questions for discourse and it would actually Stoke value through that publisher and what that actually did even 10 years ago was it made our top of funnel stuff rank well uh just so you know so the fact that we were having that middle of the funnel troubleshooting Community engagement discussion actually would make that early stage Awareness stuff perform well that's a little bit of a secret sauce type of thing uh but you're talking about the exact same thing have you had that though experience um you said Casino um have you had the situation where you've validated with all of your testing that there are some um toxic zones or zones that get treated differently than other zones it's a question that I sure these um you've got to be very careful obviously with compliance and stuff in the casino Market um so ukgc ukgc and stuff like that um UK gambling commission um so you've got to be careful on that front but then also the casino industry and being honest like I at some point I need to leave it because it's so negative in um negative esio attacks spammy links being sent through to you um fake traffic like CTR Bots being here and it just opens up at and massive can of worms of something it's already difficult enough to get a technically well-built site right good quality content do topical Authority and try to naturally acquire some links but then to to throw on top of that that you need protection and bodyguards on the front of your house and a Mt around your Castle to make certain that you don't get taken down it becomes it becomes difficult um so you encounter different types of problems um but yeah it's um or if you have got a Reddit or a quar kind of um PL a URL discussion ranking you get loads and loads of fake accounts coming spamming spamming those kind of discussions and stuff like that um with like trying to like hates a load of affiliate links or porn links to try and take it down so you you come across quite a lot of different um different issues along the way if that makes sense.
Jeff Coyle: No I think it what of my experience in that have you know I'm an investor and a uh and and have worked in that space for quite some time as well and you know speaking from experience it's the brands that have amazing content and amazing communities um some of them dropped their communities right they were like like I don't want to manage this thing and then realizing you know brands that have amazing communities and amazing content um and great Brands like you mentioned are now I mean in this kind of a chaotic discourse are worth a lot more than they were you're you're going to start to see large Brands buying communities um you know even more so than you know especially in um some of the Fringe Industries and some of the more aggro High black hat zones so um that's just something a little prediction for 2024 a lot of uh legitimate companies are going to get bought a lot lot of legitimate communities are going to start getting bought it's a great time to um to have been ahead of the game in in caring about social caring about discover caring about um other channels uh because those are the ones that are going to be uh exciting uh assets the valuations are probably too low right now they'll probably go up um and like you said though buying uh or investing in uh distressed property or um penalized or ones that have degraded I hate to say penalized because you don't know unless you've done the research of whether you are penalized or you've just been yeah you had your screws tightened how do you think about that how how do you go about um justifying that and is it based on the fact that you know how to create high quality content and so you're kind of betting on yourself.
James Dooley: Yes there's there's a few different factors um I don't want to give the game away too much because I'm going to come across I know pretty crazy question to ask you don't need to answer it because if I had if I had your answer with mine it' be a good thing right.
Jeff Coyle: Yeah no I mean to be fair I will answer it I answer it as open as I can so the there's a lot of sites that um might I know you're saying you don't like the word penalized but I'm on about completely not ranking in the top 100 for any keywords anymore um in in Google they've absolutely been decimated right but some of these people don't realize and I'm very very very surprised at this at the moment that how many people I speak to that own the these big affiliate sites that was once earning two 300,000 pound a month in commissions that now have dropped and they get no traffic anymore in Google but they're still earning 20 30,000 a month and they're not certain why and actually we know the reason why and I'll be honest with you like this is what people now need to try to start doing the you need to make certain they've got Bing Web Master tools set up because yes Bing is nowhere near as big as Google but the amount of traffic that you also get from Bing is pretty significant for for a lot of Industries so sometimes what we're doing is we're buying certain sites now that have been hit by Google knowing that just even if even if we couldn't recover it in Google we would get our money back in two to three years just from Bing tra but then yes we are recovering them and we recovering them by De optimizing certain money pages that are over optimized using certain tools like phrase and Surfer SEO and all these other tools where the keyword stuff it REM it reminds me back five years six years ago of um over optimization of anext on bat links and now what they've done is they've gone and hit keywords on the page page too many times because they've used a Content optimization tool that says correlation tells you you need to get the word best on the page 23 times and it's like no you don't you don't need to get it on the page 23 times but because this tool told them that that's what they need to do they're over optimized so by De optimizing that content by by actually deleting certain pages so some of them have gone too wide you can't be a jack of all if you can't be the best gardening um affiliate about law mowers and headed trimers but then also be the best about um gaming chairs and most mats Niche down into what you got out is it technology is it gardening is it whatever it is that you want to go down so if you're not ranking well for gaming get rid of that cluster delete it off the site focus on on what you might have some topical Authority in and then double down on that Niche de optimize the money Pages build out pages that you're missing get the nice clusters being set back up and yes we're recovering a lot of sides from The Helpful content update but is it easy no does it cost quite a lot of money yes it's almost like you need to you all these people have built like I said they built the property on quicksand you now need to get the foundations set back up make certain you're looking at as being a real business but telephone numbers on the website um an address on the website an email address and about about us and meet the team a careers page just look like a real business try to get Unique Images try to get videos if you can of using the tools That's Unique on your channel um and and have these differentiator reviews if you can to be different to what some of us have got so there's a lot there that you need to do can you recover the answer is affirm yes you can.
Jeff Coyle: Yeah I I love the idea of looking at a page and saying what is it that I'm bringing or that my site's bringing to this topic that no one else can because maybe I have a data source or I have a certain level of expertise um or what's a story I can tell right that no one else can no one else can tell that story and why right you know you have your experience um in you know in Search and externally with gaming and with uh you know with with uh uh racing and all this stuff and that gives you that Mystique that allows it to follow through does your site do that and I think that that's where um most folks need that remediation um and then it's where you have you know you mentioned over optimization um I think that over optimization comes in a lot of different flavors as you've mentioned uh and you know just being real and saying like should this page um should this page be all things to all people right I think that there was a lot of misinformation in the market about um what cannibalization was what internal links should be um and I think that you really need to go back to basics and think critically about what a user would expect and user does not expect this crazy over optimized page that is totally generic and doesn't provide any value it's just not um doing not appealing to that mission so I thought that was cool so when you're creating content now and planning what can you say that speaks to that process uh like why would you consider yourself kind of the um the producing in a way that's novel or or kind of best in best in breed or best class right now.
James Dooley: So we um we try to make certain we don't play hide-and seek with our content that we're very very concise in giving the answers um it doesn't need all the fluff to just to get keywords on the page we try to think for the reader and the user first um we try to make him that it's media rich like you said with Unique Images unique videos and and I've I've spoken a few times about over optimization well actually the algorithm is an algorithm and it is basic math right I'm not saying it's basic B math it's not basic it's very difficult but it's a formula and there's also you can be under optimized so again going back to your infantry tool when you're also looking at the um the topical authority of the site you can very quickly start to understand what pages are under optimized and you can work yourself on those pages and you can start to make certain that have I covered all the questions that people might have on that page topic if not well let's start answering those questions have I covered the whole topic of what they might want to know about what it is no okay well let's cover it but then also make certain that from M what Market moose pulls out with regards to topic modeling you when you start looking at certain topics that you've not covered when you're going into research you start quickly realizing wa on a minute yeah people would want to know about this this and this so then it it's a cheat sheet it is completely a cheat sheet you're you're in an exam and you've got the answers work through the answers and think about what the user wants and and make certain you're optimized not over optimized but optimized enough to give what they want and be have the differentiator factors as well.
Jeff Coyle: I think that what you just said I mean I wish I could Replay that to everybody who like comes to the our website because it's right now it is about being smart and being sharp and interpreting data you know I'm I'm actually working on some things and Market music is working on some things that helps you interpret that data into editorial angles and ways to cover a topic um and get you a little bit further along um with you know being a better content strategist but what you described is so awesome like I I was speaking with a a Content strategist for a Fortune 500 company um and they said almost the exact same thing you did they're like this is my blind spot detector like I might have forgotten that angle I might have forgotten that oh yeah when I because it's I'm it's in my world where I'm all I do all day is review lawnmowers I think that everybody knows how to you know uh sharpen a blade so I wouldn't even mention it you know because because is sharpening blades is just obvious you know you do it you know and Brewing you know I might I might not mention you know the the alcohol Val volume uh you know or or a calculate why what IBU means you know um because I just if you don't know what that is right what are you doing right um but you forget that having that reminder that comes from a place of expertise you might have completely forgotten that so I love that because what you're doing is actually intent analysis through your own skills it's a skill that you have to develop so I think a lot of people they go into these SEO tools they see a list of words first of all they think it's a list of words that they have to like pump in it's not yeah it's these are things you have to you have to make part of your story right because in Market music's case and you know in you know this is a three-dimensional model that we smoosh into a list you know it's not there's more to it that we can't show you obviously because it wouldn't make sense um to make it wouldn't be easy for anyone to interpret it's already hard enough but I love the way you described it because it's you you're taking words and you're turning them into something that means a lot to your reader versus you know peppering in 15 keywords into the page and you know there's a big difference to that and I I I love the way you described it it's very intuitive to me but it's not intuitive to everybody you know.
James Dooley: Yeah Al also touching upon that something else that we failed miserably at previously when we was using and was actually using Market moves which in my opinion and I'm not saying it because I'm on your podcast it's the number one content optimization tool yeah we was faing miserably right using your tool with our writers because we was doing exactly what you just said we had the list of keywords or the key list of topics and they were just trying to work it in and they just slamming it all in the introduction in the summary and there wasn't properly breaking it down of where it needs to be at and and now we spend more money on getting our briefs to our writers to be banged on and make certain that we covering the The Source context so what's the context of the page what's the desired outcome that we want from this page that makes it different and making certain that we've got the right headings in place that our writers now can't do any wrong pretty much because we've given everything that we expect to see and it means that we've had to spend more money on the front end but it means at the back end we've we have to do a lot less kind of progressive optimization because we've got it in the front end set up our writers love it now they're getting through the content a lot faster and they've got all the topics that they need to on the page and it just works it's seamless now where previously when we just give him the list of topics to go after without a proper brief and without the context of the page it became difficult.
Jeff Coyle: Yeah well I'd like to you know you said one of my favourite words there context a lot of people have a hard time taking that to um action and into editorial uh act actions and I think that that's where you know we have to be in the you know you have to look yourself in the mirror you said it before you know how much what has your existing content told the world how much content do you have is it high quality has it built Authority for you how does that influence difficulty which means that how I know how much work I need to do right I need to build 50 on this because we don't have any existing power here we got to try to build it and that's speculative right so how do you how do you um you know um justify kind of doing so much work on testing is one and like because you're doing a lot and then how do you take speculative shots now when you have to invest a lot more into content like do you are you still taking a lot of shots or is is it less so with kind of the changes or you're trying to be more.
James Dooley: Absolutely we invest we've invested more than we ever have invested ever um we I feel that the opportunity if you know what you're doing is better than it's ever been ever because there's so many people now at present that's got uncertainty and there's so many people that are using the wrong tools they're buying the wrong type of toxic links they're not they're not do they're thinking they're doing topical Authority but the keyword research and topical maps are not properly set out so they're not using like think just even even without using any tools like just using stuff within Google like people also ask related searches um the auto suggest so type in your keyword a type in your keyword B seeing what shows up working through that understanding then I mean yes go and check in what's ranking and seeing what headings they have and you might go yes you know what I quite like that heading and that heading in that heading and getting all the best bits from your competition I'm still an advocate to see what's ranking and check the intent of what Google likes and getting their best bits but then being better and that's the most important part then becoming better then using a tool like Market moves to make certain that they can keep you in check to make certain you're covering all the topics that need to be on the page and then it's just rinse and repeat and yes you're saying it's expensive it is expensive but it's very lucrative as well if you can recover website or you're knowing it's do you know what's more expensive spending 100,000 on a site and it not ranking that's more expensive me having it me having a team and me understanding that I need another 50 pages that's not expensive that is that's making certain strategically and mathematically we doing things that works if my testing team didn't know what to do then it's expensive trying to do SEO and not knowing what topics I need to cover becomes expensive me doing what we're doing now yes we've got a big team but it's not that expensive because we know the direction that we need to go and I couldn't think of anything worse now than being blindfolded and trying to do things that I think is the right thing to do and wasting money because there's two things I well one thing I hate even more but one thing I don't like doing is wasting money the next BG thing is my number one p is wasting time I I have a limited amount of time and I cannot waste time so I need to make certain my testing team are testing testing testing for what's working so I can move forward be at the front of innovation with regards to what's working with SEO and then it allows all my different businesses to grow my lead generation sites to be working and and yes it's not cheap but it's cheaper than not having a site that's not ranking right.
Jeff Coyle: Wow I mean that's said very you in I think it's just hearing it from you is it's because it do you're not saying you win every time right you're not saying that it's not you're not saying that it's not hard I mean you know and but it is it is is worth the it's worth the investment and the speculation is the pain I mean you know I would I want to get as much information as I can you know I I use lots of different solutions and and I am you know meticulous in how I analyze search results um you know I've added I've just recently added some things to our search results where you can pull filters and refinements and knowledge cards and Knowledge Graph data and sticks and veds and all this fun stuff um because I'm meticulous I like you said I want to see all all of what's there not so I can you know copy it but so that I know maybe I wouldn't even have thought of this particular angle and there 's nothing better for me when I'm dealing with a competitor who over optimizes content and their content package is basically and I call it the sort descend in Keyword Planner right they walked through the list of keywords by search volume and they wrote a page for each one of those keywords right because it's just those are the easiest competitors to beat and that's to me you just it kind of through the other way there is to say I want to be thoughtful I want to be differentiated and I can take a site that was broken and fix it or I could also start that from scratch but I have the same level of confidence because I understand you know what my team can do and and the testing that they can execute um cool well I've got some awesome questions uh coming in um what um Industries are you thinking about James what industries that you might not have been thinking about building content in would you consider in 2024 good question thank you an um I'm heavily at the moment going into artificial intelligence um I just want to try to make certain that I'm at the Forefront of innovation for artificial intelligence to make certain that it's not easy for others to catch me up I'm not saying I'm doing artificial intelligence across my sites for link building and content I just want to know quite a lot about it so I'm investing quite a lot of like AI image AI videos um some AI content Brands and I'm doing a lot of testing on that um so that's something that I'm I'm pretty big on in 2024 with regards to Industries for lead generation or products and stuff like that I'm already in over 600 different Industries so it's not really new Industries it's just seeing what what sub niches within an existing Niche might be making them the most money so like I'm in let's say plumbing and then that you realize that the plumbers they make majority of their money doing commercial wet rooms not doing shower rooms in residential and commercials are bigger market so you're going into into commercial wet rooms for roofing I do Heritage Ro I do all different types of roofing but I do Heritage Roofing is the most profitable so you start going down a rabbit hole of what niches are going to make you the most money um so I won't really say it's new niches I'd say it's more digging down into sub niches is is kind of where I'm at for 2024.
Jeff Coyle: Cool what has been some and obviously I'm working on lots of things with artificial intelligence and uh you know we're we're building an an entire platform that relates to Cluster analysis and prioritization right now um content strategy fun lots of fun stuff in the works uh yeah what what are the things that um you've been surprised with um you know I think imagery using imagery effectively can be a an amazing win I mean the days of stock um lowquality stock I mean I don't know why anyone would use lowquality stock right now there's just yeah Oodles of different better opportunities but what are the some other things maybe that um you've been surprised by and have been able to adopt quickly into your process.
James Dooley: So there's several different things of um of what I've been very very very impressed with with um AI so one of them being imagery like you said another one being um getting a collection of data big Source data and then getting AI to come across and give me unique data sources that I can use that I can get out there which is unique and differentiator the information's already out there but I'm presenting it now in a format that's never been presented before so I'm I'm being and I'm know the data source for that information is that's huge um faceless videos for certain like local lead generation sites um getting because I'm I want to make certain I'm being seen in in Google web search in Google Images in Google videos in YouTube I want to be seen everywhere from um the AI videos are working great and then the big one is I don't know whether I'm going to send it out to the public or not I've got um an AI rewriting tool um for and it's called live and I've got a re um but it's only for internal use at the moment it's actually de optimizing content so it's getting an existing article it's getting all your topics of what you have and it's de optimizing content so it's strategically looking at what words are used too many times on the page removing those out and just reworking that content removing any contextless words removing any fluff so where people used to go this needs needs to be a 4,000-word article well no if you can write that in 3,000 words but getting all the main entities and the information density is great do it in three fosen words not in four fosen words and we're kind of doing that quite a bit as well and these are for the the sites where we're looking to buy the sites de optimize certain pages delete certain pages try to get better like data sources AI image rate AI video there's a lot of like different things of what we're doing but I'd say the biggest one is using it for data um is key.
Jeff Coyle: Wow that's killer wow that's a that's that's the best answer I've heard from anyone on those types of questions too I love the idea we I used to call market Muse the fluff finder optimize because if you were scrolling through a paragraph and it had nothing highlighted it probably shouldn't be there um or if it was like way over optimized and it was heavy heavy green or heavy heavy uh highlights that did probably was something I want to investigate what you want is like yeah you're in a in a conversation or in an article you're probably going to mention a couple things in that paragraph you don't want it too high too low um but yeah that the the the 10,000w article that tries to tell you you know everything about beekeeping as well as zebras it's not really doing the job um so I love that I love the idea of so I'm I'm really into Kind of Blue Ocean Market and you you touched on it and when I defined it it's what data does my company have or do I know that no one else knows but you take a you did a little spin on that I loved um which was uh no one has ever presented this angle on this data yet um I think there's a market to to really be thinking about that I've been thinking about that in a particular industry uh in which I write which people most people know about but it involves uh you know a particular liquid uh that I uh produce but that's something that's a constant goal is what information do I have and then what information isn't presented well and I think that's amazing advice all right well James this has been amazing amazing conversation I think there's a lot of people that think that you can't recover sites right now um it's hard work people have learned I think that you really got to examine what lowquality gray hat black hat techniques might you still have Trauma from or examples of on your sites and be real make sure your mirror is clear um and you know that includes lowquality backlink profiles um as well as you know cross link profiles um but I'll I'll give you what what other things should they be thinking about should this audience be thinking about when they're thinking about um getting to being focused again on content maybe they gave up on content they're like man I just need to do PPC uh but that content can win we've got to invest we've got to be sharp um you know what what would you give it for advice and I'll give you the last word on that.
James Dooley: So I'd say there's three things um that people need to look at um one is if you've got a site that has been hit and it was ear some good money I'm not just saying it because I'm on the market Ms podcast go and get the set up and run it against the whole domain go and see what topical Authority you actually have that's ran against Market moves go and optimize your your least optimized pages that market moves are saying go and get that higher optimized go and then find if you if you haven't got the highest score on topical Authority go and do a proper topical map to cover that specific topic then go and tick all the boxes for eat just just tick the Box is it cost next to no money to to go and get yourself a privacy policy a cookie policy get a telephone number get an address and then if you have been buying back links maybe go out and get yourself a proper diso so just remove the toxic there's so many guest post link Farms there's so many people that are thinking of buying um good quality links and they're actually just pbn and they're actually very very toxic and too many people are talking about Dr as being the only metric and not talking about trust toxicity so I would say eat a b um getting yourself a diso to remove toxic backat links and then properly go and get the Infantry set up with Market moves run it against against the whole domain don't just do research at Page by Page level you have to run it against the whole demain to get the full story and they're the main three parts of recovering aside.
Jeff Coyle: Ah Thanks James that is a pleasure and if anyone doesn't know how to reach you how to reach out to you how can they get in touch with you you are a wealth of knowledge I want to get three more zeros for your hat so how can they get in touch with you.
James Dooley: I've got I've got James d.com I've only actually just started in the last six months doing my own personal branding I tried to always hustle in silence and let success be the noise um I was I was a a massive advocate of building Brands um I can I like keeping myself to myself I'm a family man um but recently I think because a lot of the fluff and a lot of the SEO myths that was being shared out online I felt like I needed to come out a little bit more to share some knowledge with people to make certain that they don't do what I did for many years and waste a lot of money and waste a lot of time um I'm at a position where and I don't mean this in an arrogant way I don't need to work another day in my life but I absolutely love innovation of SEO um I love the industry I love networking in the industry um I've got james.com um I have nothing really to sell um apart I do obviously I do lead generation and I've got Brands and stuff but me myself personally I don't really sell anything but I've got James d.com and from there you should see like my Twitter my YouTube my Facebook and stuff like that where you can come and connect on there and we can have debates or you can ask me any questions that you want.
Jeff Coyle: Awesome um it's just it's been a pleasure um always just get my brain pumping get excited about search get excited about content every time I talk to you um and and it's been wonderful having you on the show and I think that there's I can think off the top of my head about 18 to 20 amazing takeaways and you can't ask for more than that on a Wednesday I think today's Wednesday right.
James Dooley: Oh today's Happy Valentine's Day.
Jeff Coyle: Yeah Happy Valentine's Day yeah I think you're my Valentine today because Le leaves me with hope leaves me with happiness um and I I just I just really appreciate the time um and the efforts and if anyone has any questions for me Jeffrey coil on the X Twitter um Linkin I answer everything as long as you're not asking me for links um and jeffm marketmuse decom I'd put my cell phone on here if I could and James you know that I'll talk to you later and thanks again see you cheers jefff cheers.
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