Master SEO: Answers to Your Most Common Questions

James Dooley: I'm joined with James and today we're going to be answering the most commonly asked questions I I reckon this will probably be like a two or three part series which we might do one every single week but how long does it take to rank six generally speaking now 7.3 days 7.3 days if you've got the correct back link velocity and no I'm just messing with you the um it's a commonly asked question in the SEO industry is how long does it take to rank and obviously the the the answer that I hate which is normally the most common answer is it completely depends but it does depend with regards to the competitiveness of the keyword how much competition that you have and how much what your backlink profile looks like and what your topical authority of your website looks like so the bad answer is it depends because there's so many different moving parts to knowing go to rank in Google let me throw a spanner in the works right so obviously prehistoric data is is is a massive ranking Factor so if you've if you're trying to rank for a new keyword right and your business or your website's been going for five or six years you've obviously got that prehistoric data it's going to take a lot less time than a brand new website trying to rank for that really difficult keyword but would you agree in the last maybe couple years that it's a lot quicker to rank for some difficult keywords yes it is if you've got the right type of links you've got technically a well-b built site Y and you've already got some sort of topical Authority so I'll give you an example of it if I was a large mortgage broker and I was scaling out wanting to try to rank for mortgage broker in a specific area then it would be a lot easy for me to rank for a mortgage broker in London right if I already have lots and lots of content about what the existing mortgage rates are interest rates all the lenders of what you can do but if you didn't have all those pages and you didn't have the backlink profile and a well-built website to go after the mortgage broker in London would be now on impossible to rank for until you started to build that up yeah definitely um I I think we can both both agree on that like topical Authority is massive um obviously and and not only that is some difficult keywords you can actually rank fairly quickly but you just need to spend more money yeah so that's that's all that's another Factor as well like for example if if you are competing against somebody that is spending let's say 10 grand a month on SEO and you're only spending 5,000 they're going to get double the results quicker than you so for a key word it might take you 12 months but for them it might take they take them six months and if if all things are equal obviously yeah I think the hard part with regards to a lot of business owners or marketing managers might have had the fingers burnt by hiring the wrong type of seos so if you get a good SEO and they understand what is needed then yeah generally speaking the more you spend they'll buy quality back links that are relevant right that are powerful and those back links will move the need and help him and if they don't get certain things like batling have a wellb site and have good quality content they're not going to rank so if they're trying to cut corners and only spend 500 ,000 even2 2,000 a month it's going to be a slow burner for them to rank they need to understand it's probably going to take years for them to rank they want to rank faster they need to spend more to spend more means they can get more more content more battling but the right type of content and the right type of bat links is key so we we've obviously been talking a lot about um back links and acquiring them and one commonly asked questions that I constantly get is is building links ethical um is is it going against Google's te's and C's are you going to end up burning the website in 12 months by building links or acquiring links so I'm partially biased because I'm I'm an investor in search right but to give the right answer is you could have one hat on that basically says it's unethical because it's against Google guidelines but the way that searo does it which is a company that we've both invested into is the way that Searcher builds the bat links is by genuine Outreach so okay there's times where money might be passed to pay the journalist or pay the editor to upload the article just like you'd pay any sort of freelancer or any sort of company or contractor to do a job if we are trying to work with a Web Master to get a link placed on that site to the client's website there work involved and does not everyone charge some money to do work yes they do so we don't just go placing links on hack demands or pbns this is genuine Outreach and these are links that are being earned because the website they're linking through to is relevant and good quality so these I would not recommend going to places like Fiverr and freelancer and stuff like that that are just spamming you with 5,000 and bat links these are earned links because you are genuinely outreaching to the web Masters to get a link placed in a topically relevant article or writing a new article which is going to add value to their website I think that's very different to just just going out buying any old links which is against Google guidelines I mean the the reason why I'm asking it is because I get to asked a lot by market managers business owners and and they're always kind of like afraid like oh should we be building links should we not and then as soon as you start like showing their competitors and their competitors are doing Outreach acquiring links maybe even doing s directory listings and stuff as soon as you start showing the bigger picture of like look this is what your competitors are doing they become very much on board but it's it's one of those questions where it's like people are sometimes scared to to give a black and white answer to it yeah it's I mean it's a difficult one because you need bat links whichever way you're going to acquire those bat links whether you buy them or you earn them or you just try and write content and the links will come well you don't rank unless you've got that links so the won't actually come because people won't see the article that's been done so it's one of them that you've got to be making certain that you do in the free pillars which is technical content and back links and the back links is probably still the most important ranking factor that is out there like now you can start scaling content a little bit with AI and stuff like that so what's the one biggest differentiator factor is backat links how many Vols is that website got so it's it's key yeah so now another asked question is topical Authority what is it and and how how would you do it for let's say a cleaning company so topical Authority is if you try to write one article on a subject you will struggle to rank for the article you need lots of articles on a given subject that might be all closely related and categorized so for carpet cleaning it could be the let's say you do carpet cleaning in the northwest of England you would might have a page for carpet cleaning in Manchester carpet cleaning in Liverpool carpet cleaning in chesher and different places of where you do carpet cleaning so so those are deemed as local area Pages local served area pages that that's where you're willing to work right that that's one style of page yeah then there's blog posts so how to remove red wine from my carpet and in that article if you was a carpet cleaner you was trying to sell your services going to go and clean it you'd probably in that article The Source context of that article specifically would be this is how you do it but you try and make it as complicated as you can and then you say or you can just hire us who's an expert at carpet cleaning yeah so that's a different Ty some more of a blog post it's an informational article that's hopefully going to lead two business that you're going to to secure then after that you've then got how to remove blood from a carpet and it's very similar kind of setup where you're explaining how like what materials or what chemicals you might be using to remove blood from a carpet yeah make it sound relatively difficult but then move on from there to say we can do a done for you service so there's all these different ways of being able to build up topical Authority but if you see every article that I just mentioned was related to carpet cleaning in time Google starts to say these are an expert about carpet cleaning yeah so you've you've obviously got the the local areas pages so like Manchester carpet cleaning you've got the the blog content or some people also call it longtail keywords as well and then you also have the the service Pages as well so like which Services you actually provide as a cleaning company so um for example rug cleaning might be one you might have oven cleaning you might have commercial office cleaning you you you need to build the bigger picture you can't the days of just uploading one page or one service or having one page listing out all of your services and thinking that one page is going to rank for everything that's that's not the case unfortunately it's very important for people people to understand that every service will have a different intent and if it's got a different intent and if you search for that keyword and it brings back a different set of results specifically take for that service that you've looked for you need a different page for it if you've just got one page saying we do this this this this this this and this you're not going to rank for it you need to split those pages up where it's got a different search intent yeah I I agree with that and then another uh the last question is how important are gmbs and would you get a lot of reviews or how would you get a lot of reviews so a Google business profile or what was previously known as a gmbb yeah is unbelievable for all local listings right especially I would prefer to have a Google business profile than a website if I was a restaurant and I could only choose one yeah right or if it was a breakfast place so I was just recently in London this weekend and I was asking the question to my mom and my brother right where we going to go for breakfast and all of us went on to Google maps to say breakfast near me and was looking at the reviews and was clicking on going oh that's only 4.1 this is 4.6 let's go to that one and we're quickly having a look at the photos and going this one looks nice yeah my mom wanted these pancakes and I wanted eggs benedict and I'm like yeah that one looks good okay we we'll go there so for for certain industries a Google business profile is very very very important for e-commerce not specifically that important for certain industries whether they're not looking for specifically local not really that important but if someone's looking to go to a local restaurant or a local cafe it is vital and with regards to reviews yes reviews are very very important not just for ranking but for actually we was looking at the there was like 16 restaurants where it was was at Oxford Circus in London and we were searching and we was clicking down from with like oh it's 4.9 let's look at that oh it's only got two reviews that I move to the next one not so I was going not enough reviews scores too low and we was grading it via the reviews narrowed it down to the top three and then we quickly looked at photos so if you are obviously if you do have a GMB or Google business profile adding good quality photos on there as well is that the first instant of the first like thing you've looking at it is going yes or no it's almost like Tinder yeah are you going to go there are you not going to go there do what I mean like so like you've got to look at it first few photos oh that looks really nice right okay we'll go there so yes for local listings I would highly recommend a Google business profile yeah it's um it can be difficult at times like trying to get reviews and stuff like that so A few a few tips that I would say is try to incentivize advise people to leave reviews like I don't know if if any of the restaurants done this but um when I was abroad there was a lot of ice cream shops and they were essentially given out a free scoop of ice cream if you left on five star review which I thought was brilliant um so you can do stuff like that you can do email blasts so some of you guys watching will have got a load of clients that you have worked with over the years you can essentially just send out an email saying hey Lee can can you please leave me a review there are certain obviously templates and stuff like that that you can do um and then there's also I don't know if you've seen these but there's also these like cards that you can get and it's like a QR code and just pops up that we have to we have to Google my business and they can leave a review very very easily but going back to what you were saying um the photos and the videos how much of a difference does that make oh it makes huge difference not just for like I said not just for rankings and getting in that M pack not just for that but the conversion it's that that for me is conversion rate optimization someone's going clicking onto it they're quickly looking going oh yeah yeah they they look good right I'm going to go there so from a conversion rate photos and videos are important something else that I'd recommend as well is check out the link in the description because we've actually done a video together of the best ways of ranking a gmbb or a Google business profile I highly recommend you check checking out watching that video as well yeah I think it was a 25 or maybe even 30 minute video talking about how to optimize your yeah it was quite an in-depth way of someone who's looking to do it in-house personally I'm always one of them that I prefer Outsourcing so I prefer to if if I'm an expert and I'm a plumber I just want to do more Plumbing work so if you want to I would I would strongly recommending hiring a Google business profile expert to carry out these works get your photos optimize the photos upload the photos up upload the videos um start doing some post on that and lots of other things that basically is covered in the link of the ranking factors for a Google business profile yes so that has been episode one of the SEO commonly asked questions if you guys do want your questions asked make sure to leave it down in the comment section below and if you guys want a free 15-minute growth strategy call make sure to check the link in the description yeah definitely make sure you leave a comment down there ask us some questions we can ask it in the com we can answer the questions in the comment section but also we can do a follow on video any other questions that you have we'll do a follow on and then we'll do a little miniseries of the most common questions to do with SEO