SEO Emergency Questions - Part 2

I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge , hints and tips I've amassed over that time . Hello , welcome back to another episode of SEO is not that hard with me , ed Dawson , your host , as usual , and today it's part two of my SEO emergency questions .

Now , if you've not listened to the previous episode , the first one about SEO emergency questions , where I explain where the concept of emergency questions comes from and then , just quickly , it's for I'm hoping to start inviting some people on the podcast , create podcast episodes with you know , another voice , another seo expert or another person with any kind of

experience level in seo

to give sort of different opinions , and I wanted to do something . I'm trying to come up with a format that's a little bit different and I'm trying to create these emergency questions which came from a podcast called richard Herring's . That's a Square Theatre podcast which is a comedian's podcast .

I love listening to it , but he uses emergency questions in his podcast to sort of get different answers out of people , try and learn a bit about people and trying to just do something a bit different . So I'm building a whole lot of questions up that I'm hoping to start using . So I'm running through some of them now just with myself , with you .

Obviously , if they're on a podcast with me and somebody else , then they might spark dialogue rather than just being a monologue for me or for the person who's guesting . But I'm just running through some now and seeing how they work with just me . So first one for today . Let's have a look . Where was I going to go ?

What's the weirdest backlink you've ever seen , pointing to a site ? So this is weird . It kind of made sense when you thought about it , but um , it's to broadbandcouk , to one of its mobile broadband pages .

This was during covid and you know , I was looking at backlinks pointing at the site and I'd come across a new one which was from a funeral , a specialist funeral provider , which made me I don't know just I don't know , it shouldn't be weird to think that it's coming from your funeral director's books .

Um , yeah , this funeral director was was pointing links to the mobile broadband part of the site because they had started a specialist service of live streaming funerals um during covid and they would . They would live stream from any any church place of worship and they obviously relied on mobile broadband .

So they were saying to people if you want to book us , go to this page . It's got . It's got links to um all the different providers and you can check the coverage at your uh , your church place of worship and see if we're suitable . And it was a good backlink . It was good um , because it was targeted . I had a good anchor text , all these things .

But , yeah , coming from the specialist funeral provider who who were doing these live streaming um anywhere in the country they would go to to do live stream of funeral was I don't know , I just found that weird . Anyway , that's the weirdest one for me , okay .

So next emergency question is what's the most outrageous seo request a client or boss has ever asked of you ? And for me that would be back at the very start of my SEO journey . That would be back when I was working as the technical director at a London-based marketing agency .

I was in charge for the digital side , producing websites , that kind of thing , and they had a very good client base . Um , you know very well-known uh names as well , especially in the uk , things like bafta , who's our equivalent of the oscars , um , and city world cinema is a big , massive cinema cinema chain , interflora in the uk .

And we'd have american airlines . We had lots of other airlines and loads of holiday companies , but we had real big sort of blue chip clients . At that point , se , seo was becoming , you know , search was becoming more and more important for these companies .

They'd caught on , basically , and it was coming up more and more , you know , with our bosses when they were pitching and getting requests for information that SEO . We had to stop giving SEO answers , essentially , and strategies and yeah , how . I was basically told yeah , ed , you're now our seo expert .

Um , you need to go and pitch what we'll do for seo to some any big cleaner , some big client , and I was just like , oh my god , I've got a lot of learning to do really , really quickly , especially as these were massive brands , and I was like we could just screw this up completely . I'd really have no idea .

And that's that's essentially what got me into seo in the first place , and that was a real drop in the deep end . Um , so , yeah , quite outrageous , especially as this was a um . You know they're a very credible company and , yeah , all these big clients and you know they were just shows , they were winging it a bit .

Um , I can say this because , fortunately , this company doesn't exist anymore .

As is the thing with agencies , they all get bought , sold , go bust , and this agency actually , very fortunate for them , they got really badly hit by the um 2008 financial crash because they had all these travel clients and airline clients especially , and they just lost so much business because of that , because all those clients were pulled back .

They limped on , they phoenixed a couple of times , but eventually I think that they disappeared as a company in 2012-ish , I think , maybe a bit later in 2014 , but that's just the way of agencies , isn't it ? It can happen they can outgrow themselves . But yeah , that was certainly . It felt pretty outrageous to me at the time .

I had to sneak and pitch to all these very senior people in these companies and make out that I knew what I was doing . But I'm probably not the first seo that's ever said they knew what they're doing , when really they didn't , because there's a lot of them out there now still okay .

So next emergency question what's your seo superpower and what's your kryptonite ? So I think for this , my superpower is probably patience . When it comes to SEO I've said this a lot of times there are no quick fixes . You've got to build for the long term . You've really got to think long term , especially if you want to get the very best results .

It's really really hard to do stuff quickly and see results , especially do things quickly that will sustain and last .

So having that ability to think long-term even to the point where I'm quite happy to build and put resources into building a site and then just leaving it for a year or more until it starts to build that kind of trust , authority and that time parameter I think that's definitely within Google .

The longevity of a site and of pages definitely , I think , counts in Google . It also helps you do things like build up links , build up your content , but not worry about having to monetize it . That's , I think , a superpower having that patience and it pays off in the long run .

I can now look back and think oh yeah , I've got sites now that make really good income and when we launched them maybe eight years I got more of some of them . They did nothing for 18 months , two years , if even more in some cases . So having that patience to just keep them up there and keep plugging out them a bit when we needed to now pays off .

So that is , I think , a superpower , because patience is hard with some people , I think . Um , my kryptonite , I think , is outreach . Um , I've never been great at putting myself out there . Obviously , this podcast this is , you know , it was always a start .

This was me thinking how can I outreach to people , how can I get talk to people , meet new people , without having to , you know , go places ? Because essentially , as I you probably know , I live in a rural area . It's difficult to get to meetups . I'm not working in office with lots of people . I'm not going to lots of conferences .

I do go occasionally , I do try and go to things , but it is harder , especially , you know , a few years ago , when the kids were young . My kids are not teenagers , so it's easy . It's easier to get away . It's easier to get away . They're self-sustaining , they can look after themselves , they need less time than when you've got toddlers , for example .

So , yeah , you have to go through that period of literally working at home . Obviously , we've got a team , but everyone works remotely , so you don't have that day-to-day interaction and we don't necessarily have to go out there to outreach clients and stuff .

So , yeah , I think outreach is difficult and that again , outreach for some people is brilliant because it , um , it works really well , um , in getting backlinks and those kinds of things . There's , there's people who literally they gain backlinks by just by outreach , by networking , and , yeah , that's probably my kryptonite . That that's probably my kryptonite .

That's where I don't do as well and where , if I could be a bit more personable , maybe , you know , meeting more people out , you know going to conferences and being that network which I'm not . So , yeah , so that outreach network type thing is probably my kryptonite .

Okay , next emergency question what's your guilty pleasure when it comes to procrastinating on SEO tasks ? So I'm sure everyone procrastinates now and again , some more than others . I don't know how bad I am on the spectrum of procrastination . Sometimes I feel pretty bad . I think I have days when I procrastinate more than others , but I've got two .

Really the one that I do probably all the time is ending up looking at stats , looking at analytic , looking at sales , um , things like that , on a probably much more frequent basis than I should . You know hourly , if not . You know more frequently , and it's a terrible waste of time because you know these things are important to look at and analyze .

You know , occasionally , you know when you're gonna get time to really look at what's happening , but just doing it on a day-to-day , hour-to-hour , minute-by-minute basis , when you should be creating a bit of content or recording a podcast , or , you know , making calls or anything that's actually productive and useful , whereas you know just checking sales in the last 20

minutes or any sales in the last half an hour , how many people came , how many people on the site right now . These kind of things are not actually productive

and they're they're a time suck . You're looking for you're really looking for dopamine hits , aren't you ? So that's that's one , that's my , that's my more seo related one .

The other procrastination thing I have is obviously working from home and you're sat in your home environment and I find right , okay , I live in a house with my wife , fiona , and you know I've got two , two daughters to their teenage daughters . They're 14 now , they're twins and you know they all are really into horses .

Okay , um , now I don't know if you ever met or spent much time around horsey people . They you know horses take up a lot of time and they spend a lot of time riding , spend a lot of time cleaning and caring for the horses and looking around things like that .

So their focus , a lot of the focus on sort of chore type tasks for them , is all around the horses . And we've got our horses at home on the farm and you know that's off . They're doing that job .

So horsey people I find , generally don't do a lot of housework , they don't prioritize housework very much , things like , you know , cleaning the house , sort of the dishwasher , that kind of thing , whereas me I'm not into the horses .

You know I do lots of horse related jobs where I need to , like mending fences and , you know , holding onto a horse at certain times when they have to run in the house to get something , but I don't spend a lot of time on . I actually care for the horses .

So I end up being the one in the house more and I have a much lower tolerance threshold for dirt , mud , you know untidiness , than anyone else in my family . So I tend to be the person that will go and clean , go and hoover and um . It can be what I . I actually enjoy it , though that's the crazy thing . I actually enjoy cleaning .

We've have in the past had cleaners that come in um and I will find that I don't like how they do the job . I don't think they do it well enough . They don't like how they do the job . I don't think they do it well enough . They don't do it often enough .

And I can actually find it relaxing to clean , put on a podcast , so I feel like , whether I am or not , I feel like I'm working . I listen to podcasts better when I'm doing something physical , so I will often be listening to podcasts and cleaning the house . And yeah , that's procrastination and sometimes I can sit here and especially in the morning , I can go .

All right , I could do this . I'm tired of that . Clean this . I could sort this out when really I need to be at my desk doing some work . And I had the same thing this morning .

It was like , right , I need to record some podcasts today and I did a little bit of housework beforehand , listen to a bit of podcast beforehand , and there was like right now , I've got . I'm going to record some podcasts before I do any more housework , and I said I've got to record too . So that's a long way of saying why procrastination .

Um , guilty pleasure , yeah , is probably cleaning the house . Don't know what that says about me . And before anyone says , yeah , I know that you're meant to all the business books , all the productivity people say outsource anything that you know is repetitive , that someone else could do .

You could spend your time doing something else more productive , um , but I think I , I like , I enjoy it , I like getting away from the desk a bit . It gets moving about and , um , yeah , I do listen to podcasts . It's thinking time . So I don't think it's just completely wasted time , but sometimes I can probably spend more time cleaning than I should .

Anyway , that's , I think , it for the emergency questions . Today I've still got a load more . And , yeah , I hope you're finding these interesting . Let me know . I mean , are you learning something ?

Is it teasing something out about me personally , about my approach to things , how I think about things , how it works in terms of business as well as SEO , that kind of thing ? Anything useful coming out of this ? Do let me know . Feedback's really important .

So , please let me know , but no , until next time , just keep optimizing , stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics .

Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode . If you want to get in touch , have any questions , I'd love to hear from you . I'm at channel5 on Twitter . You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleuseilusecom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard .