The SEO Truth About Google Core Web Vitals

Key Takeaways

core web vitals is just the it's just the foundation for ev it's just the entry-level thing to get into the seo game because at the end of the day if you think about it every single website if every let's say 95 of websites have amazing core web bottles amazing scores well what happens well then it no longer becomes any unique value at all because if everyone has it then everyone's right here so what's going to be the difference between website a and website b if they have perfect scores and core web vitals well obviously there has to be other variables other factors because otherwise google's not going to be able to determine what should rank and remember this is all about rankings and it's all about it is about competition so google is using using different variables different ranking factors to determine who should be above each other so at the end of the day just having a fast loading website and a good user experience that's just like baseline seo like it's just an expectation at this point so once you've done that you know let's you know the person uh i think of suzanne in the group who said that uh she got like a 94 or a 94 score on the core web files if she gets it up to a 95 or a 96 nothing will change as far as organic search traffic because at that point she's already way above the average that it's just not going to make any difference it's going to have incremental differences if any at all so what really matters once we've established that foundation of good page loading speed good user experience now we're going to start to talk about the things that really have a huge impact and so these next couple slides i'm going to focus on one factor which you guys know i love is content because content is the thing that makes a difference it is it is the literal lead domino of that makes the difference in every seo campaign because if you think about it doesn't matter how fast your website loads doesn't matter how good your user experiences it actually doesn't even matter how good your links are if your content isn't actually good none of that will matter like you could have the fastest loading website on the planet but if your content is garbage nothing is going to work so the content is what matters it really is the difference now of course you could have terrific content and a poor and a really poor user experience and that will cause problems but that's why we need at the foundation we have the the fast loading website and the good user experience then from there now we're going to start talking about content so the thing i want to talk about today if i can get my computer to work create a content moat so this is something i think about like all the time and it's not just not just when it comes to blog content but it also applies to youtube content it applies to twitter posts it applies to linkedin it applies to any content that you're creating online you should always be thinking about your content mo and so what do i mean by that so i basically stole this concept from warren buffett and warren buffett if you know who he is the famous investor he whenever he's thinking about what companies berkshire hathaway should invest in he's thinking about does this company have some sort of moat a strategic advantage that would make it difficult for other companies to come in and beat them so like for example if we look in the seo industry like sem rush who just went public it would be very difficult for someone to start a company and compete with semrush it'll be very very hard because they've invested millions and millions of dollars into their software so and and they have they have just a massive moat when it comes to even their online presence too so you know these are things that warren buffett would be looking at he would never invest in sem rush by the way he only invested really undervalued companies but the point is is the concept is that you know what are the unique strategic advantages they're going to make it really really hard for a business to compete with another business so in the case of seo how can we create content that makes it really difficult for someone else to copy us or replicate us so things that that are easy to replicate are how-to stuff so for example i created you know a long time ago i created how to build backlinks well i dominated for a very long time but what happened is companies like mailchimp come in and take my content and rewrite it and then my content becomes basically rendered useless and the reason is because it's just how-to content it doesn't have any unique differentiation it's very easy to replicate so ever since that happened you'll notice like my content i i very rarely publish content really at all but when i do it's always it's always with a weird unique angle so i'm going to talk about a few of these angles but ultimately we need to always be thinking about like when you're going to create an seo content asset or youtube video or whatever you know what can we do to make this really really hard to replicate um and so here are a few things that we can do unique unique unique and this is huge because the more unique it is the harder it is to replicate because if you do things that are just abnormal it just becomes very very hard for someone to do it and then they just look and they're like you know what that's probably not worth it so like for example i have a blog post about uh keyword research services i could have easily just published one of those generic you know like affiliate type of blog posts where they list out the seven keyword research services that they've actually probably never even used and you know just by doing google searches they just list out the seven top keyword research services just based on picking the top seven that are ranking so that's the type of stuff that most people do what i did is i actually found every keyword research service and i bought every single one and i analyzed them from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective to find out which one was actually good i did real real independent research and made it 100 unique so now when you look at best keyword research services and you look at what's ranking mine is clearly the let's say the black sheep or the unicorn or the purple cow that stands out among everything else so long term i know that page will beat everyone else until someone does a case study that's way bigger than mine which is certainly possible but i know that i've created a little bit of a moat that makes it difficult for people to even really want to try because no one wants to invest money uh that's what it comes down to so uh looking for those unique angles and spending a lot of time thinking about like okay you know everyone who's ranking on the first page has these generic blog posts what can i do that's going to be just like radically different uh and that's that's what we should try to do because you know i love i love the concept of the skyscraper i think it teaches people a lot of good things you know hey you know you found a keyword and now we're going to try to create something that's longer and deeper and better but for me it's much easier to create something that's radically different than try to create something that's better because trying to create something that's better it typically just becomes a race to the bottom and it just becomes a race to see who can you know produce the biggest word count and it just doesn't work it just doesn't work long term and it doesn't create a moat at all so so here are a couple things you can do to to create a moat and not let people copy you as easily unique data and research and i'm going to be showing you a few examples here like five examples but unique data and research is huge and that's always my go-to like whenever i'm thinking about i'm like you know what can i what kind of data can i collect for this topic um and sometimes it's not possible but sometimes you can do unique data where you actually like in the case of the keyword research one i went and actually got my own unique data but sometimes you can just pull data from other resources and create a curated piece of content from all that data now that's easier to replicate right because someone could just go and collect the same data as you and create a very similar blog post so like when you look at healthline.com all of their content it's extremely data driven and it's good it's very high quality but the thing is it doesn't have a moat because i can easily go and replicate it i can just take their content take the exact resources that they used and then go basically just slightly change the content and put it on my site so there's there's no there's no moat when it comes that the only reason why they continue to dominate is because their website is so strong so but when you know most people don't have the luxury of a you know a dr85 website so the way you do it is you have to get a little more scrappy you have to find ways to get that unique data to start to build a moat for your website and your content next one is tools and software it just makes sense you know it costs a lot of money and a lot of time to build tools and software so therefore most people are not willing to invest a lot of time and not willing to invest a lot of money so your moat alone is just in that so and then if you create something that's actually good you know it's a double a double whammy there so that's why i like tools like ahrefs and sem rush and moz their link profiles are so incredibly strong because their company their tool that they offer is inherently a form of link bait so they get links without trying like if you look at scm rush's like link profile there's constantly getting links all the time just because they're sem rush not because they created some sort of epic piece of content it's just because they have a really useful tool so next is design and a lot of people underestimate this but just investing in content design or unique images can create help you create a mode too like a lot of people they go and find you know stock photos they throw them in their content that's just it's just lazy you know we don't we shouldn't be doing that uh we should make it unique um and ironically i just grabbed this photo from from google that's on this slide but if i was creating a blog post i would never do this so uh what i would do is i would take this if i was talking about this as a blog post and i would create a unique background for it that looks similar to my website uh and you can just use canva for this and i've talked about this a lot you just you can take a stock photo put it into canva export it put it on your site and now it's actually a unique image so very simple but thinking about design is one way and there's an example here that i'll be showing you uh but design is one way to develop that mode too and then expert level depth so this is something that uh is very hard to replicate uh no matter how hard they try so like for example i just published a video on youtube that was actually a coaching session from maybe a couple weeks ago and it's just me like talking about seo stuff talking about like a complete seo process for uh growing an affiliate website well the nuances and the expert insights that i can give are difficult to replicate because the only way to replicate it is to have the same experience so the only people that can really replicate are the people that have similar experiences i do and you know that's thinking about in your field like that's what you need to be thinking about is you know there's probably only a small pool of people who can really replicate you on the expert level so that's one advantage you can really go after and then on top of it if you combine your expert level content along with just like you as an individual no one can copy you right like there's only one of me so the way that i deliver content the way that the way that i teach the way that i communicate is completely unique to me there's no one else like it and that's the same for you guys too like no one else is going to do it the way that you do it so automatically just by you showing up it's automatically unique in that way so that took me a while to realize that uh but that's huge it's really huge and then the last one is just weird angles like just try to like do weird stuff like it i know it's a strange thing but you should really just like look like what's a totally weird thing that i could do for this keyword and just really try to tap into that that creativity because that's where a lot of magic can really happen so a couple examples here first one from backlinko the funniest thing happened um i think on tuesday but we send we send emails almost around the same time so he usually sends and this is you know i i study people who are in my my verticals so i know he sends emails around 10 am cst on tuesday and that's just because data proves that tuesday is one of the best days for sending emails so he he aligns with that i also like to send emails on tuesday because of that data so i typically because i know that he sends them a 10 i typically send them at like 11 or i'll send them a nine because i don't want us competing for open rates but anyway i sent he sent this post about core web vitals and then like two minutes later i sent one for uh you know core web vitals equals dumb and like the the inbox is like back to back and he's probably like i guess he's copying me um but it was just just a coincidence because we both send on the same day but anyway this is a perfect example what he did uh this is unique data and i can guarantee brian probably spent probably at least a month or maybe two months building this case study so like you know you gotta ask yourself like are you willing to spend two months creating a case study and that's really what makes a difference like it's really hard to replicate this piece of content uh you you have to go and study 200 and 8 000 web pages you have to organize all of that and then distill it into a blog post that's a very very difficult task so you know brian understands that and he does it terrifically well one of the best uh at building out case studies with unique data and usually he'll just partner with someone else who collects the data and then he delivers it and presents it but still like take what what he does and replicate it in different industries because i can tell you no one is doing this level of research and unique data in other industries like the seo industry is far above other industries as far as content quality like leaps and bounds above other industries so you can take stuff that works well in the seo industry and apply it in other verticals and it will work really really well and it actually won't even need to be as deep because no one is doing this in other verticals so definitely a moat here this one is really interesting i like this one because this is from youtube and if you're thinking about like what what's a way to create unique content on youtube this guy sam newton he's not a big youtuber he only has like 100 000 subs but he his subscriber count went through the roof when he published this video and it's about peter mckinnon who does have a lot of subscribers i think peter mckinnon maybe has like three or four million subscribers but anyway he had barely any subscribers he published this really unique awesome video that's just kind of like a funny video uh saying he's the new peter mckinnon and uh his subscriber count shot through the roof so it's like the classic 80 20 situation you know 80 percent of your results are the product of twenty percent of your efforts so his one video produced almost all of his subscribers um so you know this is once again if you watch this video and i highly recommend you do just so you can see how much uh production value and how much effort and time you can tell went into it that's it's an once again a content mode it's not easy to replicate this video so these are things you'd be thinking about and you can just tell like when you see a good piece of content you know that they've spent a lot of time and effort and planning and especially you really know it when you've gone through that process yourself and you know how difficult it actually can be so it's very easy to spot it now number three is base camp and i would highly recommend studying their content because one thing they do really well and i was talking about this earlier is it's very unique and it's very specific to them it's not specific to anyone else so everything they talk about is specific to what their business does so it really can't be replicated ultimately because it's just what they do no one else does it it's unique so they're always talking about the different policies in their company and just the way they grow and it's always unique and that's why when you look at their content they've acquired so many backlinks and people you know admire them as thought leaders you know in the business world so and that's just because their content is so different than everyone else's this is one i actually have this in the cat in the academy i think in uh gotcha seo academy 2.0 uh in the in the third module i have all these different different content blueprints but this one here is really awesome it's like this like crazy you know new devil's dictionary and it's just a custom a custom design custom functioning page that's totally unique and the verge created they probably invested several thousands of dollars into this piece of content and the result you know the proof is in the pudding if you go and look at the link profile on this particular page they have thousands and thousands of links um so they've they've definitely gotten a return on their investment from that just by the link profile that they've gotten from it alone and then the last one here is these lists that are constantly updating are really really powerful so like forbes this is probably their number one other than maybe their home page this is probably their number one most linked to piece of content and it's just because it's constantly being updated every year they're constantly updating it and of course the moat here is huge like forbes is known for having this list so when you think of like okay who are the top billionaires you go to forbes maybe you'll go to ink too but like still this is a moat because it's very difficult to replicate them and most people would never even really want to try regardless so just thinking of these different ideas to build a moat is i just can't tell you and express how important it is it can really make a big difference so that's all i have guys pretty simple today but i just wanted to cover that concept because it really does really does make a big difference so you guys have any questions comments ideas i'm all ears and have you guys tried doing this stuff yourself honestly um it's it's not definitely not easy requires a lot of effort but uh it's it really does make a huge difference all right guys well i guess we'll i guess we'll uh reconvene on tuesday um simon asks one question here uh besides from the content what do you think should be the minimum score on core web vitals you know i'm a classic 80 20 guys so i think if you can get above that 80 mark you'll probably be fine ultimately at the end of the day we just need to be better than the average because google's not going to do uh they're not going to implement any policy that's going to destroy a bunch of websites they would just really destroy the bottom half of whatever the average is so like you know if the average core web vital score is like a 60 anyone who's in like the you know 10 to 30 range will probably get hit but anyone who's in the average or a little bit above average nothing really is going to change for them more than likely but it's just a generally a good policy to try to get it as high as you can just so you cover your bases like just so you can sleep at night knowing that your website loads as fast as possible and has a good user experience that just it just really uh to make you feel secure about your situation more than anything but yeah i mean if you can if you can go as high as possible then it's only gonna benefit mainly uh michael asks who will get hit the most in your opinion with google's new update any website that just isn't willing to change ultimately you know they're still it's amazing because like ssl certificates have been a ranking f a ranking factor uh this is a perfect example of one that like google says is going to be a ranking factor right um and what it did is it forced everyone to get on ssl but believe it or not there's still a lot of websites that don't have ssl certificates um so this is uh you know this is a part of their strategy to make the web better um so they kind of say like hey this is going to be a ranking factor but in reality it's more of like this is just this is just like the entry to get into the game more than anything so it's not going to be you know like i said if everyone has an ssl certificate it's not a ranking factor because everyone has it so therefore it doesn't really move the needle so it's really just you know if you want to survive you need to have it but it's not going to take you from position 10 to 1 just because you installed an ssl certificate david said i'm a bit daunted by the amount of work needed to need for content modes uh any ideas for less work modes perhaps less than eight hours um yeah i mean the thing is like it's all it's all relative right so like me creating a moat in the seo industry i know i need to invest 40 to 100 hours more than likely into something that's insanely good however if i'm in you know underwater basket weaving i probably don't need to spend that much time i can probably spend four hours because i know that the competition is much lower so it's really all on the basis of competition so if the competition is lower you don't need to invest as much in fact that would just wouldn't be smart at all to over invest when you don't need to so uh you know the the keyword research process that i've laid out in the new training like it's designed to make sure that you're not over investing in your content which is is a mistake that you can make and i've made that mistake many times i've gone way overboard with my content out of the gate and then realized like hey i didn't really need to do that so then i scale it back and it does just as well and it proves a point that like you can go overboard uh many times so you got to try to find that balance but yeah it's always going to be dependent on the industry and of course i don't know what industry you're operating in so noah asked where do you find recordings to re-listen to your whole presentation uh it's in the back end under the coaching section uh you should see it um i'll check i'll check and see if you have access you should have access to it though so let me know you can just email support gotcha seo.com and uh we'll help you out uh christopher asks when you say it takes a month do you mean 160 hours of work per month that was my question oh um like i said it it's dependent it's dependent on the vertical um like i've i've spent on some pieces of content i've spent a month i've spent two months you know it's it just depends um but that's like i said because in the seo industry the standards are elevated so high i'm really operating against the best of the best as far as content creation and people who literally specialize in content trying to beat them is a daunting task on its own so but when you start to step outside of the national level and you're just competing maybe on the local or different levels or you're competing in a completely different vertical the standards get dropped much more so you do not need that you know level of investment uh next question is how do you get good seo clients from the usa uh that's that is the million dollar question right um i always tell people that you need to you need to either niche down either on the vertical level uh niche down on the local level or even niche down on the service level so instead of instead of being you know full service seo agency pick one subset of seo and do that really well and make that your front end offer so like you know it's it's difficult to compete on full service seo because you're competing against huge agencies who have practically unlimited budgets to destroy you so they're just going to outspend you so the way that the way to beat them the way to you know get in the back doors is to create really focused productized offerings and one thing that you can do is you could literally just offer like a keyword research service a really really premium high quality keyword research service you start to become known as the guy who does keyword research but really what what that's acting as is a front-end offer so that then you can sell the full service on the back end so that's what people don't realize like oh man i want to niche down because then i can't do full service but no you can because you sell that front and offer much easier to sell front and offer by the way then sell full service and then boom on the back you say hey you know if if you want us to help you actually go and rank for these keywords then let's talk about doing an actual full service campaign see that transition is much easier than saying hey give me uh 2500 a month for 12 months dude so it's just it's a much different transition uh getting them to invest with you getting them to trust you makes a big difference so that's why i try to get people to think about how they can productize you know try to break that service down if you don't want to break the search say you just want to focus on pure agency full service then you got to pick a niche you absolutely need to pick pick a high value niche and become known in that niche as the guy i mean study go and study chris dreyer like he does it exceptionally well uh he just focuses on personal injury lawyers which is literally a subset of law and uh honestly there are many people who do it better than he does so if you just replicated him in a different vertical it would be pretty hard to not achieve really good results to be honest so um so graham said if you were in a niche say law surely this means that you were only so many times you're going to create a content mode before you're competing with yourself for the various clients uh yeah yeah yeah that becomes that becomes challenging for sure um but you know it's just a matter of creativity right so if you're if you're only like in the case of you know chris only doing personal injury law um he'd probably want to start focusing on local types of data points so like personal injury uh data points uh in los angeles for example so you know you can really start to get super granular about uh about the data and in fact that actually is emote within itself is getting like really granular data because people love to reference data so if you have like personal injury statistics uh in let's say glendale california like you're not going to find a whole lot of content something that granular but because it's so granular first of all you'll be able to dominate very easily and then second of all it will become a reference point for people which of course helps you get links so um so simon asked do you think using the haro technique for link building would be a good idea for a website targeting german organic traffic most of the sites on hardware usa-based so it's not really a match but the links would be unique i guess um yes i think it is it is worth it but i would also be focusing on getting german-based links uh as the priority but the thing you gotta realize is like there are a lot of websites that are us-based websites so it's not abnormal for you to get links from usa based websites that's just totally fine uh quality doesn't change depending on the you know what part of the world you're in if i got a link from a really high quality news website in germany to my website i think that was awesome because it's still high quality so um or if i had an seo blog in france to my seo blog in the us it's still high quality so um so yeah that's that's not something that's concerning at all but i would i would focus on getting geo-targeted links as a high percentage of your profile you know that's important too all right well uh next tuesday i'll figure out uh if i'm able to if i'm gonna be on paternity leave we'll find out soon enough uh let's see oh let's see graham's no i didn't see your question unless you hear uh graham asked have you any advice for core web files for platforms such as shopify where there's only so much room to change the back end yeah shopify is tough really really tough um i know i know there are certain plugins you can use on shopify to help with that um i think there are some newer things happening but yeah it's you got to try to work within the confines of what's possible right so you know you're probably not really ever going to get to the point in which you would for like a wordpress-based website but like i said the goal is just to get above average and then you're pretty much in that safe zone so yeah you may not be able to get that 95 but you know if you're working with a client who's on shopify you just need to make that clear and say hey you know you're on shopify so there just really aren't many solutions to get you to that level so yeah and exactly yeah and a lot of people are using shopify so the competitors are probably using the same exact platform so you know it's like i said it's all relative uh sanket asked any good seo plugins you can recommend besides yoast um these seo plugins are a dime a dozen man like you can use yoast you can use all one seo pack you can use rank math they're all the same honestly it's funny because like now these days i only use seo plugins just to be able to put the title and the meta description and then be able to have the no index functionality but other than that like i'm not using like their their mechanism for optimizing pages because i just use surfer so surfer has basically replaced all of these plugins uh so you know it's whichever one you like the most ultimately but it's not gonna make a difference as far as your performance so you know it doesn't matter if you have yoast or all-in-one or rank math it's that's not going to be what makes a difference so people get wrapped up in that stuff okay guys well cool good session and uh hopefully i'll be back tuesday and if not uh you'll know why all right i'll see you guys later good talking to you