Nerdy SEO Debates With Matthew Woodward (Ep. 185)

Key Takeaways

hey marketers welcome to the Atari hacker podcast I am gay Breton one of the hosts of the show and actually the only host available today because if you don't know manga married recently and he's just gone on a honeymoon for months which gives me complete freedom to do whatever I want with the company some quite curious to know if he's gonna cry of happiness or despair with what I've done with what we built in the last 10 years anyway because he's gone I decided to invite some of my marketer friends to co-host the podcast with me so that we can keep the podcast going and keep talking about stuff and you can get some fresh perspectives on things that we might have a different opinion on and it's gonna be quite interesting to see us debate about that in this week's podcast I've invited Matthew Woodward who was the guy who was the inspiration behind the whole Authority hacker concept I've always liked how honest he was I liked his really harsh in-depth review of online marketing products and overall I think he's a pretty smart guy so I thought he had some cool stuff to share with us and stuff to share he had this was a really long and quite messy interview if I'm honest with you but there was a lot of nuggets that you can pick up in this video if you're looking for practical tips then we are talking about website structure we're talking about redesigning sites that are aging and we're also talking about putting together very in-depth reviews and for those who are looking for work more high-level advice than we talked about like leveling yourself up as a marketer and going from a basic effort marketer to becoming a well-rounded marketer that's able to build real businesses I hope you enjoyed this interview if you do don't forget to subscribe on the button below and hit the bell icon so you don't miss any video and smash that like button enjoy the interview [Music] hey guys welcome to episode today we are working much good well he's actually the guy that gave me the idea to start oaxaca he was doing you know very actionable stuff on a great hot side of things that kind of wanted to do the same thing on the white hot side of things but with that gray hat mentality also you know I shamelessly said that my choice together inspired us to start our hackers so much you thank you for coming so equal to have you you in Costa Rica I mean Hungary some of you probably didn't know that that's why you started Authority hacker I'm very flattered and you know I've been a reader of your since very early on as well so that's a very mutual respect I didn't know that yeah it's like I remember your you're killed link building tutorials I remember these videos when you started I was like oh that's great like finally someone that talks about actionable stuff because like yeah it's like if you fold the way I stuff it was like basically Mouse at the time I was like I usually great content and like people were linked to you it's like it was it's like how do I do this stuff which familiar has changed a lot like a lot of people talk about more cool stuff now I feel like things have evolved like even Brian Dean excetera have a lot more stuff to the table but at the time it was a bit of a gap so yeah we tried we started doing that and that worked pretty well so you you definitely the great irony is the reason I created at a link building to troves was because of all that crap that was just on Mars like great great content ads actually matt cutts like just create great content don't worry about links okay let's see how that works out so I did a link building tutorial doing that and I was it was an experiment that much to you know kind of my annoyance and my pleasure it was a great success I didn't really want to prove Mike was right the thing is like I think online marketing is a bit of a different niche to some aspect like it's small enough to like so you get known and people talk and there's all that kind of life events etc so it's like I I think and I think there's two things there's the people who only do on the only working online marketing that thing that this will work in every niche and there's also the fact that the fact that it's a just the right size of niche you can actually get links from that connection like really allows me to see me she is like Joseph I like world of mouse is just not enough fact you cannot compete against my your clinic but with more than Mouse or something yeah nothing so I think um I think it's like it since it is interesting but I think a lot of like online marketing people just kind of like are disconnected from their reality from people who work in larger b2c niches and I think yeah I said but like you definitely address that in your content as well but like a lot of people don't and it's it's it's tricky so people like Matt Cutts transmission etc well the people that would defend that vision of things where it will not necessarily be applicable to ya and and but a lot of it comes through yeah I find a lot of people in SEO Lac business accumen marketing knowledge general sales knowledge you know they got into SEO from SEO whereas a lot of the the more experienced and successful people came into SEO after they had some kind of business level experience whether it was corporate with some kind of you know um so I think often the way that we interpret that advice also depends on what background we've come from some people a biased and don't want to hear that because they've labeled themselves as a black hat SEO and equally when people read something about black hat and they've labeled themselves as a white hat SEO they're ignorant of that as well like you know Google's an algorithm it's looking for certain metrics to go in and insert and resorts come out and that's a process we can observe put in any hat on it any black hat or white hat on it is just a fine example of human stupidity as its finest and I need to impress in print ego and psyche into it so you know a lot of that advice is it depends what side of the fence you've decided you're on I'm on the side of the fence of what works in those labels and the blog was and actually authority hacker as well in itself is a great example of what happens when you create great content and forget about link building I think both of us actually have you always done link-building um no no this would be not enough man it's like at the beginning there was a bit of an eye for an inkling you know how I got Oaxaca of the ground x-ray it's like I would have the RSS feed over all the big blogs including yours actually and every time they would publish something I would literally be the first comment in there so that I could like leak some traffic from the comments I saw it as well you know like I you know I didn't start my SEO blog with SEO and and and you know people were then coming to your site and seeing your great content it's a great content that allowed Authority hacker to grow it's a great content that allowed my SEO blog to grow much to my annoyance and you know so when when when people say oh I'll just publish high quality content and don't worry about the rest there is a certain element to that book that's stepping away from SEO and more into sales and marketing relationship building and that's when you when you start building a real business as opposed to an affiliate site I agree about that actually like we try to bring people who actually like step outside of like building a base I think it's still a great way to start for I think it's a good thing to have a vision path that this is small yeah it's kind of like the way we try to grow size down that's why we have these like we have three stages we have stage one which is basically basically a side stage two which is like start building audiences build an email is monetized is affiliate start building a social following do all of that and like you can even trade like shout outs on social phone rings etc to cannot grow you yes you and so on and in stage three which is essentially owning you offer owning the products not being an affiliate but rather just like expand your margins through duplicating what has worked for you as an affiliate you could at stage for be the network and then yeah then you get a slice of Olli competitors Commission's as well you can you can code that can work I haven't been to that stage yet we don't have the network but we had a three programs for like the products for you and then that works pretty well for us yeah talking about that talking about this is mode you explain to people what you do how much of your business is matured what the color UK what else you do etc etc um okay so I had a baby like a year and a few months ago in October 2018 checks to a 20 now so that's been presenting new challenges in life and and taking me away from a lot of things luckily the year before I'd offloaded a lot of my sites and actually went to a mastermind and in London and there I was like well I feel like I've achieved all of my personal goals he's not worried anymore I've got location free like I didn't really know what direction to go you know I felt I didn't have a completely clean slate but more enough that freed up eighty percent of my time and a lot of this a lot of the sites were gone so I was like well what am I gonna do I'm gonna do so over the last kind of year and four months in between juggling baby and Daddy Juiz rebuild in you know without giving it away and a lot of people just build Amazon sites and one of the questions I love to ask people up build Amazon sites is what value does your site present over and above me going to Amazon directly and reading verified reviews like what what do you do what value do you add above that experience so I build sites that still use Amazon but build on that experience to add additional value that most Amazon affiliates aren't really doing so I've been building out lots of new sites in that area mostly based in ethical movements or movements of people groups of people who have very strong beliefs as well as on the Matthew Woodward blog that's undergone a bit of a renovation I changed it from being less of a blog and more of a site only it to be more of a resource rather than just well I never really started a blog with a plan like it was an experiment that went well and continued to grow and you know I tried to give it a bit of a bit of a shuffle in some direction last year we got the search logistics agency I'm building a couple of nice tools that well polish it up for public release that should really help people out when it comes to link prospect in finding link opportunities finding contact details I've been I've been playing close attention to the niche edits this this so in everything that's going on and I'm gonna release a tool that actually helps people detect if they've had initially its site so I should have the first version of that tomorrow nice I was going to be out by the time the podcast comes out right right so robably you never know how testing goes and all the other things it's not that simple of a thing to achieve but I think we've got the process down man the manual process works out it's coming automate it now and scan sites and find out so I'll give that away and yeah I mean I was busy all of the time you know already many many many things yeah I'm retired but yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean it sounds simple but you know supporting all a lot of there's multiple writers as a link building team as well yeah I did and I literally stood at the mastermind like I felt like I've achieved everything I want to achieve what do I went there feeling lost almost like I don't really know what to do and the you know the general advice that was given to me was well stop focusing on what's about you and elevate the people around you okay that's that's what I've been doing you'll probably see a lot of that come across a blog the next the next year or so vividly I decided Matt diggety posted a status that really resonated with me a few days ago saying that he was going to write less for keywords and more about his passion yeah and that's a trap that I fell into last year in an effort to build out kind of like a static beginners resource of SEO everything you need to know from what is SEO all the way through to link building like and everything in between that that's what I tried to build and but I was writing for keywords more than people where is the success of my blog came from you know writing about the passion and what solving people's problems and everything like that and I felt like I stepped away from that and I think I think mr. diggity as well yeah I mean we did that to be honest I mean we've done that too but I think we've always been conscious if it was become some generic blog it's just gonna like nobody's gonna care and to be frank even the post when we put a lot of care I just feel the pure block format on its own I believe is fading away like just pure pure written text content it's like even if you don't get people that are really good at content marketing even if you look at like Brian Jean for example Brandi really is a big guy today it doesn't make nearly as much as a splash as it used to four or five years ago um and and I believe is that um for I mean for us like as I said we talked about my marketing it's it's kind of like a micro community you need to like captivate people to like get attention and and it's like the the blog format is actually slowly fading away to become a support source of traffic rather than the main source of traffic yeah and I think for a lot of niches evokes that way as well even for things like product reviews like it's like you look at someone like mkbhd on YouTube for example these guys together that's [ __ ] killing it it's not the people who write it's not even expert reviews or like trusted reviews like I'm seeing about these big tech review sites for example and and and so it's almost like SEO comes later you just create content that's interesting and then you can mash up that content into SEO pages that you don't necessarily advertise as much so you just quickly post them on your social profiles etc yeah you advertise your new video you advertise you new podcasts you may be like do that kind of stuff and then from that let's say I you know did very in-depth review like you doing therefore useful tools for example and from that maybe I'll do a best roundup poster I don't push as hard but he's here for SEO purposes like of course when I'm looking at it and you know who does that really well a traps matrix basically uses their YouTube channel to engage their audience and then they their blog they don't even promote it that much like you don't get from what today brokers but look at them or look at them on a strike ready to get their rankings I think from the the same issue that we have that we stopped writing for the people and we started writing for the keywords recently whoa hooks top to bottom now I'm lying I think I don't think so I think it's the end of the I think it's the end of the blog I think I think it is the end of the traditional blog but not because it's the end of the blog but it's the start of building a real business it's something lacking for a long time and now now Pete you got to get away from the fact that you're building a blog or a site you're not doing either of those things you're building a business and that's a very different shift in mindset yes it even changes how you approach SEO for example when you build a business you're worried about a GMB profile if you build a blog you're not you know so um it completely changes your your approach to SEO when you build a business rather than building an affiliate site and I think that's more where we're seeing that the change because now we're seeing big money in to come we've got big media companies coming and they're taking their their business tried-and-tested business models and now adapting them for the web and then the crushing a little guys still aren't built like building businesses I mean for the suit for the purple use definitely our views are becoming supremely community right now especially with photos large b2c markets like um like the big companies probably already took like 30 or 40 percent of soaps at this point yeah I feel like the big ones like if you go look for blenders or like baby products yes but like I see you blog more as a collection of landing pages for SEO rather than a way to engage an audience at this point yeah and you engage your audience with his Instagram stories videos social media posts podcasts like this one like that the more like casual content where you can actually open up a bit more and like express a bit more of your personality that you can't really do some writing so blog post is very interesting when you're searching for something is great yeah like you're looking for this there's a really in-depth resource and you find value into that but people spending hours reading blog posts I just don't see as much anymore as I used to no not no not unless you're trying to learn something yeah it's like but like usually it's a short period or a sweat it's gonna be like that that high heat period when you like get into something and you want to read a lot about it so like photography recently but to be honest I don't expect to read as much in a yeah then I would do it right now and then once I caught up I probably consumed me I'd be subscribing to YouTube channels might be following some people on social media etc and not as much like learning about like what is that culture what is I a so and so on and once you've captured that basic knowledge that requires in dev guys then I think you would rather snackable content and you drive and like a 10,000 words blog posts just for entertaining oh yeah I mean you know there's other reasons we've moved away from long-form content as well and that's because Google is now looking to return relevance you know long-form content used to be king I think both of us probably have poster exceed 15,000 words oh yeah yeah I mean I think my longest one is 32,000 and you know that rarely does content of length answer a query specifically I think anyone that was into 10 times in content and things like that paying a price now as opposed to people who didn't put as much effort in there are more specific in in how they answer a query and we build hubs basically now we focus on planning a hub of like you know 20 pages or something that all kind of like interlink to each other are related like whatever subtopics are mention and these pages are gonna be usually between a thousand and let's say max 3000 yeah instead of doing it is one previous like ultimate guide like you would have done before a portal page bring it all together and I have a few stealin idiots on a toy car it's like I'm just like really lazy to actually finish editing them right now there's still some cool data that I need to post up post and would like to be frank yeah I say times when it's right that's the right type of content to to publish but in general now if it can get to the point I mean the thing is like a long continent relieved oh right it's like at some point in 2000 was was long content now it was considered no more yeah so you got you at some point like at the wicked fire times like a thousand was was what was long content like oh my god your article article yeah and you know a good example is like if you search for like best product like if the very first thing at the top of your article isn't a product table then you you know you just losing money but you stepping away from intent whereas before you wouldn't a wanted you product table at the top because you want to enjoy content make sure some keywords so you know that's that's a big change in how you structure a page as well and the thing is like it kind of like [ __ ] hold size because I'm sure you had that as well like where you have pages that used to rank really well and then now it's just not the intent of the serfs anymore y'all come and goes yeah and just completely goes down it's actually a debate I wanted to have with you um basically this kind of like two years of building inside at this point it's like you can build a site with lots of pages but then you don't have that many resources to I keep them up to date and like keep competing with the people who are ranking and like monitoring it and adapting or you can build a site with few pages and then you can have a lot of resources left to keep updating it kind of like keep fighting for that top three etc etc what's your take on this it really depends niche to niche the the you know this there's never a single truth in SEO - I worked in or affiliate many people are often looking for that single truth and it just doesn't exist there isn't a single truth so if I'm going into any niche the first thing I want to know is who are my competitors like if if there's a bunch of sites that have tons of content and you know really high-end production I'm probably not going to try and play too much but if you see si if you see site a site a site ranking where it does have a small amount of pages and just what is ranking that's what you need to build Google's algorithm you know when you do the search results that's an output of the algorithm so what is ranking you know going back to ten times in your content you know there's no point right in ten thousand words if everything that's ranking on the first page is 500 words like just and the same thing so now but like five years ago people would have said I'll know you to Alder your competitor and of course yeah of course but that's you know that's how things evolve you know right it's always been that case what works then is often what trips you but what has never failed in all of these time and all of the algorithms since google it existed is a power of observation that's never failed and that's current it's live it's real-time and it's very very much underused because we've all got tools like aah refs and you know Big Data and automation and all of that you know but we've also got a web browser and Google which actually tells you what they're looking for you don't need to do any research you just need to type the queries into Google and Google tells you what they're looking for and then do that then flesh it out with data from different places but you know just that raw power observation you know should it sure should I have few pages with lots of content or lots of pages are not much content well hands on the niche what are you competing against you know are you competing against 5,000 page one says are you competing against you know 300 word quick quick answers is it are you competing against list post are you competing against reviews or what what what what is the current challenges and that varies not only known is that very niche Tanish it can actually vary like within the different verses like a there isn't there isn't a single truth the decision the single tree fix is here with your eyes your brain the observation and google tell explain first thing so it's we need a prediction podcast and we got a bunch of people to like submit definitions and Glenn from detail calm capsicum Jo etc said that he expects that there would be multiple blocks of intense within sync the same serve from next year yeah most likely what's gonna happen is you know gonna be competing against like ten nice posts but there's gonna be a block of this post a block of maybe we've used something yeah and then you essentially will have actual response that you can compete against based on what what format your page is followed so it's actually narrowing down even though I could see that actually it's like open Google you know it's like III definitely tweeted a lot of [ __ ] at them for like killing diversity in Serbs since the medic update basically you'd get ten times the same thing like ranking on the subsidies mind and and I did reply with like yeah we want to increase diversity in Serbs so I could imagine them just doing that just picking identifying the different types of all not saying essentially doing so I might actually happen which then it's not even gonna be looking at like the top ten results going to be looking at these two results that much what you do of course you know and and you know you really need to look at the top ten the top three or tell you everything that you need the top ten just like if you're like really nerd now the top three will give you the eighty percent to me which is why I think we need to boast but you shouldn't suffer is here to stop giving us top fifty rankings resolved because we don't care they should just let me toast foam from the get-go it's like the average the top the top by ten was also get the average of the top ten and then the average of like the ten to 20 and 22 cetera nobody cares about these graphs I just tell them as well I've been I've been lobbying for that for them to change that to just put the audit in front and and and put the stats in background that I use I know you use it as well as I did the reviewers or recently it's I'd like to do that but I think there's a risk of people one not using their critical sense using these kind of tools especially so far on one end it's like one thing that I'm not a huge fan of is the true density um you know they give you the range of what you computers have so yeah 5 to 12 maybe like you should have it 18 times or something yeah and very often they recommend cute this is like a little bit dangerous to my to my taste what one on one of the crossover issues I think that surfer SEO could improve upon is separating body content from comments oh yeah because you know a lot of my posts have more than a thousand comments on them yep to the point where they make up now make up 90% of the page content and that's a tricky problem to deal with on one hand you've got Google saying that social proof and they do include that as part of their page scoring on the other hand they also include all of that content in their indexing and how they evaluate the quality of your content so it's a tricky one to deal with and especially when you're looking across search results like you'll probably often find that many of the top ranking things have zero comments even if they have the ability to place a comment so it would be nice if surfer introduced a way to separate that out and you know easy to target the content right quite easy actually did it so you know we did these data studies last year where we like calculated average number of votes per top ranking pages etc so we actually had to look into that problem and Firefox has this with the bility mode where it just removes navigation and everything so you can just read the article and this has an API literally user and all of them that was the most accurate actually so cool I'm a bit surprised actually I'm probably it's a problem I had to solve with the the niche edit checker tool ah yeah well because obviously adding a comment at the link and we don't want that to flag up with a niche at it so fuzzy much in in CSS let me stick my let's actually oh yeah I wanted to go through your site redesign process cuz I think you did like I think you do of thinking before you redesign your site on that you would yeah I think it shows by the way you like like segmenting things and the way you place in your call to actions etc etcetera so and I think um and that's kind of like a an oval table I want to talk about with you is kind of like as your site get older like how do you overcome the challenges which is like updating content over that cetera and one of them is the rebranding redesign kind of saying that you kind of need to do every like three to six years I would say cuz it just gets old yeah and everything so I want to know like how you went about that why you did it and kind of like what you learned through the process um okay well I'll pull some actual numbers of as I'm talking um so I've always been relatively connected to the audience of the blog through comments and and so on and one of the common complaints that I got was that yeah I had lots of content on the blog and before it's just a blog just a list of post right and and and it wasn't particularly categorized well or tagged well like I say is an experiment I never planned it it just went you could learn about blogging and you could learn about SEO in the same category you know and it made separating out their information very very difficult and WordPress searched as you know sucks and never returns any real relevant results so like the opposite of Google and then that was a sticking problem it was a continuous problem and the only way I thought I could fix that was to improve the user journey of blah in itself is essentially selfish by nature it's just like here's what I've written in the order I've written it it's not really focused on connecting the person's problem to a solution so the entire kind of thinking behind the new design was how quickly can i connect someone's problem to a solution so then I looked all over content I had and I was like okay well what are all the problems people trying to solve when they reach this content and from that I was like okay well we got to do the homepage we've got to do an SEO port or we got to do a blogging portal and the one that really tripped me up was the work portal now I have a lot of content I literally rank for like or used to make money online and which is not really a term you want to rank for by the way I have lots of content like how to make your first dollar on five one I found Elance as well yeah and that all of that type of content I feel like is hurting me hosting so I was like well what port I'm not gonna put that in I can't put it in make money maybe I can put it in hustle that sounds a bit spammy but you know I really hate when people sell the dream that you can make a bunch of money without doing any work and all the rest of it so I was like okay I'm gonna call it the work portal because work means you've got actually [ __ ] do so that's why it's called the work pool and which I I'm probably gonna cut and just delete all of that content mm-hmm yeah I see you're getting quite broad there you have like pro TVT tool and virtual assistant tools yes gmail tricks and like yeah it's unlike you say howdy howdy keep overtime at content kind of built sup for a period of time I accepted guest post I was a mistake you know by accepting guest oh so I really lost I got a lot of emails you know it was a mistake on my part to allow it in as my audience that paid the price for my mistakes Muttley um so you know put an end to that I deleted a lot of content reorganized shuffled it or it's still a long way to go but that that was kind of the the the the thought process behind the redesign I want it to make it a bit less of a blog that was just me me me me me me me me I'm more about a site that helps people solve their problems because the content existed to do that but it wasn't structured that way and also the old content just becomes hard to find on the blog in general like it's unless you like feature it on the sidebar some saying that like it's yes it's Gessle search right yeah which kind of sucks like sometimes like your best posts are like some older ones yeah yeah like page 10 you know yeah so that's that's why I decided to redesign it and I had a read of serve a bunch of feedback and I just tried to address as much as that feedback as possible with though that structure and those page I kind of questioned is it yes to people like in the survey right there was three important ones so there's actually let me just check that it I did actually you emailed your destroy you just emailed your emails for that yeah there's actually a link that explains the the changes that I'm that I made and so as asking people questions like okay what do you want to learn about so very basics what do you want like what do you want to learn about most of my oldest wants to learn about SEO and link building it was like seven seventy percent want to learn about that forty percent one learn about blogging thirty five percent one about make money online hence SEO blogging and the work wasn't solid that's what they got and then it was how do you want to learn people want to learn via image or text mostly and then video people when my audience were not interested in a podcast it like two percent of the people were interested in a podcast I'm not surprised even a lot of people who followers only sense of both guess yeah yeah yeah yes it's like you love it or hate it like some people go crazy about it and some people like many people don't care yeah yeah so you know question questions like that what's one one thing you hate about the blog what's one thing you love about it what's one thing I should change immediately those questions those those kinds of questions and then once you get all the answers I did in Survey Monkey and then I just went through the answers and kind of came up with like categories of what the answer fell into it was like design and then - hard to navigate you know design - color scheme and categorize the answers and from that you kind of got a breakdown of what you've got to change and yeah great you know what one thing you love about the blog great really the answers to those not so great reading what you hate about you like yeah and then you read those courses you know like we spend like months recording and so on and people are like oh you actually like these properly you're like oh I saw all your sites when you had the browser history pop up when you were typing something [Laughter] but at the same time it's nice to get how much feedback to be on it it's rare to be able to have that as well like ya know everyone can reach that and that's one good reason to be an email list a lot of people get lazy AF to be an email list the arm eye is probably the best thing you can do I think mm-hmm yeah toe touch about an access to your community with no noise it's so what was next after you did the survey so after the survey putting it all together gave me a clear direction I needed to to address navigation and things that was done with the restructure and appalls and that that was really it the the blog theme stayed the same except for a new header we just simplified the header and simplify the navigation other than that not a lot changed I was also doing various split tests they used to be a cartoon me in the header I split tested that and removed that and I also split that really make an impact the cat who yeah yeah yeah yeah I split tested the logo as you see it now the logo with a cartoon and the logo with a little image of little photo of me and that that was a clear winner but like what were you testing against or was the goal like opt-ins a delight engagement bounce rates page time on page yeah I see yeah because it's one of the first things people see and if you hit my site on mobile it's it's it's yeah yeah so that's why I was testing against her so it's it's gone through you know since its launch it's gone through changes I'm still not entirely happy with the structure I feel like the homepage needs a lot of work it's too busy there's too much choice not enough content I feel like that's her in me yeah that I missed and I added it not really in a very nice way and it's manual so that sucks on the home page right it's like a I mean I use my home page to rank posters all right it's like yeah of course yeah well yeah internal Lincoln's a whole other thing yeah it's like yeah it's like my home page is definite like a big big it's like I tried to pick a mix of like stuff I want people to read and actually what I want to rank or like performs well in terms of yeah of course of course it's a balance between rankings conversion and everything else yeah but that is actually genuinely the latest post because I do all that internal linking forever down which yes it's probably gone on the wrong end of the scale on that a bit too heavy I think yeah if you put too many links on your homepage they need a lose to a point where it doesn't help that much exactly and I think I'm a victim of that I mean to be honest the grass is always greener right it's like it's a sometimes it's like for us I think I could even put more being straight I guess it depends how many things cell phone into your home page well you know I built the blog off the back of my coat saying forget about SEO just create a focus on helping people instruction it like that focuses on helping people so yeah do you feel all of that was worth it like I feel like you spent a lot of time on it like that looking back it's been a few months now like how do you heal after the fact its pivoted me away before I was ranking for a lot of terms I didn't really want to rank for like make money online changing that structure around now I'm ranking for less trafficked keywords but they're the keywords I want to rank for proper SEO yeah so it's helped him in in that respect and that's why that entire work sections up for a review because if I if I if I track because I when when the updates come out actually break it down by section and I can I can see that that work section continuously gets smashed where is the SEO or blogging if it doesn't get touched or it raises a little bit light but the the work sections just yeah and that's because it's stepping into your money or your life kind of it's also because I've done links you get right see only Ness you so relevant in SEO and maybe not as relevant in like freelancing and making money on Fiverr and stuff like that I guess yes of course of course so I'm experimenting with some some your money or your life signals to see what happens there before I'd take the delete decision but it's definitely up for review I mean I like that you're honest about it so you know one thing I hate about people who talk about online marketing is when they win every time they talk exactly like we've talked many times I mean we had sighs penalize that we used to people know but like thank you for being honest because I not everyone is like that this Ally is this it's a game we play like you gotta roll with the punches and that's how it is you always like like we said things that worked five years ago now you know and that's the difference between someone who can survive in the SEO world and someone who can't you've gotta be able to pivot change learn and accept move on and be honest about it that's how it is and it's not only that but when you say gets older essentially you've done things that you did them because they worked at the time but now they're today so it's very easy to get caught into this and in the SEO community people quickly point a finger at you wasted a stand and be like ah why did you do that you're like you makes no sense it's like no like actually five years ago that's what made the most sense to do and it's like we are suffering that stuff on several sites and you get that as well which is like it's no more as your site and you know what it's a good problem to have it means you've lasted which most people who never never seen that problem is because they never were able to maintain a site to a profitable level yet to that home enough to read because they didn't build a business they built a site you've got you gotta go through like you know if you built a business you don't really care about algorithm updates yeah you get I mean it has you know it has an impact of course it has an impact but it it shouldn't it shouldn't be a challenge to the survivability of your business it shouldn't be and if it is then well good look why your traffic that's what I do like I spend quite a bit of time on social media and pay traffic these days actually yeah yeah but it's you know that's part of a coherent digital marketing strategy SEO is a small part of digital marketing strategy but some people look at SEO as the digital marketing strategy and that's a huge huge mistake traffic source you know it goes back to saying look people are building sites not businesses when I build a business you every decision you take you have a different answer to when you build a business versus building a site it happens very often to us that we give a big key words and like lose traffic but like some smoke you have like you know five or six times the conversion rate and valuable to us it's like yeah it's like I'm not gonna big names but like in China is you have Oh like you're losing traffic here I'm like sure you know I mean it's like when you when you're actually tracking your matrix on an ITEX xhr like a lot of traffic is useless you realize that promise you um and then and whatever you see in a tracks is not very relevant it's relevant if like all your traffic is like ran the previews again that's the case and sure like it's a good enough yeah yeah as soon as you have a business model that's slightly more complicated and traffic metrics don't nearly as much because you have queues that convert 10 times more than others and provide you track it properly then it doesn't matter yeah yeah yeah of course you can't wait to go through is I've seen you do a lot of updates to your content and honestly I find updating content one of the most annoying thing to do like as a site owner I don't know how you feel about this but like like I wanted to know how you do that in the most efficient way possible because it's always very tricky ideal I mean there isn't an efficient way to do it because it isn't always the same problem for example a post can be out of date just because a tool deployed a new design right and then all your screenshots are out of date that is relatively easy to fix relatively easy but if there's been a pivotal change you know if you wrote it you troll about 10 times in your content the best way to update that delete it and you know sometimes it's the how that you do it that's changed sometimes you know the whole thing's irrelevant you know it really it really depends but luckily I have a lot of engagement terms of comments and my readers aren't shy of telling me you know um here's my question though let's imagine your post is out of there and you know it you are ranking number three for the query and making good money do you take the risk to redo the post oh do you say you know what I'm gonna hold on a little bit more and when there's like if the traffic starts going down then I start touching it it depends on gamble your rankings you know it depends on what's out of date aha but let's say let me try to take an example let's say if I got an example SEMRush SEMRush review I think we compete on that term as well we don't okay so so SEMRush review was probably written two years ago is out of date okay we've got new features they've got new things the interface the the process of some things ah I've changed it is out of date but it's still relevant okay because it's teaching you different ways to do things or in SEMRush which you can still do it's kind of changed a little bit but if you've got something between you years you can figure it out it's it's still relevant that is not a post I'm gonna roll a dice on okay um it ranks well it's still relevant although it's not completely current basically if it's perfect but it's not broken you don't gamble it provided it's walking for you at this point exactly yeah follow it and buy and like you get conversions and you're not willing to change that post but at the point where it becomes so irrelevant that people can't use it there's this title yeah exactly and that's that's that's when it you've you forgot to take the decision delete mm-hmm yeah now if it's reached the point where it's become so irrelevant that you're thinking that it probably needs updating you'll see that Google is also telling you that you need to update it so there's not a one you know there's not a single true fan update any content you've got a look at each individual piece on its own merit you might look at a piece of content and be like well it doesn't rank for anything it's out of day it gets zero traffic but it's got 200 backlinks so screw delete in that I'll just bury it I want to ever get to it and we redirected personally direct yeah I don't like the redirect because then you end up with a bunch of links with irrelevant and gas you need something somewhere relevant but like you know for your case like why wouldn't you redirect it to one of your hopes for example let's say and some some pose I've deleted I have redirected to hubs but you know that's but if a post had like two hundred links I probably won't have done that everything has its same you know there's not a single truth with updating or deleting your content it I know that's interesting about it because there's ax and a lot of people have a lot of text on this and I feel like the industry hasn't decided exactly what's the best way to do this at this point so I think it's quite interesting to talk about this I've talked about this with like Maggie like team solo like all the guys yeah pretty much everyone has a different answer which is kind of interesting yeah like I say I still think this is like searching itself on like how to do that like I believe at this point updating content that has some kind of traction as a way higher return than creating new content updating content certainly brings a boost in search traffic there's no denying yeah that but is it the boost that you want when you could spend that resource doing something else it gives you a boost that you do want am I gonna go read it renovate the Elance article for up work no I'd much rather spend that time you know doing something that's relevant an EEO and all I did at the top of the articles there are real answers now what work like that was the update it sounds like you're gonna ask that part of your website you well it's you know I love experiment in the the SEO blog is my experiment playground and yeah I build test sites or do experiments and the blog is usually the first live place I deploy the exploit experiment before going and putting it anywhere else and it's amazing how much you guys miss by the way that anyone that you're a bee test on popups at some point like I think a few years ago you were like quite intense I'm like a be testing your teen pop ups okay so so current learnings there if you're using any WordPress plug-in to power your pop-ups you are suffering from significant losses in site speed page size and that search for performing more poorly in the rankings for example if you're using thrive leads right now that is so heavy it's unbelievably heavy and I change it for optinmonster lightly go to a month ago and page site the page size went from like 1.6 Meg to 700 K it's not just that but like I'm booting that it needs to do for like the IP testing and everything it's like it's a lot actually for yourself yeah hosting is bad yeah and you know my it like logs all of the leads and the data the table just for that was like 2 gig just died so um you know I've done a lot of tests in there not just from a conversion pot and by the way moving from thrive architect opt-in month thrive leads to optinmonster should report my conversions across the board and literally all I did was replicate every campaign I had in thrive leads replicating optinmonster and I just used optinmonster's design templates same words same images just their templates boom like cook cook site cook cut low time in half cook page size in half cut requests in half like insane insane change you know so I'm always testing I'm always doing things I'm always moving forward I never stood still with with anything and that's why I have opportunities like this work section where I'm like well it's not working very well what can we do what can we try what and it's a great learning tool you know to just you know what's the old phrase you know just free [ __ ] at the wall and see what sticks and I'm very much doing that with the work section right now I like doing that too like we do that as well on our site etc this stuff that I like on larger sites I we didn't do without gonna tell you like I'm just like I'll try it or whatever and see what happens and usually you learn about from that I didn't feel like checking each other's I was testing their kicks alright again say yeah yeah yeah go to google and click it works but it doesn't take basically it's like it's like a popularity thing a few years ago what used to happen is if a URL was tweeted about a lot with the rankings would increase with the velocity of the tweets and as of the velocity the tweets died so did the rankings I was like that within the algorithm so that's what you see in there it's quite it's quite interesting like you know people can definitely game that around the holiday seasons or Black Friday or stuff like that oh yeah yeah yeah and the way to maintain that is you know the reason that happened is a click free wait when open open up because you artificially yeah exactly I told people to search and click but once people stopped searching and clicking someone else was winning a click-through rate battle and and that's that's what killed you I tend to find actually if you break the top 3 and you don't win the click-through rate battle you just drop the page 2 and yeah you test though a lot of the title tags they be testing like it and I hated it actually I hate because it's just not accurate like because the whole sub changes all the time so you can tribute your win to what you did or what everyone else is doing and yes actually I ironically the only testing that I like the headlines is thrive headline optimizer and the reason like it and it does actually it does that blow but the reason I like it is it measures the engagement on your site it do