Olga & Lee
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[00:00:00] Olga: Hi everyone, this is Olga from SU Sly. This is SU podcast by SU Sly. Today, I have a very special guest. This is Lee Witcher. I know Lee mostly from, um, I kind of heard about him for the first time when I started watching SEO Fight Club and kind of this was a very important time in my SEO career because my my thinking changed a lot at the time from being a very, very purist white hat SEO to being someone who actually maybe has a more critical approach.
[00:00:39] Olga: And, uh, with that, uh, I followed with that. And I, I, I even took part in these, uh, course, uh, tested SEO training, which was like, uh, Total kind of, uh, breakthrough for, for me and today I want to, uh, talk with Lee about his SEO story. I want to get to know more details and I hope he will share some of the things he's doing, maybe a little bit more about SEO testing.
[00:01:07] Olga: So Lee, how are you doing? I'm doing great.
[00:01:10] Lee: How about you?
[00:01:11] Olga: Yeah, I'm doing great too, and I'm really, really excited about this episode. So, can you briefly introduce yourself in case someone doesn't know you? Because maybe there are still white hat people like I used to be who don't know you, but I'm not sure if there are such people, but in case, just in case.
[00:01:32] Lee: Well, I don't, I don't consider, you know, things white hat or black hat. I just consider things effective and non effective. You know, I started out, um, my background is in database marketing and direct marketing. So a lot of, you know, analysis and testing type of things. And, you know, as the, the internet developed.
[00:01:49] Lee: Uh, I tinkered around with SEO for about a decade. I would buy the courses and the software and all those kind of things, trying to say, Hey, maybe this is the one that will get me the rankings that will get me the Lambo or whatever. And, uh, you know, it wasn't working and it never really occurred to me until the beginning of 2018.
[00:02:10] Lee: To take all the analytical and testing skills that I had and apply it to SEO. So I looked out there to see who was testing and, you know, what sort of research was being done and I decided to kind of look at all that, um, who was doing what and test their stuff my way to see if it held up. under, you know, much more stringent conditions.
[00:02:31] Lee: So very quickly you find out who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't, you know, that's, that's the beautiful thing about, um, testing in general is that you can put up pages, you can see what Google does and, you know, determine for yourself what's true and what isn't true. So that's what I started in 2018 was just really doing a lot of analysis and testing.
[00:02:53] Lee: And that led me to, uh, appear on Fight Club first as a guest and then later on as a regular guest and, you know, finally as a host, uh, on the show, uh, one of the hosts on the show. And that's really where it's, you know, come from, uh, the, I, I say I've been in SEO for 15 years, but it's really five, uh, it's five years of, you know, tested data and 10 years of just messing around and listening to everybody else.
[00:03:21] Olga: Wow, because I remember those, uh, Fight Club episodes where you just were joining, because like when I discovered SEO Fight Club, I think around two years ago or something, I kind of started from, from the beginning and watched all the, all the episodes. And, and I remember those. those episodes where, where you started to appear.
[00:03:41] Olga: So, uh, but, um, can you tell me what was it that you were like, uh, professionally doing, uh, for the, for those first 10 years? Was it like, were you employed somewhere? Did you have your own business those first 10 years when you weren't really doing? Yeah, I've had
[00:04:01] Lee: my own, uh, uh, I have a partner and we've had our own database marketing, uh, firm.
[00:04:06] Lee: Um, we worked together back in the nineties at a company. And then, uh, in 99, we teamed up. So we've been together for 20, whatever, 24 years now, you know, doing that. I don't do a lot of that client work. Most of the clients that I have are, are gone because I've Shifted my focus over time to more, uh, internet marketing related stuff rather than client related stuff.
[00:04:29] Lee: So, you know, my day job was trying to figure out how to get you to give my clients, your credit card number, you know, it was all, it was all testing. And so it was back in the day when. Before we had a lot of the online capabilities that we have now. I mean, when Amazon first came out with, you know, the people who bought this also like this type of thing.
[00:04:50] Lee: I mean, we were doing that the hard way we were figuring out analytically and then, um, you know, on websites in catalogs or in call centers, having people say, Hey, Olga, that's a really nice jacket that you, uh, you're, you're buying there. Have you seen, you know, the, uh, the blouse that goes with it? No. Well, let me, you know, and it was just a way of getting up cells, you know, based on what people's behaviors were like.
[00:05:15] Lee: So I was the nerd that was following all that data and, you know, trying to test different things, you know, um, for example, in a. a catalog environment. If you're trying to sell a shirt, you know, do you sell one shirt, just a picture of the shirt? Do you sell like five shirts of different colors kind of laid out on a table?
[00:05:35] Lee: Do you sell the shirt, you know, on a, on a model? You know, how many colors do you have off to the side and those sorts of things? Do you sell it at, you know, 1999, you know, 24 99, 29 99, where do you get the best return? So my job was basically figuring out all of these things, dangling all of these carrots in front of consumers and seeing which ones they bid on and, and then using that to, you know, optimize the profitability of my client's businesses.
[00:06:02] Olga: Yeah, but I think it nicely ties into SEO. I
[00:06:07] Lee: mean, the skills were there. It's just, you know, they hadn't been applied to, um, to the search engines. And like I said, it never occurred to me to do that. And then I kind of got the idea and I kind of saw some things that were out there. And I thought, man, there's really not a lot of people doing this.
[00:06:22] Lee: There's advantage in doing this here in this, this industry. So, that's been where it dovetailed. So, by day, uh, during those years, by day, I was, uh, taking care of my clients. And in the afternoons and through the night, I was just, you know, launching all sorts of tests or analyzing data, uh, on the SERPs to see what I could pull back and what I could see was working and wasn't working.
[00:06:45] Olga: Okay, so can you can you talk about your beginnings with SEO testing? Like, what did you start with? Do you remember what was the first test about?
[00:06:55] Lee: I don't remember what the first test was about, but it was replicating some of the stuff that other people were doing. Um, you know, Kyle Roof was doing, uh, he was with, uh, SIA at the time, and there were a couple of other people that had their tests published.
[00:07:10] Lee: And so I just started grabbing some of those tests and replicating them to see, you know, Does a keyword in an H two matter, you know, does a bold tag over here matter, you know, these sort of, uh, very basic tests, you know, to try to validate, uh, what other people had published, whether it worked or didn't work.
[00:07:29] Lee: And a lot of times you found that what people had published didn't work. And there were some people that did more rigorous testing. They would run their tests multiple times. So they had a better result and it held up. So once I figured out there were a couple of sources of tests that held up. Then I just started testing the factors against each other.
[00:07:47] Lee: So you would have, you know, when you do a test, uh, standard or the old style of SEO testing, you'd say, all right, does bolding a keyword work? Does it boost? And you can find out that it boosts, but it tells you that it boosts versus a control. It doesn't tell you how powerful it is. Only that it beat. You know, not bolding the, so you have to start testing like keyword in an H two versus in a bold tag keyword in an H one versus in an H two and H threes, you know, these sort of tests where you're putting them up to see which factors are stronger when compared to each other rather than, uh, to a control.
[00:08:25] Lee: So, I mean, that's where it all started was just trying to figure out what's the strongest factors. That people had already tested and figured out.
[00:08:35] Olga: And can you share some of, uh, maybe most surprising tests you had at that time? Kind of, uh, aha moments. You know,
[00:08:44] Lee: yeah, I was gonna say the aha moments didn't really come from those because, you know, you start to think about, um, a keyword in a title, you know, it makes sense that that would be important.
[00:08:55] Lee: A keyword in an H1 being more important than an H2, you know, that makes sense that it would be important because, you know, it's sort of the hierarchy of a page. But there were other things that we began to test that were just, uh, fun. And, you know, when you start to connect with other testers, you get ideas about a variety of things to do.
[00:09:13] Lee: So I remember. There was an argument about whether or not stop words mattered, you know, and, uh, all these sort of things. So if you have, you know, the, uh, best Seattle plumber, you know, does it just truncate down to best Seattle plumber or does it look at the, you know, at all? And so how does Google treat stop words?
[00:09:36] Lee: And so we came up with this test idea that I ran, which was the article that I wrote was written entirely in stop words, except for the keywords that were in there. So if Google ignored stop words, all that would be left was the five times the keyword is mentioned, you know, so you'd have duplicate content.
[00:09:54] Lee: You know, if all the stop words are just stripped out, all you have left is the keywords and, you know, those are duplicate pages, you know, on a, on a site. So it wouldn't, you know, it would only show one. Well, it showed all of them, you know, we kept showing that over and over again. So Google doesn't ignore stop words.
[00:10:10] Lee: It may treat them differently, but it didn't ignore them. And so it was just starting to get, you know, creative about some of the theories that people had. Uh, how can you run a test to, you know, determine whether or not there's. Any truth in it or not. So from tests like that, we determined that a Google can't, uh, you know, it doesn't really do anything with stop words that we can detect.
[00:10:32] Lee: Doesn't ignore them. Um, and B, you know, it was another one of those Google can't read because the entire article was, you know, a and a stop word, stop, or, you know, just, uh, you know, a and a keyword, the keyword and, and a, you know, and it didn't mean anything. You know, there were more stop words than that, but, uh, basically the whole article was gibberish and it got indexed and it ranked for its keyword.
[00:10:57] Lee: So. Awesome.
[00:10:59] Olga: Awesome. Uh, I'm not sure if it was you, uh, Ted mentioned that, um, SEO Fight Club one time. Was it you who added, I think, a couple of hundreds of thousands of words into the title tag and how did it work out?
[00:11:17] Lee: It read all of them. You know, this thing is we, we started off with a very simple, uh, test, which we talked about on, uh, Fight Club.
[00:11:25] Lee: Uh, how many keywords can a page rank for? Cause you hear the idea, um, you optimize a page for one keyword or you optimize it for hundreds of keywords or, you know, what's the, what's the truth. So we just wanted to see, uh, what's the maximum number of keywords we could get a page rank for. So, uh, I, I did a million word blog post.
[00:11:47] Lee: Um, and we just had a, you know, a program just generate a million random, uh, gibberish words. So there were just unique character strings. And we put them together and we find out a few things like WordPress does not like it when you try to paste in a million words. So we had to break it up into 200, 000 word chunks, uh, to get WordPress to accept it and then tracking it was fun.
[00:12:09] Lee: Ted had to build a little custom script to, uh, to track the keywords to sample. And what we found was, um, the first 200, 000 words. Indexed. The ones below that didn't. So there's a size limit, you know, on what Google will crawl and index on a page. So we figured that out. And, you know, that's a lot larger than most.
[00:12:31] Lee: Even, you know, skyscraper content. 10, 15, 000 words was nowhere near the 200, 000 that, you know, we were getting indexed. But what it means is that there was no practical limit for the amount of words a page could rank for. It wasn't like Google would sit there and you can rank for 500 but no more. You can rank for as many as, you know, Google deems topically relevant.
[00:12:53] Lee: And so, you know, that was kind of a, uh, a cornerstone on some of the other research that, you know, that we did on, um, you know, topics of pages and things like that.
[00:13:06] Olga: Can you, can you talk a little bit about this, those other, this other research you did, some other experiments?
[00:13:13] Lee: Yeah, the, um, Ted was looking, he had reached out to the community and said, you know, show me pages that are ranking for, You know ton of terms and so people volunteered those things and he was able to find some and he shared some of them on On fight club episodes like if you're you're ranking for let's say hummingbird feeder, right?
[00:13:33] Lee: You can rank for there's there's hundreds of terms around that We had a page that I don't know like twelve or thirteen hundred, you know keywords that it ranked for but it was variations around hummingbird feeder and hummingbird feed and So you have a hummingbird feeder and you have a nectar, you know, which is basically sugar water, but then there's different recipes for it and different things.
[00:13:56] Lee: And there's different styles of hummingbird feeders and different materials that you make hummingbird feeders. So, you know, the 1 page that we were looking at the site, we're looking at the page that was ranking was ranking for. You know, just a ton of these things because it was optimized well for the base term hummingbird feeder.
[00:14:15] Lee: So that's what we found is, you know, pages that rank for just tons and tons of keywords are optimized for just a core root word, you know, like hummingbird feeder in this particular case. So you don't do that. You can't rank for like hummingbird feeder. And, uh, you know, car tires, you know, it's just not going to, those two aren't topically similar enough.
[00:14:35] Lee: You're not going to rank, uh, if you try to mix topics on a page, but if a single topic has a lot of keywords associated with it, then yeah, you can rank for a lot.
[00:14:46] Olga: And did you, did your tests show that, for example, you can rank for hummingbird, hummingbird feeder, like on the first position and all those other, uh, related maybe topics.
[00:14:58] Olga: Can you also be like very, very high or usually it is just one theme that you are ranking like dominating and others are kind of lower.
[00:15:06] Lee: Some are a little bit lower because as you start to get to the longer tails, you know, there's always an element of exact match. So, you know, red hummingbird feeder, you might rank on page two, cause you mentioned the word red somewhere on the page, but other pages are optimized for, you know, red hummingbird feeder, whatever, they're going to beat you out.
[00:15:25] Lee: But, you know, you're still in the running and if you tweak it around a little bit, you can probably, you know, boost some of those terms up, but when you start to boost some long tails up, you'll take other ones. Down. So there's, you know, you can't rank number one for, uh, probably for a thousand different keywords, you know, for a single page, but you can rank well for, you know, a lot of keywords.
[00:15:48] Olga: And, uh, did you, when did you start using Cora? Because I think Cora is kind of probably the best tool you can have if you do SEO testing. So like, how did it all, the two blend together?
[00:16:04] Lee: Well, in 2018, when I started doing the, uh, the testing, you know, and I started testing factors against each other, uh, August 1st of that year, Google sort of unleashed the AI.
[00:16:13] Lee: Uh, that update was just, you know. It changed a lot of the way Google was processing stuff. So, volatility in the SERPs went way high. Mm hmm. And, you know, back then, if we were doing a simple test, it might take six to eight weeks, uh, to get a result, to get a clean result from it. But Google was changing the SERPs, you know, significantly about every two weeks.
[00:16:40] Lee: So by the time we had an answer, the question had changed like three or four times, and so, you know, it wasn't working. So we started looking at new testing methodologies and, you know, sort of how to deal with this volatility. And at that time, I bought Quora. Because, um, Cora had, I was gathering about 800 factors worth of data, which is more than anything else out there by, you know, a lot.
[00:17:05] Lee: Um, and I wanted to see if I could use that data to maybe build a model, uh, of the SERPs. So I could figure out, you know, what are the strongest factors using some, you know, statistical tools and things like that. So, I started playing around with that and that led me to start talking with, you know, Ted about a variety of things and, you know, one thing led to another sort of.
[00:17:24] Lee: How that works.
[00:17:25] Olga: Mm-Hmm. . So are you the author of some of the ranking factors that are in Cora right now? I think now there are like more than 1000 hundred am am I correct? Yeah, one 100,000.
[00:17:37] Lee: Yeah. The current version of Cora. Uh, the old versions Ted would program in, you know, like the keyword in an H two. So that would be a factor, you know, number of keywords in a, that would be a factor, you know, you'd have to hard code them.
[00:17:49] Lee: Now he's built an architecture where it crawls pages and discovers factors. So factors, you know, it's exploded out. Um, the number of things, I think he said in his Quora database, there's over a hundred and some odd thousand, uh, discovered factors in there now, or potential factors. They're not all ranking factors.
[00:18:11] Lee: Um, back in the day, you know, when I was first doing some things with like factor diversity, you know, I showed Ted some of the stuff that I was doing and that got coded into Quora. So the, the factor diversity factors are typically the number one, two, and three, uh, factors in, in any Quora report in the shared data.
[00:18:30] Lee: And over time as we find different things, uh, they get coded into Quora. So if we find, um, for example, the LSI terms in, you know, H123, if we say, you know, there looks like there's something there, he'll code it into Quora so that we can, you know, measure it and test it and all of those sort of things. He's very good about responding to data.
[00:18:52] Lee: So anything that we do and find that we think would be best suited to, uh, to Quora pulling that data, we can do. You know, we share it with Ted and he codes it in and the users get the benefit from all that.
[00:19:05] Olga: But I have to say it, even though this is not what I think now, but Google ignores LSI keywords.
[00:19:11] Olga: LSI keywords do not work. Like, what are you talking about? Can you, can you briefly talk about LSI and how you view them?
[00:19:21] Lee: I, I let What we know, um, is that if, and this is tested, and this is in the field, if I grab topically related terms and I add them to a page. I can consistently improve the rankings of the page versus if I add stop words to the page, nothing, you know, we know that those things are there now people get hung up on, uh, the term keywords and entities and LSI, they're all basically just nouns.
[00:19:58] Lee: They're all entities at the end of the day, and they have, you know, topics are basically a collection of entities. You know, the example I always use is if I say to you, apples, butter, sugar, cinnamon, bake, you know, pretty soon you're going to figure out that I'm talking about apple pie. And, you know, whether we classify those as entities or LSI or keywords or whatever you want to call them, that group of words forms a topic.
[00:20:24] Lee: And that's how Google reads pages. So, we can argue, you know, about what the terms are, what to call them and everything else, but they work, and that's really all I care about.
[00:20:34] Olga: Mm hmm. Yeah, this is, this is also something I have personally tested, even though before I also doubted LSI keywords, and this is, this is exactly as you're saying.
[00:20:46] Olga: So, Uh, can you describe some of the, I don't know, top SEO factors that you found over the years, over your tests to be like the, the top ones, which kind of are work for the majority of keywords, types of websites, which ones are these? Yeah,
[00:21:05] Lee: the, the, um, keywords are, you know, the, the driver, uh, of it in all the SERPs, including Google, people still think that, you know, with all the focus on entities, which very important and things like that, the keyword is the primary driver, uh, of the page.
[00:21:21] Lee: So. And there are zones on a page that are more important, and there's been just lots of testers that have shown you the keyword in the URL, keyword in the title tag, keyword in an H1, you know, all of these are important zones that Google pays extra attention to. So, to the degree that you can get those there.
[00:21:37] Lee: They're great. Um, also just getting the keyword and variants of the keyword in your content in the HTML works really, really well. A lot of people still have that fear, you know, if I add my keyword, you know, two or three more times, Google will see it as spammy or whatever. But if you have a tool like Quora, you can take a look and see what people are doing on page one.
[00:22:03] Lee: So there's this old rule that you still hear from time to time that your keyword density shouldn't be above 2 percent or you're spammy. And if you look at most SERPs, everybody on page one is well above 2%, you know, so they're not getting penalized. They're getting rewarded for it. In testing, we've tested up to 95 percent keyword density and it works and it ranks.
[00:22:26] Lee: So, you know, it's not going to do it for an active term. You know, I can't just throw apple pie on a page 10, 000 times and have it ranked because it's not complete. There's other entities, there's other things that are missing. So other pages outrank it. But It's still there. You still see the number of times that, you know, the, the density of apple pie in your, your page will correlate strongly with rankings.
[00:22:50] Lee: And generally you can move your rankings up by adding your keyword in variations, you know, more times. So people talk themselves out of those sorts of things. So if you're looking at those top zones and you're looking at your keywords and variations, Not new, but still SEOs, white hat and black hat tend to forget or overlook that, which is why I like, you know, something like Quora because you can take a measurement and see where, where am I?
[00:23:16] Lee: Oh, I'm at, you know, 4%, everybody else is 6 to 8%. I'm losing, you know, so. You can edit the page accordingly. Mm
[00:23:24] Olga: hmm. Mm hmm. Okay. And, uh, can you share, like, some of the tests you are working on right now? Is there something, something you want to specifically test now with all those changes in Google Helpful Content, those types of things?
[00:23:41] Lee: You know, it's interesting. The, the Helpful Content stuff, uh, my position right now is we're not sure what Helpful Content is or isn't. Google has been vague. You know, SEOs are out there hypothesizing about what it may be because we see changes and we're trying to say, is this helpful content and is this how it works?
[00:24:00] Lee: And let me go find some other examples where of this to see if it also got, you know, boosted or, you know, or demoted, uh, for it. And it's really hard. There's not a lot of data right now. There's way more theories than there are data, so I'm not sure what helpful content is or isn't. Or whether it's in play, or how it's in play most of what I see right now is that the, the same ranking methodologies and ranking factors that existed prior to helpful content are still driving the SERP.
[00:24:33] Lee: So, largely, I ignore. The conversations about helpful content until somebody comes up with, uh, you know, some actual data that says, Hey, here's something that we're seeing. That's different than history. The tests that I do, a lot of tests that I'm doing right now are sort of, uh, hidden because they are looking at fundamental forces used to be, we would test things like, you know, does a keyword here, you know, does it matter now we're looking more at.
[00:25:03] Lee: Google as a system. So for example, uh, if you look at how Google processes an image, we know that Google, if you show it a picture of the Eiffel tower, it can say that's an Eiffel tower and it's in Paris. And, uh, some of the stuff that they're showing with the new Gemini, uh, is really, really good at some of those image recognition that coming out and playing with that, but it can also read text on an image.
[00:25:29] Lee: It can also read exit data in an image. All of those things are processed at different times. So you'll see that exit data is processed, you know, uh, you know, maybe quarterly and, and OCR stuff is processed monthly and other image stuff is processed, you know, every six weeks or, you know, just intermittently.
[00:25:50] Lee: And so it's just understanding that because if you see stuff that Google processes real time, it's more important than stuff that it'll process once a month or once a quarter. So we're trying to figure out those parts of the system, um, looking at what the crawlers are doing when they come to the, you know, what pages they visit and what elements they pull and sort of what does it all mean, you know, as of this time, you have mobile crawlers and you have desktop crawlers.
[00:26:20] Lee: Even the best people can't tell you really fundamentally what the difference is between the two of them. What are they doing? Why does Google need, uh huh, two of them? So figuring that out gives you a better insight into what Google's looking at than trying to figure out You know if having multiple images on a page is a ranking factor You know, we're trying to look at how they're crawling, you know, those sort of fundamental things.
[00:26:42] Lee: And so, we're, we don't, you know, the people that are doing that right now don't reveal that because they don't want people mucking with it. I understand. Until we figure those things out, you know, it's not there. Um, but other things that I test, you know, I share with my, uh, uh, with my tested SEO from my mastermind group and things like that.
[00:27:03] Lee: Some of that stuff gets out in there as well. Uh huh. So non
[00:27:07] Olga: fight club. Uh huh. So can you, can you talk now a little bit about your tested SEO training here? Tested SEO masterminds, because I got there for the first time. I think it was in May 2022. Three. So I can say, uh, if, if I, if I look at my SEO experience, the way you look at yours, I can say that I only have like half year, half, half a year of experience in SEO, even though I was there since 2012 or something like that.
[00:27:40] Olga: So can you talk a little bit about what you do there and is it, is it what you do now for living, like mostly like testing and doing tested SEO trainings? No,
[00:27:51] Lee: the, the training is part of what I, uh, what I did that, that stemmed out of, um, just frustration with doing that. It was a temporary thing, you know, the, and I'll run it, you know, two, maybe three times a year, uh, until I get, uh, tired of it.
[00:28:06] Lee: Uh, it's not the primary, uh, thing, but it, you know, uh, there was a fight club episode. Um, about four years ago and, uh, I had a bunch of testers on, I was one of the testers and one of the questions that somebody, uh, that was watching the, uh, the show, uh, asked was, you know, what percentage of your tests do you publish?
[00:28:30] Lee: And, uh, you know, somebody said, ah, 80%, you know, 50 percent and, you know, 1 person said 20 percent and I said less than 5 percent and people were mad, not they weren't mad at me, they were mad that testers wouldn't just give. you know, 100 percent away to the universe. People don't understand how much time and energy, you know, gets devoted to that.
[00:28:55] Lee: So for example, I, I researched CTR for about six months. I was doing CTR tests probably 30 to 40 hours a week for six months to figure out how it worked. And people like, well, how does it work? I'm like, you know, I'm not giving that away. Uh huh. So. Tested SEO training arose out of taking all the stuff that I didn't publish.
[00:29:20] Lee: And, you know, just putting it into an eight week training where I basically give people, uh, my ranking playbook, you know, this is 95 percent of what I do. There's still a couple of things that I tell people in the training, some of the things that I, that I do that I don't share, but they're not necessary.
[00:29:35] Lee: I do them rarely. So somebody like you coming into the training, um, a lot of people will come in following Google's guidelines, not realizing that they're inaccurate. And they're not the whole story. And Google's not sitting there waiting for you to go to 2. 1 percent keyword density. And then, you know, you go to, to Google jail or something along those lines.
[00:30:00] Lee: And all the stuff that I teach can be done white hat, gray hat, or black hat. It just depends on your, um, preferences. So all I care about is what actually works and what actually works better. So, you know, some techniques, if, you know, if I find something that works and can get you ranked in, you know, six months, and then I find something that it gets you ranked in four months.
[00:30:24] Lee: I still know the six month thing works, but you know, I'll use the four month thing. And then if I find something that works in two months, I'll use the two month thing. And that's what we, you know, share sort of the refined, uh, version. And after people come through the training, uh, there's a mastermind on the back end where, uh, people share, you know, they've taken what I've done and expanded upon it and done their other things and in bringing their own expertise.
[00:30:48] Lee: Uh, into that, we have somebody showing up today that's showing their index, their, their audit, their site audits on a mastermind call today. So, you know, people share their expertise, um, and the community benefits from it. So, um, you know, it's, it's a, it's a great little community. I'm, I'm very, very happy with it because I learned stuff from the people that come through, you know, talented SEOs that can see and speak a common language.
[00:31:15] Lee: Uh, you know, there's magic in that.
[00:31:18] Olga: And how many people are there now in your community?
[00:31:23] Lee: There's 60 something in the, uh, in the mastermind, uh, right now. 60
[00:31:28] Olga: advanced SEOs. Yeah, nice. And can everyone join Tested SEO Training?
[00:31:37] Lee: No, you have to apply. You know, if you go to TestedSEOTraining. com, uh, and look to see if it's right for you, you can understand a little bit about the, the program and stuff like that.
[00:31:45] Lee: And you reach out to me and I will schedule a time to basically interview you. And, uh, you know, if there's a good fit there, you'll be offered an opportunity to come in. Not everybody makes it in. It's definitely not for new people. Um, it's not for people that are like course jumpers, for example, uh, people that just like to go, it's, it's a, it's a bootcamp, you know, we're actually, you're implementing week by week and we're sharing results and things like that.
[00:32:13] Lee: Um, so it's, it's, uh, it's a commitment. And it works better if you already have a solid foundation and SEO, even if it's incorrect, even if you're leaning towards all the white hat stuff, if you're open to looking at data, you know, that we show and data on your own sites and testing a few things a little differently, um, then, you know, you'll do well.
[00:32:37] Olga: Yeah, because this is kind of what I came with. I had some, I had some experience, a lot of experience. I was doing the SEO, the Whitehead, where I basically knew the SEO documentation by Google, like by heart. And I knew, I knew the fundamentals, how, like, where, what you should do to optimize the page. And it's.
[00:32:58] Olga: It usually worked, but in the cases where it stopped working or it didn't, or it kind of didn't, uh, didn't bring the results I expected, I got stuck a little bit. What, what I do next. And now. I have like a pool of possibilities, maybe this, maybe that, and factor diversity, something you mentioned earlier, this is, this is, this is huge.
[00:33:22] Olga: Can you talk about factor diversity a little bit more? Because this was a game changer for me as well.
[00:33:30] Lee: Factor diversity basically means, you know, um, if you think about, uh, Google as a scoring algorithm, it's got to crawl your page. And it's got to figure out things about your page. You know, do you have these terms?
[00:33:43] Lee: Do you have these things? And it converts all of that data into a score. So I just said, you know, is Olga's page better than Lee's page? That's, you know, ultimately what this comes down to. And so because, you know, you always hear this, the standard is 200 ranking factors, whatever, there may be thousands of ranking factors.
[00:34:04] Lee: I think it was the last thing that Google had said, but let's say there's 200 ranking factors. Well, you can get score. By having, you know, different amounts of some of those 200, you don't have to have all 200 of those, but the more factors you have, the better you'll typically score, especially if you have the stronger factors, you know, more of the stronger factors is even better and more efficient.
[00:34:27] Lee: So what we figured out over time was that that, you know, that element there is itself, you know, predictive, the number of factors that you utilize, um, is very predictive of your rank position. We also know on the other side of it, there's a, um, an algorithm that's a spam algorithm called MC4 and, um, we don't know that this Google has exactly this or it's implemented in exactly this way, but what the way that MC4 works is it tries to find, um, if your score is primarily made up of one factor or a minimum number of factors.
[00:35:06] Lee: What it does, it says, now you're trying to exploit the system, so we'll ignore you. We've all seen this, you know, you go build, you know, 50 links to your page and it goes up higher, and then you build 500 and it goes up higher, then 5, 000 and it goes up higher, and then you build 50, 000 and it tanks. You know, at that particular point, Google understands that the only thing that you have going for you is number of backlinks, and then you get up to, uh, where that is just such a dominant Amount of your score.
[00:35:31] Lee: It just says, Hey, we're not going to give you credit for backlinks. But if you have more factors, if it's not just that one, if you're, if you're utilizing a lot of different factors, then it continues to backlinks continue to work and other factors continue to work. So, you know, factor diversity is just something that we preach all the time.
[00:35:48] Lee: You know, just make sure that you're well diversified and you're not a one trick pony. And the, uh, the thing that Ted has been sharing a lot lately is if your site moves during an update up or down. You're missing something, you know, because if it moves up, you know, you just happen to have something right now that's in favor in the algorithm.
[00:36:10] Lee: And when it gets dialed down the, uh, the weight of that, you'll drop back down again, which means that you're missing some other pieces. Otherwise you would stay up. And, uh, you know, not move very much at all. So, you know, that's, that's diversity in a nutshell.
[00:36:25] Olga: Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is super, super interesting.
[00:36:29] Olga: And can you talk a little bit about Google core updates updates? Like how, how do you approach them? How do you analyze websites? Like, is it only about factor diversity? Like, because I know you, you and Ted, you share things about Google, uh, core updates that are kind of, um, contrary to what. Most people believe and say, like, can you share some, some of that?
[00:36:55] Olga: Well,
[00:36:57] Lee: the, I would say that the way that I think about core updates is Google's trying to figure out what factors give them the best signal. Um, and so at times they might think, Oh, you know what schema is giving us a little better signal. So we'll wait schema a little higher, you know, exact matches, you know, being overused.
[00:37:20] Lee: So we'll wait that one a little lower, you know, backlinks, you know, we'll wait that a little higher. And so they're just adjusting the knobs. On, you know, the big factor families that they have. And so it rescores things and moves people up and down. But the better SEOs, the ones that have factor diversity, they'll have all of those factors present on their page.
[00:37:42] Lee: So they don't care that you give me more credit for this thing that I have and less credit for that thing that I have. I still have enough factors and points to rank well, so the better SEOs that I know, we don't notice. That there's a Google update, except for the chatter in the SEO groups. Oh my God, there's an update.
[00:38:02] Lee: Oh my God, my site got hit. You know, that's what we notice. Um, our own sites don't really move, you know, much if at all during an update, because the, you know, if you have all the factors, you don't care which ones, you know, they give you credit for. So if somebody says that their site has been hit during an update.
[00:38:24] Lee: You know, we'll just run a core report and try to see if they have, you know, a glaring deficit in some factor category. That's, you know, ranking. Well, so, for example, if Google at times, historically schema has been an extraordinarily powerful factor. If you don't have it, you got problems. You know, it's not that way today, but you know, if, if you've got that, there are times when exact match is very, very important.
[00:38:52] Lee: So if you don't have it, you know, you'll drop if you add it to your page, you rise right back up to where you were before. So all we're looking at is just, you know, if you bounced up or down, it's why, what is the difference now in, you know, what Google is waiting, um, versus what it was, you know, prior to the update.
[00:39:13] Lee: Most of the time we find that it's not really the update that hits people's stuff, it's their own. You know, it's, it's technical issues or other little things. I had a, uh, um, in August I was at a conference, digital unfiltered. Um, and one of the participants there asked the, uh, the panel of speakers, you know, we just had an update, my site got hit.
[00:39:35] Lee: What would you do? And most people focused on, you know, how to recover from an update and my, my. Question to him is what makes you think it was the update that hit your site? There's a lot of factors. You know, did it hit all pages or just some pages? You know, did it hit on the update or immediately before or after?
[00:39:48] Lee: You know, sort of, you know, there's more details there. A couple of weeks later, he reached out to me and he goes, thanks for that. I went and looked and it wasn't all pages on my site. It was just some pages. And on some of those pages that got hit. There was a PHP script that broke and he said, we fixed the script and all the pages were covered, you know, so we find that's kind of the, you know, the thing, most of the time, it's some other something other than the update, but everybody likes to say, hey, the update happened, my site tanked, therefore.
[00:40:19] Lee: And sometimes it's that, but a lot of times it has nothing to do with the update. It could be, you know, you lost links, uh, some negative thing happened. You changed the plugin and it broke your site map, whatever.
[00:40:33] Olga: Yeah. Cool. And if someone wants to start testing, like how do they go about it? Do they like, do they like buy a new website, a clean website?
[00:40:44] Olga: Can they test on a live site, site they already have? Like, how would you, what would you recommend?
[00:40:51] Lee: So if we were going to the strict laboratory testing, you know, you set up just clean websites and you create these, you know, fake pages and so there's a lot of value in that. And, you know, people want to start with that just to get their feet wet.
[00:41:04] Lee: You can do it. But another way you can do it is on live pages. Now, either way, you have to do it a lot of times. So, if I told you that having the word purple in your H1 was a ranking factor, an easy thing to do would be to go to your website, you know, your website's got a bunch of pages, take, you know, 10 of them and, you know, don't do anything with them, just kind of set them off to the side so you know, and you got 10 of them, that you go change the H1 to include the word purple.
[00:41:36] Lee: And then you just watch what happens to the rankings, to the impressions, to, you know, traffic, to clicks, you know, all of those sorts of things. And you can see for yourself, yeah, it did something or nah, it didn't do anything, you know, you can, but just make sure you do it enough. Don't do it one time and think that you've discovered something because it's randomness and volatility in the service.
[00:41:57] Lee: You can't do it. So I always encourage people when you hear these ideas. And whether you like them or don't like them, go try it. Try it on pages, and you can try it on pages that don't rank well, so you're not doing it to your money page, but every site has pages that, you know, don't rank particularly well.
[00:42:15] Lee: So if you're, you know, ranked number 45 and you put purple in your H1 and it shoots up to number 22, you know, it's an indicator. It's not going to make you a lot of money because it's still, you know, further down in the SERPs, but at least you can see. And so we just encourage people to go to that. And if it goes from 45 to 85, you're like, whoops, that's a bad thing.
[00:42:33] Lee: Go remove purple from the H1 and it'll recover, uh, back in position. So just try, you know, just go and do and see for yourself. Uh, you know, you don't need even when we show people how to test sort of with the classic, uh, testing websites only and fake keywords and those sort of things, everybody thinks you need a Ph.
[00:42:57] Lee: D. in statistics or something like that. All you need is the ability to copy paste. You know, put stuff in a rank tracker, see what happens. That's it. It's not, you know, it's not a mystery. It's just work.
[00:43:09] Olga: And talking about rank trackers and SEO tools. So what is your SEO tool set? In addition to Quora?
[00:43:17] Lee: In addition to Quora, I use I use Ahrefs a little bit because sometimes I like to just dig into people's backlink profile a little bit.
[00:43:25] Lee: Um, I use Screaming Frog a lot. Um, I use Excel, uh, as the, the primary, uh, tool. And I have a couple other tools that are, uh, that are in development. Um, People can look at it. Witcher Labs. I have a little, uh, link building tool that, you know, builds cloud links for you.
[00:43:46] Olga: Oh, can you talk a little bit about that tool?
[00:43:48] Olga: Like, how does it work? Sure. Can everyone get it? Yeah.
[00:43:53] Lee: If people go to witcherlabs. com, uh, there's a simple link tool. Um, all it requires is for you to set up, uh, your cloud accounts and give the tool your credentials. So the really nice thing about this Is that you're able to, um, it's almost like your own private PBN because they're your cloud properties, your buckets, and anything that I do using the tool to myself, if I, you know, blow it up or, you know, do bad things, it doesn't affect you because you're completely different than I am.
[00:44:28] Lee: Yeah. Um, and what it does is it just, you know, you give it a keyword that you're trying to rank a page for, and it goes and does some research and create some content and create some cloud links, uploads them, and then it sends them to a little crawler so that Google comes and finds your, your cloud links and stuff like that.
[00:44:45] Lee: So we built it, you know, to do a little simple job like that. Uh, and it works well, you know, it's not everything that you need to do in link building, but it's enough to give you some quick little relevant links to your, uh, to your site. And we have other tools, um, in development that, you know, help, uh, make the SEO process faster.
[00:45:05] Lee: Um, but generally speaking, you know, I don't use a lot of tools, you know, also I'm not an agency, so I don't have to have a lot of the reporting tools and client management stuff that's there. But in terms of just pure SEO tools, that's my toolbox.
[00:45:20] Olga: So you want to say that cloud links work coming back to that?
[00:45:27] Lee: I don't, we use cloud links because they're easy to, uh, to generate and things like that. I don't think that cloud links are better than any other type. I don't have a preference for type of link. You know, if you've got PBNs, use them. If you want to use web twos, use them. If you want to use, you know, uh, You know, sort of social media stuff or video or whatever it is, use them.
[00:45:52] Lee: They'll, they'll all work, you know, and do it. So I don't sit there and say, you know, cloud links are the magical thing that Google loves. Uh, that's not, that's not it. It was just a matter of cloud properties are easier for us to build links on than other platforms. Now we could have done the same thing by buying, uh, domains, but it's easier to set up cloud stuff than it is setting up individual domains because then users.
[00:46:19] Lee: And ourselves, we, we have different, you know, hosting and, you know, that, that makes, um, posting your links problematic. Yeah. So we went with it as an easier, uh, it was an easier.
[00:46:33] Olga: Okay. And for rank tracking, how do you, uh, track rankings?
[00:46:39] Lee: I use SERP robot. Um, you know, it's just something I've used for a long time and it does okay.
[00:46:45] Lee: You know, I don't have any love or hate or any other tool. It's just, I built that when it works for me and I'm lazy, so I'm not going to shift. Um, and then occasionally if I'm looking at local stuff, I also use, you know, local Viking to do GeoGrid, um, you know, there are other GeoGrid software that work well, uh, out there.
[00:47:06] Lee: So it's not that I've tested and it's better than this 1 and that 1, you know, it's just, it's something that I used and it gives me the data that I need. And
[00:47:13] Olga: talking about local SEO, is there some test results, an interesting one or anyone that you can share?
[00:47:23] Lee: You know, the thing about local, I'll share this little tip because this is where people mess this up.
[00:47:31] Lee: Um, a lot of people think, okay, local is all about the GMB or GBP, or people say, no, local is all about the website or no. It's actually both. Google gets local signals from each of those, and you can rank just using, you know, methods on the GBP, you can rank just by using stuff on the website, and they're, you know, it's better to utilize both of them, but this, this.
[00:48:04] Lee: Dogma about oh, it's all about this or it's all about that. It's not true. There's multiple ways of doing it and you just have to understand that those things give different signals. You know, if you're looking at like a plumber on the GBP, you can say we have plumbing services and you can do a few other little things there.
[00:48:22] Lee: But on the website, you can write lots of pages with hundreds and hundreds of words of content that just validates that you're, you know, a plumber, you have expertise in that niche. The website's a much better way of, you know, doing that than the GBP ever would be. But the GBP is the one that is in Google's system that says, hey, We're located right here at 123 Main Street.
[00:48:46] Lee: Here's our phone number and our hours of operation. And that's a trusted, you know, that's a trusted geo signal. That's going to be better than anything you could do on a website. Other things can be done in either place and you can rank well.
[00:49:00] Olga: Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is very insightful. I also learned a lot about local SEO, uh, during tested SEO training.
[00:49:08] Olga: So my perspective also changed a lot, uh, after, after doing some of those things. Uh, And coming back to tests, uh, what are some things, uh, we shouldn't do? Things that can easily mess up a test for newbies?
[00:49:28] Lee: Doing it once, you know, multiple things, like I'll see people and they'll, they'll do these case studies.
[00:49:35] Lee: Hey, you know, we did this thing for helpful content and our site and our client site. Shut up. And I'm like, okay, is that all that you did? No, we also built some links. We also fixed, you know, some technical issues. I'm like, well, you can't just pick, you know, the one thing that you like, just do one thing. If you're going to do it and do it multiple times.
[00:49:54] Lee: So I know if I go test, you know, do a certain type of backlink boost local rankings, you know, I'll go do it on 10 sites or more and see, knowing that just randomly. If I do nothing to 10 sites, one of them is going to shoot way up. One of them is going to shoot way down. And you know, the other eight aren't going to move very much.
[00:50:15] Lee: They'll move, you know, plus or minus over a period of weeks, you know, one to three positions. So what I'm looking for is do I get a whole bunch of websites to move more than one to three positions? So I get six of the 10 websites move up, you know, eight, 10 positions. I know that what I did worked. Because I have, you know, just a lot of data and we'll go and repeat it and, you know, do it on other live sites and things like that to continue to get those, um, uh, those results.
[00:50:45] Lee: But that's most of what I see is people will work really, really hard and they'll set something up and do it only once. And, you know, you might as well do nothing at that point because you're whatever you get is going to be just random.
[00:50:59] Olga: Yeah. Yeah. Makes perfect sense. And I have to ask you about that.
[00:51:05] Olga: Everyone in the SEO industry is now a little bit scared about the future AI. I watched your presentation on SEO rock stars. You talked about that and I really, really liked that presentation. Can you share your kind of take on AI changing, taking away our jobs?
[00:51:27] Lee: Well, I think that the, the, we saw back, I think it was April or May, um, a guy developed a really, really clever app and it was, you had a little ear piece in your ear and it was designed, it trained it on law to help you fight traffic tickets.
[00:51:47] Lee: So you would go into court, this little device would be in your ear, and it would listen to what the judge was saying, what the prosecutor was saying, and it would tell you what to say, the applicable law. That would be, you know, counter to that. So it's basically like having a lawyer in your ear, but it was AI driven.
[00:52:03] Lee: And the legal industry came after the guy. Uh, they said you're practicing law without a license. And he goes, yeah, but it's just software. It's not us, but because in the U S uh, practicing law without a license is a felony, uh, in most places he backed down and, you know, pulled it, whether he pulled it or not.
[00:52:22] Lee: The ability to research a topic like traffic law and real time almost have a lawyer in your ear is phenomenal. And so you look at a lot of knowledge work like law, you know, case law. And the statutes are online. You can train AI on this and AI can, uh, understand and make connections within that faster than a human can.
[00:52:55] Lee: And then it can replace probably, uh, 80 percent of what lawyers do or more. The same thing is true of any sort of knowledge work. You know, we've had a friend of ours, you know, fed a bot that he created. He fed it the U S tax code, you know, a couple of hours and it understands the tax code. Most tax accountants don't understand the tax code.
[00:53:18] Lee: So, you know, and, and as the, there's still problems. You know, uh, things still hallucinate, they misunderstand, you know, these large language models are still under development. But if you look at what was available in February of this year and what's available in December of this year, it's night and day how much it's come and it's going to continue to accelerate.
[00:53:40] Lee: Uh, I was looking at the, uh, uh, launch video for Gemini, you know, uh, Google's new, uh, new AI thing, and while there's some questions about it and things like that, the fact that it's multimodal and it can respond in so many different things means that it can learn and comprehend and do things faster than we can.
[00:53:59] Lee: So my take is that knowledge based work like SEO, um, there will be models. That are developed to do those things within the next 3 years and it won't be clunky and bad, but. You know, if you have something that can, for example, an AI that can run a site audit and identify that you have a problem with some 404 pages, and it can tell you that you need to, you know, 301 this, that, or the other, and your title tag needs this, and you know, your content needs to be expanded.
[00:54:31] Lee: Here's, you know, uh, some suggestions for expansion of that content. What do you need you and me for? You know, that's kind of the, you know, where it is, it's going to become a commodity. And so I think knowledge workers, unless you are the top of your industry, you're at risk. And right now we're looking at, um, other income streams that don't depend on, you know, that particular thing.
[00:55:01] Lee: If I was an agency owner right now, I would be worried. Mm hmm.
[00:55:06] Olga: Yeah, I thought maybe you will say something more positive.
[00:55:10] Lee: Well, the positive, the positive thing is we know because we've seen the talk that I gave just looked at, you know, technological disruptions over time, follow a very predictable pattern, just like this one is things are going to change.
[00:55:22] Lee: Do I know exactly how they're going to change? No, but I know what I'm looking at. Um, we saw, I was laughing, um, yesterday or day before yesterday, open AI. Okay. Made a, uh, a partnership with a German firm. That's a news firm that owns lots of news outlets. That's how they're going to get their real time data.
[00:55:43] Lee: You know, whereas Musk's, um, was trying to get his stuff, you know, out of Twitter, which is huge, you know, real time thing. And it's an advantage, but they just negated that advantage, uh, for them. Actually have now more and better data than he does, which puts his AI at risk. You see Google coming out and saying, Hey, this is our Gemini and it beats chat GPT for now.
[00:56:05] Lee: And then Microsoft says, Hey, if we got these new prompts and stuff like that, we'd be Gemini, you know, it's like everybody's jockeying for, uh, for these things and you're just watching the way it's, it's playing out. So is, is everybody going to, is the market going to adopt all this? I don't know. You know, we can have two guys in a garage right now, inventing something that we don't know about coming out, but we have time.
[00:56:29] Lee: So if we see that ultimately this is going to be a problem, you know, where isn't it going to be a problem? And you can start to make that move. Uh, now not that you just jump ship and scream, Oh my God, the world is ending, you know, but, but look at other opportunities. So, and they're always out there.
[00:56:48] Lee: People are always going to need help with certain types of problems. And there are certain things that AI is not good at, and it's going to be a challenge for it to get good at. And those are opportunities for us. Typically SEOs, uh, the, the good ones are good problem solvers. Yeah. You know, others just want to tell me how to do it.
[00:57:06] Lee: Tell me what tool to use. And, you know, they're just basically little executors and those are the ones that are most at risk. So I look at it as a very positive thing. The world is going to change. It's going to change in some positive ways and some negative ways. And if you just keep your eyes open, uh, you know, you can take advantage of that.
[00:57:22] Olga: Yeah. I like the sound of it. Okay. At least. So where can people find you connect to where are you active? Like what's the best place?
[00:57:32] Lee: Best place to find me is, you know, uh, SEO fight club. Uh, you'll see, you know, anything that we talk about, cause that's weekly. Um, other than that, you know, I don't publish a lot of, uh, stuff.
[00:57:43] Lee: I'm not out there. I mean, if, you know, few SEO groups, um, people want to reach me, they can find me on Skype, you know, my Skype handles test it all. Um, it has been for. Well, since Skype came out, that was the one that I picked years ago, because that's all that I do was testing, uh, even back then. Um, so everybody thinks that's a new thing.
[00:58:03] Lee: I'm like, no, that's been before I even started testing in SEO. I had that handle. Um, and, uh, you know, Witcher Labs, you can see some of the stuff that's in development, because we've got things that are coming in the, uh, now and in the next few months that are in development that are, that'll be out there.
[00:58:18] Lee: So people can see what we're up to.
[00:58:20] Olga: Okay, cool. And I hope to get Honey, your wife. On the shows soon. I hope she she agrees to be my guest
[00:58:28] Lee: as well She'll love to come on and hang out with you. Okay.
[00:58:31] Olga: Okay, cool. So Lee, thank you so much for sharing everything. Yeah Thanks. Thank you everyone. Bye. Bye
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