Product Led SEO - Stop following the herd

Eli Schwartz:
Can talk today about how we can do SEO differently and not copy everyone else that does SEO. I'd love for you to add me on LinkedIn. Follow me on LinkedIn. Connect with me, shoot me an email. Any feedback you have on this presentation. My email address is right here, and of course you can Google me, or find me on LinkedIn. So, when people think of SEO, what typically comes to mind? So, typically people think about algo updates, and this is for people that do SEO and don't do SEO. It's a constant game of cat and mouse between your traffic goes up, and then you get hit by Google and your traffic goes down. Or even people that don't know any SEO, they just feel like SEO comes in these waves. Second thing that people think of when it comes to SEO, is they think that of SEO is free traffic.

Eli Schwartz:
So, SEO is the opposite side of the coin of paid traffic that you buy on mostly Google. And then SEO is the free version of that. Third thing that people think of when it comes to SEO is that it's all about rankings. And if you're not in on the first page, or not in the first result, or in the first three results, you haven't done any success for SEO. And the final thing that people think of when it comes to SEO, is that there's some sort of magic. So, the magic is if you're doing SEO, you think there's a secret to what you're doing, and there's a black box, and you don't want to share it if you are the receiver of SEO. So, you think there's some sort of evil magic, the snake oil magic, which is something that someone is potentially ripping you off, and not telling you the exact things about what they're doing for you.

Eli Schwartz:
Now, I can assure you that all of this is absolutely wrong. So I'd been privileged to work with some really, really amazing clients, and work full time for some amazing companies doing SEO. And this is not the way that I've been able to be successful at SEO. Earlier in my career, I was able to do the kinds of things where it was cat mouse with Google. I have been, I guess the right word is victim of Google log updates. And I have seen people lose their jobs, who's had bosses freak out and throw things at me because of Google logo updates. But this isn't the right way. This is not what I believe SEO should be. But, we'll talk about how it really should be. But first of all, we'll mention about how everyone does it, and this is not necessarily the right way.

Eli Schwartz:
So, first I'm going to go through the logical reasons why the way most people are doing SEO are incorrect. So, the way most people do SEO is they think of Google as it was. This is a screenshot of Google's homepage, 20ish years ago when Google started, they only had 25 million pages. So, if you read SEO advice today, it will be very, very similar to the SEO advice you would have read 10 years ago. And we'll talk about some of that advice. What the approach to Google is essentially the same as it was as if Google had just started.

Eli Schwartz:
But, Google is actually completely different. Google is an AI company. Google of today is doing so many different things that is not at all just about ranking an index. And really, the thing that's most different about Google and their AI is I have a... The best way of explaining this is I have a little bit of a bad habit. Which is I live in Palo Alto and we have a lot of autonomous cars driving on the roads in front of me. And whenever I see them, I have this thing where I like to jump in front of them, walk in front of them, ride my bike in front of them, turn my car into them because I figure I can learn something. I can find out whether their AI is good enough to not hit me and kill me, or they'll hit me, hopefully not very hard. And I'll have an opportunity to sign an NDA and no one will ever know about it.

Eli Schwartz:
In this case, this car is Waymo. So, typically when I talk about Waymo in public, I would usually ask people to raise their hands and say if they have ever heard of Waymo in an audience of about 200, I'll usually get about 10 people that have heard of Waymo. So, I assume that's the same today. For those of you that have never heard of Waymo, waymo is Google's autonomous car driving division. So, Google has a division that is making software that drives autonomous cars. They've been working on it for 10 years. They're using AI to make decisions about whether something is a bug running in front of it, or a bird, or a baby, or ball, or all these things that are really complex. Google is an AI company. That's Google of today.

Eli Schwartz:
So, the same company that can make those sorts of technology and Google actually is far ahead, of all of their competitors in their space. So Google is showing more autonomous miles than Chrysler and GM. And of course, Uber and everyone else working on this exact challenge. So, Google is far and away, an AI company when it comes to this, like the absolute leaders, and search is really the exact same. But let's talk about some of the things that people do when it comes to SEO. So, they'll say you need to do things like put keywords in a title tag. A company that has such strong AI that can make life and death decisions, keywords in a title tag shouldn't really matter all that much. Because Google knows what you mean when you write it. And they know what you mean when you put it in your title tag.

Eli Schwartz:
So, when I first started doing SEO, you needed to make sure you put the right word in. I worked in automotive space, so we needed to put cars versus vehicle, or a singular version car. The other thing people talk about is having a number of words of copy. So, the common one is you need to have a thousand words of copy. Again, the amount of words shouldn't matter to an AI engine that can actually understand and read words. All they're looking for, is the right words. Next is a clickable title. So, this goes into having the right keywords in your title tag, but is your title tag clickable. And that's... We're going to trick users and we're going to trick Google because it'll be the most attractive title tag. Again, Google is an AI engine. A clickable title is defined by people actually clicking it.

Eli Schwartz:
Many times, people talk about whether engagement metrics go into search. I think engagement metrics go into search, but not the way that people typically think. I think engagement metrics, that's how people search on a page. Go into search in the sense that when you click on many, many words that have the word free capitalized, then Google learns from that. The AI is learning that free is something that people like you or people in general are going to click forward on. Same goes with snippets. So, powerful snippet, same idea. Google knows, and they're your AI engine is teaching them what it is that people are going to be looking for. And finally, when it comes to images, there's a lot that goes into how do you tag images? Do you put an all tag on it? What kind of image does the image have to match the content?

Eli Schwartz:
Again, thinking of Google as an AI engine, this shouldn't really matter. And for those of you who have Android phones, Google has an app cal Google lens, which if you take a picture of something, it will actually identify exactly what that is. So, Google of today is so much smarter than Google of 10 years ago, or 20 years ago where you were trying to fake it out, with having the right images and trying to connect something to a page with all tags that didn't really matter. Another thing that a lot of people like to talk about when it comes to doing STO today is site speed. And the reason people talk about site speed is because it's one of the only defined metrics, when it comes to SEO. You can either be good or bad. I'm not a big fan of even caring about site speed. I care most about whether users can engage with the page or not. And not really what sort of metric you have.

Eli Schwartz:
I had a client in the car rental space, and they were [inaudible 00:07:53] enterprise.com. And enterprise.com had a site speed score of one. So, scores went from one to 100. They had one, the absolute lowest, and I think we all know that they did quite well on their visibility, and did quite well as business [inaudible 00:08:06] up until COVID stopped everyone from running cars. So, again, site speed is not something you need to focus on as a metric. Or we can talk about what you do need to focus on. And finally, my favorite is backlinks. So this is a typical week of my inbox, of people sending out links, a request for me to buy links from them. They put big names in here. They'll put a name like Inc., which if Google has an AI engine, they can know that many posts on Inc. don't really fit with this general general of what Inc. is publishing.

Eli Schwartz:
Same goes with a site like IBM. IBM makes enterprise hardware. And if there's a link to a poker site, it's very likely that that link doesn't belong. So an AI engine can easily recognize where links aren't valid. Now, the way that most people would view SEO in this way, is that there's this constant seesaw effect between you do all the right things, you have all the right keywords in, you have the right links, you have the right site speed, you have the right content, you're going to go up, and if you don't, you simply go down. And if we're thinking of Google in AI world, this couldn't be further from the truth. But in a practical sense, none of this even works. And now we'll go through a hypothetical example of how you would do SEO in this world where we're trying to build the great content, build the right links, and see if that even works.

Eli Schwartz:
So in my hypothetical example, we're doing SEO for a job website. So, it's like a craigslist. It's like indeed, we have random jobs. This is our task. We want to generate more traffic for the site. So, you go to a keyword research tool. In this case, I'm using rank ranger, big fan. It's a sort of a swiss army knife for keyword research, and for other sorts of tracking. I put in what might potentially be the biggest search term in my space. So I'm not looking for any specific job. There's not going to be any volume on that. I'm going to go look for the biggest term, come up with unemployment 550,000 searches per month. Now I want to find a topic that I'm going to write for unemployment. So, I use another keyword tool and I discover that I want to write this article cal how to apply for unemployment.

Eli Schwartz:
Now the challenge here, is that every other site did the exact same thing I've done. They've gone to keyword research tool. They found the biggest queuer. They figured out what the biggest topic is, and they've written that exact piece of content. But now I'm smarter than them. I'm going to go look at everyone's backlinks, whoever wrote that content, and I'm going to go get the exact same backlinks, and I'm going to try to one up them. Getting one more back link or a one better backlink, and hopefully I'll be able to outrank all these other sites have been doing it for a long time. And then finally, I'm going to land on a rank tracking. So I'm good. I found my keywords unemployment. I'm going to throw it into again. I'm using a rank ranger here as an example. And I'm going to report and show how well I'm doing on my keywords, based on the fact that I've chosen these keywords, and this is the way I'm going to track my success.

Eli Schwartz:
Now, aside from the obvious challenges about the way this process works, all of the things I'm doing are limited by my capacity. So, if I only have the ability to target 10 keywords per month, because I only have the ability to write 10 pieces of content per month, I can only target let's say 120 key phrases in an entire year. So, I'm never really going to be able to conquer an entire space. So, if my focus on SEO is picking keywords from a keyword research tool, again, that every other competitor can do. And anybody of $99 or $200, whatever any of these tools are going to cost, can do the exact same thing. Anybody with a backlink tool can get the exact same backlinks. Even with all of that, I still can't go after that much content because each pieces of content requires that human write that piece of content. But here are the bigger challenges that I find with all of this.

Eli Schwartz:
Number one, I'm going after rankings. Now I'm reporting on my success using rankings, and with all of my best efforts, it's very possible I never going to get that ranking I need. So whether I'm working in house and my bosses requiring me to get that keyword ranking, whether I'm a consultant and my client has required me to get that ranking, whether I just worked for myself and I want to get that ranking, it's very possible that my goal will never be achieved, because Google is an AI engine, and Google is a lot smarter than you just need some roll links. And I'm going to rank content based on the fact that I get links, and I have the right content. In many cases I've seen, where a piece of content is able to rank without any links at all. Many, many times I've seen them not even using the correct keyword in that content.

Eli Schwartz:
I have a client that ranks on a key phrase that they know that their top phrase and not even use it all on their website. I've competed against clients or against websites that their backlinks have been deleted years ago, yet they're still able to maintain a top position on that keyword. So, so much more goes into rankings, than just the raw metrics I think. So, if this is my focus, I just may not ever get that ranking, which means from that sense, I will never be successful in my SEO. Even more than that, if I do get that ranking, it's very possible that it won't even matter. So, in my example, where I'm working on a job site, and I'm focusing on unemployment, people that Google the term unemployment are not looking to necessarily get another job, they're looking to get paid by a government for being unemployed more than likely.

Eli Schwartz:
They're looking apply for unemployment. They're looking for what they can do while they're unemployed. If they're actually looking for a job, the unemployment is not the keyword they're going to use. So if I'm looking to generate revenue from the content I've created, this won't help at all. And finally, when I'm focused just on keywords, some keywords are my goal, and I need to just make sure that keyword happens. If this I narrowly focused on what rankings I have for the keywords I've chosen, I'm going to miss out on other keywords that I probably are already generating traffic on. And when it comes to reporting, I'm not going to report on those successes. When it comes to converting and learning, I'm not going to know about those successes. And here's an example from my own website. Not that I rank on these terms, but I do generate traffic from them.

Eli Schwartz:
So, if I was reporting on international SEO, I might miss out that I was ranking on the word international SEO consultant. Just because in order to measure my rankings, I would have to feed in every single potential keyword, and ordering of potential keywords and plurals or potential keywords. So, rather than focus on specific keywords, I recommend against doing something else. And for that, I like to call this product led SEO. So, this is a term that I potentially coined. I haven't seen many other people use it. However, it's not an idea at all that I have created. We're going to walk through a little bit of this. Love to hear any feedback on this concept. I'm in the midst of close to publishing a book on product led SEO, at the end this approach, and any feedback I get now, it would be greatly appreciated because I can incorporate that into the book.

Eli Schwartz:
So I like to think about product led SEO and doing SEO, as reversing the funnel completely. So, a typical SEO funnel, starts with keywords at the bottom. I'm going to find... In my example, I'm going to find the keyword that has the highest potential search Volume. I'm going to ladder that up to here's how many clicks I think I can get per month. Then I can tell you how many times early on my career, I had to go through this process where I've had to figure out how many monthly searches there are per month. And then from there, calculate what my potential position was. And then from there calculate what the potential clicks would be, and then what the conversions would be from all clicks on that page. And then the conversions all the way down the line.

Eli Schwartz:
I want to completely reverse that. I want to focus on my end goal, which is how I'm going to benefit from the traffic, whether it's a lead, whether it's a sale, whether it's a signup, whatever it is. How am I going to benefit from this traffic? And let's think about the people themselves that are coming into this funnel, and then we're going to back that all the way in, to how we would do SEO. So to get there, I focus on the end user. So if it's for an early site, and I believe, and I hope there's product market fit, I'm going to talk to the potential customers. So if I'm doing SEO for a job site, I'm going to try to identify what the content gaps, though are not using a search tool, or not using a keyword research tool, but using actual people to ask them what they might look for in a job site.

Eli Schwartz:
What are the kinds of things that they're hoping a job site would do for them? What's the content they might want to read? And from there, distill that into how they would interact with a search engine using queries. If a site is already established and is engaging and working with customers, there will likely be customer data on how people are using the site, and what are the kinds of gaps that there might be, and the kinds of content that should be created. And from there, we can understand the words that they should be searching.

Eli Schwartz:
And finally, my favorite source for getting some of this data, is any large company that has actual customer support. Whether that is on the phone, or whether that's by email, or whether that's by social media. Has interactions where customers are feeding in information about what exactly is they're looking for, what they're hoping to read, what they're hoping to learn, and how it is they found the site. So, I've been fortunate that work worked with some companies where they record all that data in Salesforce, and from there, I'm able to turn that into content, that magically convert so much better than anything else, because I know the customers want it.

Eli Schwartz:
So, to that end, rather than focusing on keyword search volume, I'm focusing on conversions. If there's high potential for a piece of content converting, it really doesn't matter at all what the search volume should be. As I'm prioritizing all the things I need to do, and we may still be limited by capacity, because some of the content actually has to be written. But when I'm going through this prioritization process, I'm using actual conversions and likelihood of conversions, and potential dollars that will come from that, rather than just how many people are potentially searching on that per month? Which doesn't even imply that they're going to click and I'm going to get that traffic. So, my ultimate goal is conversions, and this should be your ultimate goal. Everything you're doing with SEO should be driven by dollars, leads, signups, whatever it is, Google app downloads, whatever it is that you're generating some sort of actual business KPI. Rather than, what I like to think of as the fake KPI of just rankings

Eli Schwartz:
3% of a hundred, which is three, is a lot better than 0.01% of 10,000, which is one. So, this is... Most people are doing the opposite. They're focusing on that keyword that has thousands and thousands of searches per month, which from that they may get traffic from. And from that traffic they're going to get, they may convert. I would rather find the keyword that I'm more than likely going to get the click from, because I have great content market fit. I'm going to... And because I have that,

Eli Schwartz:
I'm actually supplying the perfect answer, and matching the intent of what that user is doing. And when they arrive on the page, they are more than likely to convert. So I'm building out conversion funnels based on what people are going to convert from the content, rather than conversion funnels on some hypothetical here's how many people search per month. And here's how many people are going to click through on my site. And then try to estimate how those people will even flow through the site.

Eli Schwartz:
And to that end, keyword research tools aren't even accurate nowadays. And I assume we can all notice this. If you do your own searches, what the keyword research tools do is they aggregate up different topics. They're not going to give the specific words that people search. So, I say a keyword search like weather, now if you search the word weather, all of us on this call today, are going to get different results based on where you are. Because when you search weather, Google pens the actual location. So, when key research tool tells you what the monthly searches for weather are, it doesn't really match, because everyone's actually searching weather, and Google's appending that location. And as we get smarter and smarter into voice search, and then as this AI gets smarter, more and more of our searches are going to have different attributes appended.

Eli Schwartz:
I just recently saw a result, which everyone can try themselves. If you search for our golden retriever, and this is specifically on your phone. Search golden retriever on your phone. Google will give you ways that you can append different results to your search. They'll tell you you can add diet. When you click on diet in this little knowledge box, it doesn't even change the actual query in the box. They're just giving you different results. So, that's you feeding information to the Google. You're teaching Google what it is they should be looking for.

Eli Schwartz:
But even more than that, when you do a voice search, they know what your specific intent is. You can say, "I'm hungry." And they can decide that right now is dinner time, or right now is lunchtime, or usually want pizza around this time. So, keyword research is based on an anonymized person, but none of us are really anonymous anymore. None of us are really doing things that ladder up to those higher search volumes. So, rather than focusing on something has thousands of thousand searches, focus on something that will more than likely convert.

Eli Schwartz:
And for that, I like to think of what I call a blue ocean SEO. So, there's a book which I recommend everyone read called Blue Ocean Strategies. High-level Blue Ocean Strategies, focus that idea of going where not everyone is building businesses. So, an example might be, if you were creating a new taxi company, the only way you'd be able to compete is by having lower prices, or maybe more comfortable cars. Uber upset that entire market or Lyft, or whoever [inaudible 00:21:59], upset that entire market by just creating a brand new business, that you suddenly use mobile phones, and you didn't get taxis, you got other people's personal cars. And from that, they had no competition. They weren't competing against taxis, they were just something completely different.

Eli Schwartz:
Moving that on to SEO, so rather than focusing on keyword research, which is something that everyone else is already doing anyone with enough money to buy keyword research tool can figure out those the keywords, I'd rather find the people, know that there's a content gap in what those people are looking for, and build the content out to meet that gap. So make more sense in one moment. And then as I'm building out that SEO, rather than scaling it by creating more content based on keywords, so a typical SEO roadmap, and most of the time when I work with companies that build out 18 month, two year roadmaps of what we're going to do. So, a typical roadmap with, if you're not focusing on SEO as a product, and doing product led SEO, is going to consist of here's my thousand keywords, and here's how I'm going to chip away at this list, and writing more content matching those keywords.

Eli Schwartz:
So, I much prefer to focus on SEO used in utility. So, what is it that people want? I have this prioritized list based on conversion. What am I missing from this list? What are the kinds of content I need to create? As I create this content, I'm able to iterate against this, and build out more things that users need, rather than here's arbitrary words. I need to make sure that next month I check another five words off this list. As I'm doing this, I want to aim for anything that first of all, is programmatic. So the idea is that we don't want to be limited by capacity. So, I don't want to be held to having a writer, and if I have budget, I get another writer. And if I have a very good writer, that writer can write more content for my budget.

Eli Schwartz:
So, I want to do things that are programmatic. So, programmatic is... A great example of programmatic is any e-commerce website. We're pulling in descriptions. So as we launch more pages, I can create pull and more descriptions coming from the manufacturer, and create more pages around that. Huge user generated content is also programmatic and scalable. So, any manual content, again, limited by capacity, is far from scalable. So anytime I'm creating a new product and learning from people about what it is that they need to find on the web, the content has to be... Absolutely has to be scalable. So for a job website, it may be mashing up different pieces of data. So as I want my website to grow, there's easy directions it can grow, rather than I need to write another blog post about what this specific job is like.

Eli Schwartz:
There will absolutely be a technical lift from this. And I prefer that some of these technical challenges when we're building product actually be quite difficult. Because if they're easy, any competitor can easily do this. If all it takes is doing keyword research and writing a blog post, anybody can write. Do keyword research and pay someone to write a blog post. If there's technical lift and figuring out how to get Google to really get through an entire website and find all the content, this makes them more challenging. And this means that you're in a great competitive position. And most of all, once you have done this, you can own it forever.

Eli Schwartz:
So, Amazon is a great example of a company that does programmatic scalable product led SEO. So, 10 years ago, whenever... Amazon built the current iteration, or 15 years ago, the current iteration of their website, they had no idea that in the year 2020, one of the most popular search items on their site would be surgical gloves, and [inaudible 00:25:33], and surgical masks. Yet, they did the SEO around, how can we build a great e-commerce website? And that website, the architecture, the product, the ways you can navigate through the website and rank that content on Google, positioning them for anything from now and into the future, that potentially people are going to be looking for.

Eli Schwartz:
So I'll talk about some case studies to make this less hypothetical and more practical. So, these are examples of companies we all know, that do exactly this. So TripAdvisor, TripAdvisor created today, they would... And you were building it from a content driven standpoint. You would probably go and research what are the top hotels in New York? What are the top hotels in San Francisco? And write long blog posts with pictures about what it's like to be there. Instead, TripAdvisor created the architecture and the product around having a review on every single hotel, restaurant, attraction in the entire country, and then scale that up to the entire world. And if one day we call [inaudible 00:26:35], colonize Mars, they'll just create a new subdirectory for Mars and all the States and countries within Mars. Zillow's another great example. And Zillow is my favorite example of Blue Ocean at SEO.

Eli Schwartz:
So, when Zillow started, they didn't say how are we going to compete against all these other websites that have ranking on terms like real estate or mortgage loan? They built content around every single address in the entire country. Something that no one else had done. Something that if they went to do keyword research on a personal address, there was no search volume. But using, I hope customer data, they figured out this was something that was lacking, and they built the content and the architecture around that, and look at the success they've had from that. When you look on it for an address, more than likely, they are going to be in that first position. And these are some of my own personal examples of doing this.

Eli Schwartz:
So, Drops as a company, they are first word app language drops.com's website, but they're an app on the play store and the iTunes store. Where they help you learn new languages in a fun way. They wanted to build out a website where people can do the same thing. They're obviously competing against Google translate and every single other dictionary app and website app in the world. So rather than figure out what are the most important words say in German? What are the most important words in Spanish, and build up the pages for that and create content for that? We focused only on architecture. It was a three-month process to really build out the plan. To scale up the entire website, and you can see there's traffic growth here. And the keywords, the ranking on our keywords that you would not find any search volume for.

Eli Schwartz:
By building out the scaled site, we were able to... Or Google was help, or is able to help us identify where it is that there was no other website, there's ranking in those terms. And examples are, people searching for Hawaiian language. Who even knew there was Hawaiian language that people were curious about. Not sure that very many people speak it, but yet there were no other dictionary sites that did it. So just by having this architecture, we may not be in the top positions for German although those pages exist, we're in those top positions for Hawaiian and Tagalog, which speak in the Philippines. So, it was all focused on the product and all focused on architecture.

Eli Schwartz:
Another example is a company I worked with named fishbowl. So, fishbowl is online reviews, very similar to Glassdoor on consulting agencies. Lots of Q & A. So, the focus there wasn't again on how can we rank on specific topics and specific employers? Is really from a product and engineering standpoint. How do we build out something that can allow Google to discover every piece of content, and identify a potential keyword, and not just rank on something long tail? And you can see this growth here.

Eli Schwartz:
And finally, my favorite example was a partner with a company that they had a Q & A database that somehow was just sitting in emails and in Salesforce. And by exposing this, you can see the number of impressions. They started with a high base. So they don't have the same spike, but the number of impressions they're driving by just pulling out that Q & A, that was hidden. And they're able to rank on some amazing terms that no one else was targeting, because it was so tied to exactly what people were looking for. So now to dive into specific tactics throughout my last couple of minutes. On how to do product led SEO.

Eli Schwartz:
So, first of all, when people focus on SEO, they're usually focusing on non-brand, which are not familiar, or things that do not use the word, your brand name in it. I'm not as focused on this, I just want to generate traffic that converts. But in order to do this, you should really go into your search console, which is my favorite tool, and understand what your brand versus non-brand split is. For many sites, they'll be surprised to know that most of their traffic is branded, a lot more than they thought. When I was working with SurveyMonkey, when I first joined, we had 90% brand by the time I left, is that'll bring that down to 40%. I think for a SAS company with a well-known brand, 60% brand versus non-brand split is okay. For a non well known company, you should be much closer to 20% brand to traffic. We either way, the first thing you want to do really is going and know what your breakdown, a brand versus non-brand and know where your upside is.

Eli Schwartz:
Your brand upside of course will be kept by the size of your brand. Your non brand upside should be infinite. Q & A. So if you are engaging with users, then start building out Q & A. Find out what their questions are asking, this will be long tail, and you'll be surprised at how much traffic you can generate, from essentially what users already doing for you. Years ago, I worked with Quora. It's amazing the traffic they can generate on keywords, and no one would have ever thought that people are looking for. Search suggestions are a absolute great way to find content you should rank on for brand or non brand. So, rather than going to a keyword tool and say, "These are the things I need to rank on because... And build content around because people are searching for it," go into search suggestions, and you need to build this content because actual humans, are looking for right now.

Eli Schwartz:
So, put your brand, make sure that you have a piece of content for every single one of these. Current they'll need every single one these keywords to show up in search suggest. You'll notice there'll be things like; if your brand, your brand sucks, I hate your brand, refund brand, there's no reason you shouldn't be creating content for that. If it's a non-branded topic, same idea, anything here, it's a great thing that you know that there's demand for, and Google is telling you in real time that people are looking for it. Going into your Google search console and looking at your search query, mentioned earlier that a client that's generated most of traffic off a keyword they didn't use on their website, this is the where you're going to find it. So, go in Google search console, you don't have it set up, set it up immediately.

Eli Schwartz:
And this is where you'll learn the kinds of things that Google thinks your website is fitting on. The kinds of topics that they Google slotting you into. I have a... They worked for the client a while ago, Google thought they were an adult website. This is the only way that you'd know, when you see the kinds of keywords are ranking on. So, go in here and look for ideas on things you can expand on, and make sure you're answering all the questions that people are sort of asking your website via search queries.

Eli Schwartz:
And finally, when it comes to links, I much prefer to focus on PR rather than just raw links. So, don't really care about domain authority, I care more about links that people are actually going to click on, and partner with an agency named [inaudible 00:32:54], happy to introduce anybody to them. They have great relationships from a pure standpoint with journalists that understand their SEO, and are able to get content that people are going to read and talk about and likely click through. And when you do that, you'll be amazed at what a couple of links will do for, you rather than needing those hundred domain authority.

Eli Schwartz:
50 links, that no one on websites, no one even knew existed, or the domain authority, 90 websites on content that no one's [inaudible 00:33:22] when to read. Rather than just focus on links, I focus on content people are going to read, and that's the kind of content that will actually help your website to rank. And lastly, I focus on SEO purely as a product. So to that end, I have a product project management spreadsheet, happy to share. Just reach out to me on LinkedIn or email me, and I'll give you this spreadsheet where you can start understanding and prioritizing all of your SEO tasks, based on this, rather than just keyword research and happy to share any tool recommendations.

Eli Schwartz:
So, just to quickly summarize. You can't fool the robots. Google's and AI engine, they're doing things that are put life and death in their hands. So, when it comes to getting some fake links or stuffing in content, they are so much smarter than we can ever be. Next, rather than focusing on the search engine and how to trick the algorithm, focus on the dollars. Don't worry about what keywords search volume is, just worry about what will likely convert. And lastly, think big. If all you're doing is focusing on a piece of content that you think has X amount of searches per month, and then you need to go to another keyword that has X amount of searches per month, that's not what you should do.

Eli Schwartz:
Think about how you can create a million pages of a website. That really answer all the questions that everyone in your entire category is asking, and that's entirely possible. And whenever I have done that, I've been amazed at how it ends up being actually easy to do. And it's so much easier to do that, than just pin all my hopes on ranking a couple of pieces of content. And please be in touch...