Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Gert, who's going to introduce himself, tell us about his company, his focus, and why we should trust him as an expert in his niche.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you for having me.
So I'm originally from Austria, based in Spain. In Madrid, we're doing SEO for people from all over the world.
I have a technical background. I was doing my fair share of web development and got into all kinds of online marketing, PPC, email marketing, lead generation, especially for E commerce and SaaS brands all the time. And at some point, I decided to shrink the services down and really focused on SEO. Created an SEO agency where we've been providing audits. And especially one of the main things we asked for is ongoing SEO consulting where every week we would tell clients what to do next and analyze the situation, check them where they are, where they stand compared with their competitors, and then tell them, look, here are like the 80, 20 of what you should be focusing on now. And then we do the same thing again. And this is very well received. Clients really struggle now that we have all the possibilities to implement whatever we want in minutes or a couple of hours.
I think the struggle is real that people do not know what to do first. And it's very, very easy, as you know, to get dragged into rabbit. The first rabbit hole. AI opens up and says, hey, this could kind of make sense. Let's just do this for six months.
And this is where we come in, where we just say, okay, you have the possibilities to implement those things. We come in for strategy, for direction, and really also to bounce off a few ideas they got coming up to see what actually makes the most sense for them.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: No, that's that I actually, I want to steal your model and add that to go for it.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: It's a. It's really, really well received. We don't. We have no secrets about it anyway.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Well, it just makes sense because there's every time I talk to every conversation with the. On my unscripted small business podcast, you know, there's all of these unlocks of, you know, oh, now we can do this many more things and we can clear this many more tasks. But you're right that there's, I think Brett Sklar, my previous interviewee, he said, you know, AI is not taking your job, it's taking your tasks, but you can choose. There are so many situations where the cleaning, the. The feeding of a process into Claude Claude Code or ChatGPT, in some ways, you actually make A lot. You end up with more work even though the output is, is increased. But the back end, you know, double checking the workflows, you know, auditing. If you're creating more content, you've got more content to review. If you've automated schema to get added to pages that you're creating, then you're adding, you know, reviewing that, verifying that, you know, and so you might be taking some of those things, but it absolutely is a challenge for small businesses to know, okay, which direction is going to, you know, which path, which type of optimization is going to yield the greatest outcome for the input. Which again it's fundamentals. That's what I did in my SEO audits in 2012 of like, hey, these are the problems and these are going to yield the most output. Do these first.
And it's the difference between an automated tool like you, you can go now to, you know, a dozen sites open. SEO's got a site audit tool.
You can run it on the free credits.
I think even Screaming Frog, you can manage a site audit on their basic tier without paying anything. But just because you get an output of a checklist of things that are possibly problems, that tells you very little in terms of like your specific situation where you're going to get the most benefit for inputting a human into the workflow.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: I think you're raising a lot of good points here. The first thing that comes to mind really is that the same people that are now bragging that they built their own website while they were sipping coffee are the same people that two years ago said of course I'm not building my own software, I have my own website, I have people for this and I have an agency and I have staff for this and I only focus on high, well value tasks in my business.
Those same people are now telling me every day they built their own website and they did their own tool and they made their own marketing. A lot of people are getting dragged in the wrong directions right now. So there's, there's people doing stuff they shouldn't be doing. A CEO of, of an eight figure company shouldn't build his own website, right? And, and a seven figure Shopify site owner shouldn't try to build a Shopify plugin himself.
They probably should have hopefully more high value tasks to focus on. But right now, in my point of view, and I share this with a few people and they get similar responses. I think we are like in an intermediate period right now, right? So where we say hey, from, hey, I can do everything, we haven't yet arrived or we are slowly arriving to hey, everything I've built in the last six months hasn't gotten me more money or more free time or anything. It was just fun.
So let's step back a little bit and bring a few experts in. I think this is right now a little bit of a weird period in our industry also, we see all the content that was created doesn't really work. All the optimizations like you mentioned, the automated tools, et cetera suggested and were then quickly implemented didn't move the needle or even broke something else. So I'm seeing there's a lot of things going in the completely wrong direction. But we are getting people coming here with their hockey stick graphics that suddenly drop because they went just crazy and Vas got crazy targets to hit with ChatGPT creating 20 articles every single day because it seems to work and it works and it works. It reverses. We all know it works about three months now, thanks to Lily Ray. I think she mentioned this lately.
So it's a weird period. And I think just the sheer amount of things you can actually do within minutes or a few hours, expert knowledge is overwhelming for the most people.
And this is where I believe it's going to come to a point where we trust specific experts again and say, hey, I can do all the implementation, or we have somebody who can all do all the implementation. I think hardly an SEO agency is going to make money these days anymore. Going in, updating meta titles, hopefully.
On the other hand, site owners still don't know which page titles to update or which meta descriptions to change and why. And this is where we try to really break it down and say, okay, like you did in your audits, as you mentioned, where do we think we have the highest impact for a, for an effort that we can actually justify?
[00:07:38] Speaker A: Does it seem like as an SEO we're being allowed to plug deeper into businesses, you know, getting access to CRMs to see how their leads are converting, you know, having greater collaboration with email and paid teams, easier access to get, you know, that data from those teams so we can do more with the organic side because we're allowed deeper into the organization.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: I think I can only speak for our case. We always try to get as much data as we can and the reason is because very often we are going to be able to uncover opportunities nobody was thinking about before. I give you an example. I had one of my first clients when I moved to Spain and office, interior design space, etc. And it was just one of the conversations we had where we were able to build a six figure branch just on the site. This wasn't even the main project. It was just his experience and data combined with my experience and data and a weekend of me building a new website that ultimately turned into a six figure per year business. This is just on the side. It's actually paying for our services, which is nice, but it's disconnecting the data from different points. Before you hit record, you mentioned how you combine Search Console with clarity and analytics. For example, we try today to do similar things. Where do we have data points? I'm talking about all the content we get from feedback forms people collect and never look at. We have clients who come with 5,000 feedback forms filled in where clients put like half a page of description. Why they are actually reaching out, what their problem is, what their pain point is, how they talk about it. For us, this is gold and giants are about to delete it because it takes up so much space on their computer.
So we really proactively ask clients, what do you have? How do you collect information? I just got my own use on a HubSpot CRM which a client appreciated that even asked for it because no other agency asked before.
I would just want to know because attribution is so tricky and this is another episode. If we want, we really want to gather all the data we can and then also cross pollinate. So the same way as we might reach out to the person doing the PPC to say, hey, we discovered this keyword. It seems to be converting really well because conversions are going up like crazy since we got this ranking. Maybe try this in ppc we also get their reports and say, hey, these are the main keywords that actually drive conversions in Google Ads. So we can actually track where are we ranking. What, what about AI visibility when it comes to queries that probably are relevant for those keywords? So we get a little bit of a benchmark where we stand and what makes the most sense.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: It seems to me that one of the skills of SEOs has really been in kind of understanding the failure of these different types of data.
For example, Google Search Console has dark queries. You know, It'll give you 100 clicks for your page, but the table, if you can count, might give you as high as 60.
I have one, ironically on an article that's for Google Search Console data isn't accurate. It only tells me three. The queries for three out of those hundred for that three month period. It feels vindictive.
Oh why? They don't want to Give me that data.
But it's a perfect reinforcement of the dark queries case.
But that comes back to a kind of a skill set of understanding the limitations or the augmentations.
How do you make sure that you're keeping that in mind as you do your analysis of tapping into these data pools and bringing them together?
That how you're doing that analysis is cognizant of their limit that data points limitations or that data pool or data sources limitations.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: I think the first point is to acknowledge that whatever data we get is flawed.
Every single platform's data is flawed. Whether it's Google Analytics, what the report is organic and direct and whatever on conversions.
Google search console obviously is flawed as well. Whatever tracking tool might not take into account pop up blockers and tracking blockers and opt outs in the European Union here for example and things like those we have. Then on the CRM side of things, depending on the salesperson they might mark high leads as high quality, low quality, not so quickly to decide or whatever.
So it doesn't matter where you go, it's going to be flawed data. This is number one. Number two for me is to see everything first of all directionally. So this is directionally it seems we are looking. I was just really literally before sending a report, update report. We do this on Mondays to a client and so look, it seems literally in the slack it says, it seems that for this and this topic related queries are rising.
There is no value for the client to to pick one query and say look, this is now ranking number three. They're going to type it in, they're going to see it on number five. There's no value in telling a client look, we see you in AI overviews on top, they're going to type it in. They're not going to see themselves on top.
It's just really, really shaky. So for me it's important to draw the directional conclusions to track the micro progress we are seeing. So if I'm optimizing something I obviously want to see an outcome but it also comes together to the focus. We can't do everything at once. So I also try to not track 500 different keywords at once and 500 different landing pages at once. We usually have a master, we call it a master tracking which might contain at any point like 1020 keywords. We focus on a little bit and see how they evolve if they are ranking for the right keywords. Even if you're working with a page of 1500, with a site of 1500 pages, you're not going to all the time track those 1500 pages and see how they evolve and which one didn't get clicked? This one at least we don't. We try to focus on those that very often either the client or we or both already know are driving the most relevant audience to this website and then say, okay, for each URL, what are really the main queries that drive an informed user in? Either we know it from Google Ads or we know it based on their history.
And with the narrower the focus, I think the better you can use the data because then you can start cross connecting data from different data points. Okay, it's actually Semrush and Ahrefs actually. Do they agree very often they might not.
You can compare Google Search Console. It might draw some conclusions from there. You can say Google Analytics. What else do they have about this page that's not declared as organic, but might actually be organic? Maybe we can look into the direct channel there. We can look into specific filters. We can break it down by the actual target country where we think our main most important target audience comes from. And then we also have an internal metric that we call high intent. And high intent is very simply defined as a soft conversion, if you want where that indicates people landed on pages I expect them to land on or to come to before they convert.
This could be a service page. If I'm an online course, this is the course page. If I'm a SaaS product, this is the pricing and features page, et cetera. I want ultimately, in order to make more money, I need to get more people across all channels to those key pages. And once I track how many people actually landed on those pages, I have an interesting lead metric that then lets me work backwards and say, okay, where do those people come into my website that end up coming to a service page, that end up coming to a course page, that end up getting into that Shopify checkout process.
And then again, the focus is narrow. I think one of the main things we do is trying to narrow the focus.
I think this is probably summing up why we are getting paid. Because clients come in and say, hey, I've got 1600 articles I wrote over the last 15 years. Do something with it. There must be some value.
And then we say, okay, what do you actually want to achieve? They tell us, and then it's okay, now we are down to 150 articles. What is your client like? They explain us. Now we are down to 13 articles from 1600. And then it's like, what has been working in Google Ads and now we are down to five. Let's really analyze those five. Let's go to competitors, let's see what's working for them, what can we learn from them, how can we go deeper on those five topics, angles, aspects, what can we do in terms of link building in order to strengthen those and then see what we are actually going to do with the other. What is this 1595 articles?
[00:17:10] Speaker A: I think you might have an insight on this. I came across a case where there was a search query and it has a search volume of 10 searches per month. But then I was looking at Google Search Console with Claude and that same query on my site had 1100 impressions and I was wondering if you had maybe an insight on.
You know where I'm getting some of those numbers turned around because that's from open SEO which pulls from data for SEO which uses Google AdWords API and doesn't use extra data like Ahrefs. They use an extra layer of data for search volume numbers to increase or decrease them. But I'm wondering am I missing something there or. Because if, If I'm getting 1100 impressions in the same time period of the month and the search volume number for us for that keyword is only 10, I'm wondering where I'm not seeing that that number could be higher in search console.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: What I like to do.
First of all, I think search volume has really very little value as a metric on its own. And I have strong arguments with clients that come and tell me that some of the keywords I want to go for are not worthwhile because they have a 10 or 100 in search volume and it's not going to pay off because everybody wants to do simple math and simple math means if this is hundred search volume and I'm getting to number one and I'm getting what is it right now? I don't know with AI overview 10%, 8% of clicks, 20%? I think not anymore.
Yeah, let's say 15% right. I get to number one, I get 15% of the hundred search volume, I get 15 clicks and I have a 10% conversion rate and I have my average lifetime value. This is how I can justify to have my SEO agency go for this keyword.
And simple math brings marketing into the wrong corner and I think we are seeing this now with 68% I think was the latest statistic Rand Fishkin put out with zero click marketing.
68% of clicks probably now already more 68% of clicks are searches in Google do not lead to a Click to a website.
So out of 100 people doing a search, 68 are not going to click through to the website.
Thinking that you still can calculate an ROI based on a traffic metric or a search volume metric, I think is insane.
So for me personally, my opinion, happy to discuss this with anybody who wants to do this.
In my opinion, search volume has very little value. Now add AI to this.
Maybe the content you build around this 10 searches per month keyword is so relevant and brings up so many case studies and use cases, cases and connects your brand to such a great terminology that you get massive mentions in ChatGPT. You're still not going to be able to track it because it's not going to lead to a click to your website. But whenever somebody asks about this topic, it's your brand being mentioned and not only mentioned, even recommended. I did a test with the top CRMs and Salesforce was mentioned, but actually negatively. So they said whatever you do, don't go with Salesforce because it's absolutely not a fit here.
So you want to really.
I think the main challenge we have right now is not to figure out whether this is AI SEO, AEO or TEO or whatever. The main challenge we have right now is to explain to C level executives that the ROI on SEO is not measurable on its own.
Unless you make 150 assumptions that are all flawed on its own, coming with data from platforms that are all flawed on their own and you accept this is the source of truth. What do you think?
[00:21:31] Speaker A: Hold on, give me a second. Because that's a deep challenge to 20 years of SEO and you know, literally making, you know, SE arcade before I turned it into my in my agency site. It's still actually in there. I still have a keyword cluster tool that, you know, looks at search volume and then multiplies conversion rate CTR table and then builds buckets. But I did always struggle when I was creating those CTR tables of, you know, accurate representation. The concept was, you know, hey, let's see if the search volume numbers are accurate enough and the conversion rate numbers and then the lead to say, you know, the lead close rate and then the end revenue and the lifetime value, you know, let's see if there's anything there. And just kind of look at as as more be business intelligence metrics of like, okay, where is the search volume comparatively? Not using the numbers as like absolutes, but more notionally or grouping or directionally. Because if, if search volume numbers are flawed, then they're all flawed same way. So you can do some comparative information still. But I, I gotta think through your challenge because you're, you bring up some solid points that may rock the boat a bit here of, you know, thinking of search volume first. You know, I do have to admit my, my entire methodology has flipped and I only do keyword research as a secondary process. I prefer to actually get somebody on an interview and then have them talk and extract what they talked about as the first cut for any keyword research process I do or creating new content. So I think, I think you're, you're directionally right. I'm going probably declare victory. And for you, and in the social
[00:23:45] Speaker B: post afterwards, I think with attribution, there is no victory.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: You will win for losing.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: I think the problem really is that the decision makers want it to be really, really easy. That's my experience.
So I just have a client right now. They got the budget, they work with me directly. We look at this, et cetera. And the reason why they got the budget is because they did this math.
But they had to pick keywords and they told me like that because I told them that keywords were too broad for their niche.
The keywords they want to go after.
And they said, yeah, they had to pick those keywords because they had more volume, which actually made the SEO project work.
Can we take a moment to think about this? Right, we go for keywords in SEO that we wouldn't go for just in order to make sure the spreadsheet shows a positive expected roi, which is not going to happen after six months because the keywords are useless.
And this is where I really like the high intent metric because it just tells me how many people are now getting to your key pages.
And let's track this over time and let's see, hey, is this actually going up? Am I actually landing more people across all channels? Because SEO, it doesn't work in isolation and we get a lot of branded traffic we happily attribute to SEO and vice versa.
How can we actually all work together to get more people to the key pages that are going to help people make a decision.
And this is factoring AI, this is going to factor in all kinds of pages. This is a discussion with email marketing, where the email marketing agency gets an information from us about a topic that's working really well. They might want to try and we're just all working together and ultimately we are going to be a happy team around the company as long as more people come to key pages.
But I think just going for the traffic first and then those keywords even if the volume, imagine the volume works, right? Imagine the volume is perfect. You get a volume and this is 10 is always 10 and this 100 is always 100, which is not the case, as you know.
Nobody's telling you that people coming with this particular keyword when it ranks number one and you get this volume, are actually the ones that convert, let alone have the highest lifetime value.
We're going to never know. We're going to never know unless you run. What I had clients do sometimes and what I still think is one of the best methods I have come out to just show them when I think they are wrong is to run Google Ads for a few weeks. And I said, pick the three keywords that you think are going to make or break your business and run ads for them over three weeks. And then you come back and then we start the SEO project and then a lot of them come back and say, yeah, interesting. We didn't get a single conversion from so many people who actually searched for this exact keyword in a space of three weeks, so they even had time to decide.
Or we say, hey, the 2500 search volume actually is 120 and the click through rate we expect not even on top with an ad is decent enough to make this work.
So I much prefer, I think it's a great point you raised the search volume versus Google Search Console. We know now that search console is heavily impacted by bots.
Lots of bots produce impressions.
I used to use impressions all the time a few months ago. Still I talked about impressions and look, we are more visible, et cetera, all crap because we know bots are creating impressions and Google doesn't care to filter them. Apparently we even see now that AI mode queries also show up in Google Search Console. So somebody asking a follow up question is going to produce another query which is also good information to have. It's all for me, directional.
It's all directional. But I much prefer your approach to start in Google Search Console and start with an interview. We do interviews as well. Start with an interview, extract the vocabulary, look at forms. How do actual clients talk about it, their clients talk about it, versus the brand we work with because there might be differences as well. We do audience researches with SparkToro, for example, we really try to get to know the industry as much as possible and then sometimes we try to match, hey, directionally, what would be the search volume here? What would be the expected traffic from ahrefs? We use ahrefs here. What would Ahrefs say is the expected traffic of Ranking number one for this keyword and all the variations, which seems to be a little bit of a more suitable metric for me.
Also flawed.
And then try to see where does it make the most sense. If we have limited time this week to work on something, where do we think can we have the biggest lever to get people to the key pages of this website?
[00:28:54] Speaker A: You're, you're right on. And I mentioned it. You brought up our conversation before this. I was using, you know, Microsoft Clarity to cross reference Google Analytics. Google Analytics had a hundred clicks or fifty clicks in or a hundred clicks total and fifty clicks fell into direct. Clarity was able to clarify that those were bot click.
And so the thinking about, oh, hey, you know, some of my organic fell into direct. No, those were bots. But maybe some of those bots have, you know, it's hard to tell now what type of bots, you know, is this a bot that's running around with a wallet?
You know, if you've got a Shopify site that's now plausible, that's possible. There's actually now bots that are given wallets. They need to go and find inventory and if they find the right handshake opportunity and then that's money.
But there's also, you're right, if they're surfacing these fan out queries from different LLM tools, then that's as much poisoning the pool as we poisoned our own pool for our ranking tools. Remember when we Google made the switch and they removed the ability to look at 100 rankings per page. It was fun. Oh gosh. Oh my goodness.
All of my impressions have dropped by 50%.
Oh no.
Half of the Internet is gone and not look. Oh wait, that means every search volume that we've seen in Google Analytics, that's a ton of scraping, especially for more money keywords. And the more money that those keywords have, the more scraped they are, the higher the search volume. So you know, there's that perverse incentive from Google not to change that price point, not to change that number because they're able to, you know, sell more ads on that higher search volume.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: I think there's, it's just an impossible task.
It's an impossible task because there are too many moving parts.
And either you accept that this is extremely flawed, whatever, but it still looks nice on a spreadsheet and there's a green number at the bottom, so let's go for it, or you accept that marketing is an important part of a business and needs to be done in a sustainable way.
So what I like to do. And I just published an article that's going to be published on search engine and about it as well.
The thought experiment maybe like it. Imagine you do SEO, but search engines don't exist.
You have to do SEO, but search engines don't exist.
Right? So what else can you do?
What else can you do in order to get your website in front of the right audience?
And this is where I created a concept I call the Search Everywhere Optimization Pyramid.
And it's just a framework. It's also on Search engine Land and on my blog as well, where I just say, hey, where could we actually start?
And we usually start with an audience. Platform research.
So meaning who is my audience and where do they hang out if I want to get in front of them? Marketing is all getting in front of the audience and talking about your product, your service, your brand, where are they and what are they talking about? How can I get in front of them?
And the next layer, then I want to know whenever they talk about something where I think I can actually contribute something. So I have an alert that search everywhere optimization. And when I have a moment, I go through the alerts and see, can I maybe contribute to those conversations something?
And the next one I see, hey, to get in front of my audience, I want to work with other people's audiences who actually has my audience. This is very often online magazine. Can I contribute to those online magazines?
And then I take the next step and say, okay, before I actually start producing content, because I still haven't produced a single blog post here. If I actually produce my own content, how do I guarantee that people see it if search engines don't exist?
So I'm going to look for where they are. I'm going to see what they want to talk about, to talk about something they're interested in. I'm going to try to make sure they see it.
Ads, direct collaborations, influencer marketing, whatever it is, I'm going to do all those things to establish a distribution process. And then I actually start creating my content. Because now I know what to write about, how to make sure it reaches the audience, how to make sure I drive it forward by participating in conversations and dropping an article or mentioning, hey, I just wrote an article about this, can I share it?
This is how I can actually have a step into industry publications and actually talk about the same topic there as well.
And I have a network to distribute it. So whatever article I plug in is going to go through the conveyor belt and it's going to be repurposed on social Ads, email marketing partners, collaborators, podcasts and so on.
And now I can whatever content I create doesn't need a search engine for a start.
The funny thing is that if you do it this way, now bring search engines back. You have done exactly what you need to do in 2026 in order to rank well because you have all those people talk about it. You're in the right places, your brand is connected to the right concepts and topics. You are an authority mentioned on industry publications.
Whatever you put out is placed everywhere and repurposed everywhere and structured everywhere. And people are going to search for your brand because you are just present in this space.
But we are so narrowly focused on this is search and this is Google. And do they now have this search feature? Do they not have the search feature now? I have to discount 20 clicks because they moved up. The people also asked, but they should actually add five because my title is much better and has a higher click through rate.
We forget the bigger picture. SEO. This is not all about SEO. Nobody cares about SEO.
I haven't had a single client stay with me because the SEO was so good.
I heard an example today which I found really, really interesting. Nobody sells a trip to Hawaii by telling you how good the plane is and how easy the check in is and how nice the flight attendants are and how great your suitcase is suited for this trip.
But this is what we do. We say, hey, we are the, you should go to Hawaii because we have the best plane.
But if we take a step back and accept this SEOs that we are just one wheel, an important one, I think, I want to think, but we are one wheel in this machine that everybody is trying to get this brand to Hawaii.
And if we do our job well and we work well with the other parts, the client is actually going to get to Hawaii. But this takes us to, I think be brave enough to take a step back and say I'm going to do my SEO thing here and nobody really needs to know all those boring details. It only fascinate us.
But we acknowledge that we are part of this. And part of this means that the tiny numbers I'm seeing here might not be the absolute truth, but might be enough for me to get a directional insight to know where to drive this. So we all go to Hawaii.
[00:36:54] Speaker A: It seems like both a good way to avoid AI slob, you know, looking to create the distribution network, doing the research, doing the off page, building an authority hub, and also doing the things that are, you know, feeding the bots in the right way, you know, ChatGPT is a terrible customer support representative out of the box until you train them. As Matt Brooks of SEO Tarek says, you gotta train them.
So I like that, I like that worldview and that metric. Like, I can confess that, you know, there were clients in 2000, from 2010 to 2015 that I never spoke to.
Like I was a the SEO on the project and there was a customer support representative who talked to the person at the agency and the agency connected with the client, and that person with the client was actually a sub agent within that same company to the actual director of marketing. So there's three steps away. I never spoke to them and yet I did SEO for them. You know, largely looking in, you know, I think it was Ahrefs at the Semrush or Ahrefs finding keywords, writing articles with zero input directly from them. And, you know, those days are gone. And you know what? I think if we embrace it, if we step out of our, you know, narrow, give me a tool to solve this problem type of view, I think we might end up with a better organic, you know, search everywhere optimization.
You know, it's, we don't need to go to geo, just change search engine optimization to search everywhere optimization. And I think we hit it on the nose.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: I would think so too. I was always very involved in every project and still am.
It is true we have fewer clients now and with more involvement. We had many more clients in the past and we also have our team with strategists on the project as well. But I always like to do the strategy part. I definitely think what changed is we need to open up a lot more, get all the data we need, given that everything is, I would say, directional. Anyway, the more we gather, the more we are going to identify patterns and say, hey, directionally in Google Analytics, this is what should happen directionally. Based on my keyword research, this is actually confirmed directionally. 500 of the last 2000 forms that we have filled in mentioned the same topic in different ways. Let's actually create an article about it.
And this is, I think the more we do those connections, which is why I really like what you mentioned initially, where the more we connect the data points, the clearer the picture is. What I try to explain clients is that we always play the join the dots game. So my kids are older now, they used to play this and you connect dot number one, dot number two, dot number three, and suddenly it's a cat and everybody's happy.
The problem, what I learned in SEO a few years back actually because it was really hard to understand how this all played together.
If there are not enough points on the map, the cat doesn't have a tail or only has two legs.
Not recognizable as a cat. Right?
[00:40:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:28] Speaker B: You put too many points on a map, you can't join them anymore. It's too complex. I had a client where we had to ask them to remove 80% of their. Of their content because it was unrelated. There were too many points. There was no way you could connect the. Google could connect the right dots to actually understand the picture. We removed 80% that they started ranking for their core keywords again.
Three months ago we did the exact same thing with a consultant.
20 years of content build up and we're like, let's remove at least half of it. And now suddenly she's coming up for the top keywords on page one again. Because Google says finally, finally I can connect the dots I need. And I understand this is actually a car this time.
And the more. And the way we try to think about it is how can I connect the dots between my brand, my product or service, my target client, my ICP or Persona or whatever you want to call it, and their challenges. And if I can connect all those dots and I do this consistently on the web, on all platforms that matter and on my website, it usually gets more people to the key pages on my website to then convert.
[00:41:42] Speaker A: Absolutely love it. Give a final shout out.
This is if I'm going to add any resources you mentioned to the show Notes for the show. It'll be up on unscripted SEO.com for anybody that wants to dig in.
Full length transcript. It's all going to be there. I know we got pretty heady with and mentioned a lot of different things. I'll try to get links on all of the resources that we mentioned, but go and give a shout out for your agency. Let people know if there's a social channel where they can connect with you. I think you said you had an article going up on Search Engine Land or Search Engine Journal.
I'll make sure to get those linked, but go ahead and tell the folks how they can connect with you.
[00:42:23] Speaker B: The best would be to head over to getmailak.com T E-R-T M E-L-A-K.com or find me with my name on social media. Mostly I spend time on LinkedIn and Instagram these days, but any tenant should work to send me a DM and I'm happy to chat.
[00:42:42] Speaker A: Thanks so much for stopping by.
[00:42:45] Speaker B: Thank you so much Jeremy.
