#SEOisAEO Digital Marketing Podcast - The most fun you'll ever have learning about digital from the experts

Second episode with Fili. First point - manual penalties are real, but algorithmic penalties do not, just a change in the calculations. An algorithmic updates are not like cars with slashed tyres, they are like navigation systems (or something like that). If you lose rankings after an update, you need to look at your SEO, especially on-page. Onto manual penalties. Link building, doorway pages, structured data penalties (that are more and more frequently) etc. He tells some entertaining (and surprising) stories about some of the reconsideration requests he has read. My best advice is 'don't do a shouty thing'. Fili gives some more helpful advice. I am very impressed by the word egregiousness. Google does not hold grudges. In fact, very much the opposite. Fili explains the procedure for a manual penalty - a Googler builds a case, a bit like in the courts and present that to get a judgement. They apply benefit of the doubt, just like in the courts. But getting rid of a penalty is NOT like parole. A bit of philosophy about why it is logical that everything in SEO is 'it depends'.

Emily has had a varied career. Google aren't playing the game anymore, on-SERP is making SEO harder and harder and featured snippets are having a major negative impact on CTR. Or are they? And what is the type of traffic? I love Emily's Monday morning actions. Google has the route to sale but not the sale and Amazon have the sale, but not the route to sale. Which means they kind of rely on each other. If you are smaller brand and/or a published, fear the featured snippet. I mention the idea that the featured snippet has a separate algorithm based on the Knowledge Graph. Whatever the effect on CTR, at least you get your brand out there and in front of people… plus featured snippets are a very achievable SERP element to grab.

Sitting in CitizenM in Shoreditch, we start talking about pizza parties. Then onto horses - should we run like a blinkered horse, and concentrate on what we are doing and focus on the finish line? Or should we look left and right at our competitors? Nik argues the latter, plus think about context and perhaps we should open our horizons by exchanging with other people. We should now be taking into account the rich elements and perhaps look at the opportunities to rank on those and leapfrog the competition (coming back yet again to the explanation Gary Illyes gave me). That means having a very good look at your competitors' content strategy, but also prioritising the pages you are aiming to rank, especially when you are working on a tight budget. We get carried away with mentions of tools: Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Accuranker, Majestic, Sitebulb. Then get back on track. It turns out that when you have budget, you can perhaps be a blinkered horse. If you have limited resources, you need to pick your battles. SEMrush is great for competitor analysis and perfect for picking your battles.

We start with the Sound of Music, move onto the wonderful, sharing SEO community and supportive companies such as Yoast and SEMrush. Peter is a fan of Yoast, and Yoost. Expert is a misnomer - its more about depth of knowledge and experience… with (perhaps) a little magic. Peter then makes an analogy with art, and we get onto the simplicity of Picasso. In the competition between Yoast and WordpressSEO, Yoast wins hands down for Peter. More functionalities, easier, new (rather exciting) Schema markup. We get onto the treachery of updating plugins, PHP and the Wordpress core. WPengine makes all that easier and safer. Peter has three rules: install Yoast, get onto WPengine and get onto Cloudflare. We get in a bit of philosophy with Sun Tzu and Monty Python. Then back to Google's investment in Wordpress and fun with Gutenberg for the final furlong.

We start with beards - Chris has his in the build stage. Chris tells me not to grow a beard. So that is exactly what I did :) Make your site easily crawlable and use your server logs to optimise the crawl using beautiful spreadsheets. Find the robot holes and fix them using signposting. Intriguingly, Chris uses Screaming Frog for log files and Site Bulb for crawling. He is a fan of equity sculpting, when it it done well, and gets excited about TTFB and sitespeed. Onto music instrument sites (Thomann is dreamland for musicians, according to me) and how complex they are. A bit on Javascript, then we end with the concept of perception of speed and seemingly instantaneous siteloading - in the blink of an eye (340 ms).

Kenichi is a leading SEO blogger in Japan. I put him right on the spot with questions about FAQ and Q&A markup - he sets me straight - Q&A is for user-generated content. For FAQ the debate whether we should have single page for all FAQ or multiple pages. Google is still experimenting, so there is no conclusive answer. Although he makes a great point for putting multiple FAQ on one page. Kenichi goes onto JobPosting, citing Google case studies. Then onto Event markup. And over to which is the #1 search engine in Japan. Clue: not Google. But Google nonetheless. Confused? I was! So much so that I suggest eating hot soup with your finger

Sitting in Google's office in Zurich. We discuss the numerous John Mueller's in Google... and the world. And the problems with the ambiguity inherent in people's names. John cycles to work, eats in the café, answers emails, meets with Google teams, but doesn't play much pool. We then discuss beer, street names and Google offices that used to be a brewery. Then I suggest that SEO is changing at an accelerating rate - John doesn't agree. Then a bit of Javascript SEO and valid HTML. Then the importance of having a system and being consistent - John does agree. He gives a lovely insight into his role at Google, what he is trying to achieve and how he goes about it. A bit about darwinism in search, the increasingly multimedia SERPs, onSERP SEO and GMB. We have a bit of a love-in about Google Maps, and reminisce about how life was different before Google Maps. That leads naturally onto knowledge graphs, relationships, entities and attributes... and review spam. John points out that most of what he says is site-specific, and two thirds of what he is quoted as saying is misquoted or quoted out of context. He is very phlegmatic about that, and says he is moving more towards talking off the record and having one on one conversations.

I start by overdoing his surname in the song. Then he tells me that he did 152 events last year. Then onto featured snippets - and SEMrush's study of 80,000,000 featured snippets (with hints as to how to get them). I link the 20th March update with the big uptick in featured snippets on that date. Fernando gives me the lowdown on how featured snippets are evolving. Fernando sees beauty in featured snippets and tells me about the most beautiful tabular featured snippet he has seen (Australian). Featured snippets are for brand awareness and consideration - embrace them, and you will flourish. Don't ignore preposition keywords - that is how people research the purpose of a product. Apparently the results for queries around iPhone are very, very different accross countries - and that becomes very obvious (and important) for the latter stages of the purchase process. Onto the factors for ranking as the featured snippet. Then 55% of featured snippets have a 'people also ask', as do results with images, carousels and videos - this is the start of predictive search and Google preempting our needs. Loads of countries don't have featured snippets in their language - and that is an amazing opportunity (unless Google gets really good at translation). Then onto the number of words in different languages and the ensuing ambiguity and the need for context… I push things too far (as usual) and get over-theoretical about Polish, Russian, Hebrew… Finally, Fernando tells us that ranking factors will no longer be a factor in our thinking in the near future. Finally, if you can solve the users' question or problem quickly, then you will win the game.

I am very curious about his name, given that he is from Ukraine (I think). He cites Arnold Schwarz-a-thingy. The onto more serious matters - starting with a definition of 'Long tail keyword' (we mostly get the definition wrong, by the way). Long tail does not refer to the number of words in a query, and Tim proves it. Interestingly, some one word queries have very small search volume. Which ones? In short 'if the query is long it doesn't necessarily have low search volume and vice versa'. Then, 90% of content on the web gets no traffic from Google. We are producing a lot of content for no payback. Another misconception is that the page ranking #1 in Google for a given keyword gets most organic traffic. Not true. Tim gives a brilliant explanation. I then ask a brilliant question (Tim's words , not mine :) This encourages him to give an amazing example of content for ranking, clicks and conversions (the dream !) Tim then states that user signals are super influential on ranking, whatever Google says. Finally, we exchange quotes about simplicity in writing... and Tim wins with the best ever quote from a French philosopher.

We discuss Alina's name and how much we both learn from our respective podcasts before getting down to the nitty gritty. Content and strategy for voice search. Voice search saves time and time is our currency. Brilliant. Dan Shure suggests is a fan of providing multiple formats for content so that you have the right format at the right time for users. Text and audio, perhaps video… then I get predictably overexcited by Dan Shure's name. Speakable content, accessibility (where I do a terrible Simon Cox impersonation), images, then APIs (companies will need to develop them to feed these devices). Lastly, we swerve into push notifications, specifically on voice. Warning - I talk too much in this episode. Poor Alina is very polite about it.

I start singing lower than ever before (you can almost hear the hangover in my voice). Anton then tells me 'you could do the song better' (which I could). He also tells me he worked more than he drunk at SEMrushLive. I didn't. He tells me how he got where he is today. Then onto webinars... first off, ask yourself why you are doing it. Just because you can? Or you have a good reason? Jo Pulitzer suggests not trying to sell anything. Building your audience in three stages : people get used to you, then build that to trust (by giving value), then you to loyalty. That loyalty and trust is then extended to your brand. Brilliant. And always remember that people are investing their time in your webinar. At the end, they need to feel that invested their time wisely. We often forget that conversation has a value... and he agrees that if it doesn't, my podcast is dead ;) We then get onto 70% of the quality of the answer is in the question. Then back to webinars. Sexy titles and descriptions are vital - often more important than faces. And SEO is not your principal question for the announcement landing page. Make it for people, and reach out to them. Then I get over-analytical about entities, so-occurrence, relatedness, semantic triples... And Anton brings me back to earth very politely. What is his point of view on volume vs quality? We end with the part about influencer marketing - Anton doesn't know a better tool for influencer marketing. I suggest podcasts. Guess what he replies. Then he quotes President Kennedy at me to make his point. Finally, Anton gives me a lesson in business (which I need). It isn't rocket science (and yet I didn't spot the trick).

A lovely companion to my conversation with Gianluca Fiorelli's International SEO podcast appearance, since this looks at international expansion in digital from a business strategy perspective (beyond the website). She starts by wonderfully singing thank you (turns out Sarah is Welsh and therefore can sing like a bird). She admits that talking is her favourite hobby. Onto the business at hand, she tells me that the six steps: Get Aware, Get Ready, Get Started, Get Strategic, Get Building, Get Performing. Businesses try to run before they can walk (Sarah uses the term 'fools rush in', but that is a song and thus dangerous territory), and too often skip steps. In SEO we are very much working in the 'get performing' stage, but many of our clients have skipped one or more steps and are not truly ready. But when they do faithfully follow the 6 steps, unstoppable international growth 'simply requires nailing one territory before expanding by replicating to the others.

We start off discussing SEOcamp Paris, then move onto the heart of the matter. Bartosz is a super Javascript SEO expert, but doesn't see a long-term future for his skillset. Javascript is too difficult and expensive to process. And Russian Dolls somehow come into it. Google has been struggling with JS for years, but will nail it soon, which is great from a geeky point of view, but bad for Bartosz's business…. maybe in 2 years, maybe in 5, depending on when Google figure out how to digest the cost of Javascript. Because they haven't until now, Javascript SEO is a 'thing' - Which.com has been deindexed because of Javascript, Netflix have sidestepped JS, Hulu were unfindable for a while (and replaced by Torrent). They all need people like Bartosz. I get a bit keen on internal politics at Google (about which I know very very little). Bartosz helps me out by improvising a short piece of theatre in the role of a Google fellow, which is super fun. In the middle of it, he suggests how as a Google fellow) he would put Bing out of business. He then switches sides in his ongoing piece of theatre, and slips into the role of a Bing fellow… and switches sides again by moving over to Amazon. Then back on topic, and there is light at the end of the tunnel - Javascript sites are starting to rank and that means something is happening and the process towards Google handling JS easily has started. He ends by admitting that he has never written Javascript code - but that is actually a positive thing for his role.

This episode is full of half remembered quotes, which makes for some fun listening. In between mis-quoting people (and cartoon cats), we have a lovely discussion about ways of automating SEO tasks. Laziness pays... but Michael got into this not because he is lazy, you understand, he just doesn't like doing unnecessary work :) Specifically keeping store data up-to-date in GMB. A chat about our role as digital marketers in this world. Facts are a marketing tool and SEO is about communicating facts and getting those facts to people in the right way at the right time. Then a bit about email - there wasn't anything like email before email came along, apparently. Who is the Reverend Spooner? And how do we end up talking about Rowan Atkinson? You don't know what you don't know. Even the bit about archiving and storing data is fun. Or maybe you know what you know you do what you do and you can't use it if you don't have it. Or something. And lastly Michael makes me feel better about not using Big Query and Big Data. A lot of fun and informative + interesting (really !).

We start with a discussion about sunglasses, then quickly move onto InOrbit2019 in Slovenia and some great advice from Ian Anderson Gray and Dennis Wu - create a one minute video. now. Going into people's houses to do their paperwork in France (sounds creepy to me, but isn't … and is a 'thing', apparently). Administrative Phobia is a thing too, and ZenCafé is going to help people with that problem. Interestingly, InOrbit2019 and ZenCafé is the (strange) combination that pushed Anders into DIY marketing and inspired him to embrace the empowerment age. Anders brilliantly takes DIY Marketing to the next level live on screen (you'll need to watch the YouTube video). Onto the fear of looking stupid (Anders and I got over that a long time ago :) We get a bit sidetracked with Paul McCartney (and I sing a Beatles song). Anders goes on to sing a Danish love song adapted for LinkedIn (who wouldn't want to hear THAT ?)Andre Then back on track with a video a day to promote on social media. Anders' motto - Do It Yourself, I have no clue I will try. Brilliant. I make the worst Bing/Google joke ever. Another great quote from Anders. The more you try yourself, the better you will be at hiring people to do it for you. Anders answers the question "What is perfect?" (wow !). Then he tells me where innovation from. And that rotten food is the way forward in Digital Marketing. Makes sense to me. Go figure ! Finally, your marketing budget can be 150 €. And Money can't buy you love.