Ep 164: Why Deleting Content Can Win You More Traffic with SEO Lily Ray

Understanding SEO and its components can be overwhelming especially when you are new to content websites.

In this exciting episode, we will unravel the SEO mysteries with Lily Ray so you can win more traffic for your online business!

Lily Ray is the Sr. Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research at Amsive Digital, where she provides strategic leadership for the agency’s SEO client programs. Lily began her SEO career in 2010 in a fast-paced start-up environment and moved quickly into the agency world, where she helped grow and establish an award-winning SEO department that delivered high-impact work for a fast-growing list of notable clients, including Fortune 500 companies.

We have discussed what SEO due diligence you should do before buying a website. How to identify growth opportunities before buying a website, like keywords to rank for and other factors? And how to best structure your site to gain more traffic?

We also dive into why you should work towards having less content on your site and removing content over time, why create content that doesn’t just get traffic but builds your brand and how to do that, and how to get links instead of hunting them down or buying them.

Lastly, Lily will share what are the most important things you should have for your site, which are basic but critical and where Google is headed, and what we can do to take advantage.

If SEO is not your cup of tea, this is a perfect opportunity to learn more about it. Catch this episode now by clicking the ‘play’ button!

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Episode Highlights

03:17 SEO due diligence

09:57 Easy wins of “On-Page SEO”

16:14 Quality vs Quantity

18:30 80/20 of off-page

20:54 Be good to Google!

24:00 Do great things and you will get rewarded

27:02 Tech SEO 

29:10 Where is Google heading?

Courses & Training

Courses & Training

Key Takeaways

➥ Choosing the right name for a business is crucial. From an SEO perspective, it’s essential to consider if the business name can help with ranking. For instance, including relevant keywords in the business name, such as “CPA” for a CPA firm, can boost visibility in Google Maps. This strategy can help match the exact phrasing that people use when searching and increase visibility.

When it comes to on-page SEO, website architecture and page creation are the most important factors. Google evaluates the authority and relevance of a website on a domain level, while individual pages rank on Google. Therefore, it’s crucial to have optimized pages that rank well for the services, products, or topics you want to target. 

➥ When conducting keyword research, it’s essential to analyze competitors’ pages that are ranking for the same term and ensure that your pages have similar attributes to rank higher.

Off-page SEO is more critical for small and new businesses. Larger, established brands tend to get links organically, or they have a separate PR team to acquire links. Small businesses need to invest time and energy into link building, but it’s essential to do it correctly to minimize risks. While opinions on the matter vary within the SEO community, it’s crucial to follow Google’s guidelines, especially as a new business or domain. 

About The Guest

Lily Ray is the Sr. Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research at Amsive Digital, where she provides strategic leadership for the agency’s SEO client programs. Born into a family of software engineers, web developers, and technical writers, Lily brings a strong technical background, performance-driven habits, and forward-thinking creativity to all programs she oversees. Lily began her SEO career in 2010 in a fast-paced start-up environment and moved quickly into the agency world, where she helped grow and establish an award-winning SEO department that delivered high-impact work for a fast-growing list of notable clients, including Fortune 500 companies. Lily has worked across a variety of verticals with a focus on retail, e-commerce, B2B, and CPG sites. She loves diving into algorithm updates, assessing quality issues, and solving technical SEO mysteries.

Connect with Lily Ray

Transcription:

Jaryd Krause (0:00)

Did you know that you can get more traffic by deleting content on your website through a well-structured approach? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast and today I'm speaking with Lily Ray, who is the Senior Director, SEO and Head of Organic Research at Amsive Digital, where she provides strategic leadership for agencies and SEO client programs.

Now she has been born into a family of software engineers, web developers, and technical writers where Lily has been able to bring a strong technical background and performance driven habits and forward thinking and creativity to all of the programmes that she's overseen. Now, Lily began her SEO career in 2010. So, 12 years ago, in a very fast paced sort of startup environment, and then moved quickly into the agency world where she was able to help grow and establish an award-winning SEO department that delivered the high impact work for a fast-growing list of notable clients including 500 companies. Now Lily has worked across a variety of different verticals with a focus on retail, it could be B2B and CPG sites.

So, she loves diving into algorithm updates, assessing quality issues and solving these tech SEO mysteries. Now in this podcast, Lily and I talk about what SEO you can do during due diligence before you actually buy a website? We will talk about how to identify different growth strategies before you buy a website, like keywords you can rank for and other factors, as well.

We'll talk about on page SEO, we talked about the 80-20 of it and how to structure your sites and your content best way possible was talking about why you should work towards having less content on your site like deleting content over time and how they can equal more traffic, which is wild and crazy to think about. So, we'll dive into that. We'll talk about why you should create content that just doesn't, you know, get traffic to your site. And think only thinking about more traffic, we should be creating content that builds your brand. And we talk about how you can do that as well, which is really good for SEO, then we move into the 80-20 of off page SEO, and how to get links instead of hunting them down or buying them.

So how to get organic links. We also talk about you know, tech SEO, the 80-20 of tech SEO and some of the most important things you should have for your site, which are basic but critical. And then finally we finish off and we talk about where is Google headed, which is a big discussion in itself. And we talk about some of the things that Lily can see where Google is heading. And what we can do to take advantage of. Now this is such a valuable episode, you guys are absolutely going to love it!

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Lily, thank you so much for coming on.

Lily Ray (3:18)

Thanks for having me.

Jaryd Krause (3:19)

Looking forward to this chat. Like I said before we hit the record buttons, it's good to get somebody on with a depth of SEO knowledge and goal. And so, I'm looking forward to where we go in some of the side tangents. Firstly, though, people listening they're like, Alright, I'm going to buy a business and I'm going to grow a business.

The first step is knowing how to do SEO due diligence when you do buy a business and not getting taken advantage of or caught out by not knowing what to look for? what would be some of the top things that you would look for when you're looking to buy a business in terms of SEO due diligence?

Lily Ray (3:52)

Well, the naming of the business is important. From an SEO standpoint, we always like to think about the potential of a business name to rank, if you have the opportunity to think about keywords in the business name, for example, like if you're a local business that can go a really long way to help you rank better in Google Maps. So, if your CPA like can you include CPA in the name of the business or anything that kind of matches how people search.

So, like, I've worked with a tattoo shop here in New York that was able to add tattoo NYC to the end of the name, and that went a really long way, both in terms of Google Maps as well as the domain name. When people type tattoo NYC like they show up a lot more because of that kind of exact match phrasing. So that's one thing to think about.

In terms of the domain itself, you want to do some due diligence to see if there's been any problems on the SEO side. So, you can use tools like Sistrix, for example, or Semrush. And they can show you kind of a historical look back at SEO performance and If you see that the site fell off a cliff in terms of traffic in the past, you might want to see if you can learn a little bit more about that it might have been affected by an algorithm update or worse is that it might have received what's called a manual action on Google.

So that's like a penalty on Google, which means the site might have some history of problems with breaking the guidelines on Google. So, it's very important to consider those things. Because if the penalties or manual actions weren't resolved properly, that can continue to affect the domain going forward.

Jaryd Krause (5:32)

Yeah, I've seen this happen with a bunch of websites that people have been looking and sending to me recently, what they do is that, my members, they will fill in their due diligence, and we review them before they even make an offer. And we see that like, some people are really hungry, oh it's been affected by this up this manual action or this update a year or two ago, and the person who owns a business has been trying to continue to grow the business unsuccessfully.

So, in the buyer’s mind, who's a newbie is like, I want to buy this because it's a cheap deal, because it's gone backwards. But you know, that was two years ago, it should be fine, there's still that you still don't know if that's a result. So how would we find that out? Would we look into, say, Google Search Console, give viewers access to that when doing due diligence? Would we look into some other things to identify this?

Lily Ray (6:20)

Yeah, that information comes directly from Google Search Console. So, you would need to be able to access search console to see, what's called a reconsideration request has been done properly. So that's the way that you try to get back in Google's good graces and kind of own up to the problem and explain how you're going to change course, and all the things you've done to, reconcile with the things that they took issue with in the first place that needs to be approved by Google.

So, in the messages portion of Search Console, it'll say like the reconsideration request has been approved, like all of that needs to be cleaned up before he starts working on the site. Because some sites, he'll set up Search Console. And you'll see why there's been a manual action sitting here for years unaddressed. And it's very hard to compete in the SEO space. If that's the case, some manual actions are more egregious than others. But generally speaking, you really want to work with a clean slate.

So, like, if you're buying a domain that has history, like it should be something that is on brand, like if it's received links, and traffic and everything in the past, those should be ideally, links and traffic that makes sense for what you'll be using the domain for going forward.

Jaryd Krause (7:29)

I want to switch gears a bit to what you said earlier about somebody that you know, who put a keyword at the end of their domain. So, did they buy, did they do this in terms of row strategy to see before they buy the business? Can they buy this another domain with the same start of the domain with an add on keyword at the end?

And if so, do you feel it's worth people looking at keywords that haven't been targeted that that site could get ranked for prior to purchasing the business to get more Google traffic? what you're mentioning before? Or am I off the mark completely?

Lily Ray (8:05)

No, that's right. So, this person was lucky in the sense that they knew me, and were talking to me in the process of starting the business. So, I encouraged them to take the fun, interesting brand name that they came up with and append tattoo NYC to both the business name and to the domain name. And that luckily, that domain name was available, it had no history or anything.

So as much as you can do that, without sacrificing your name, the name of the business sounding really nice and pretty, or whatever. You know, at least for the domain, like there's some debate in the SEO community about how much having keywords in the domain is still a ranking factor having what's called an exact match domain as a ranking factor. But my opinion that it definitely helps. Maybe it's not the strongest factor, but like, there's so many different things.

So, Google My Business, again, like the name of the business is such a big factor for ranking there. So as much as you can, like, include the keyword of what your business does in the business name, or the domain name, and or the domain name. I think that's if you can plan for that it will have a lot of value going forward.

Jaryd Krause (9:16)

Gotcha. Yeah, our domain is buyingonlinebusinesses.com. And I struggled, there was so many available at the time. And I'm lucky because that's a really good keyword. But to I'm not going to chalk that up to SEO experience because I had none of that when I started.

Lily Ray (9:36)

It's a good domain for sure.

Jaryd Krause (9:40)

So I want to shift gears to tech SEO. This is one somebody's bought a site check. Yes, tech SEO can be very daunting for somebody that has that has no idea about SEO. I guess most people start with on page SEO, bit of sort of off page SEO and then they move into tech SEO, maybe we start with on page SEO, what would you say some of the best like easy wins of on page SEO, maybe just two or three?

Lily Ray (10:08)

The most important thing to consider with on page SEO is really the website architecture and the pages that you create. So, Google works in a couple of different ways. For one, it has certain attributes of the site that it’s kind of evaluates on the domain level. So, things like authoritativeness, or things like relevance, like what is the history of the site, I don't want to say domain authority, because it's not what I mean. But like, Google has these kinds of broad notions of what a domain is about.

So that's calculated on the on the domain level, but on the page level, is what ranks on Google. So, if you don't have the best page on your site, to rank for the different services that you offer products that you sell, topics that you want to rank for, you already are not. You're not going to be able to succeed. So, when you do keyword research, you have to do like mapping to say, we know that we want to rank for this term, we know that the other people that are ranking for this term tend to have pages that do XYZ.

So, we need to have those types of pages as well. And it's a really granular exercise, because sometimes you might not know, should these two keywords be on the same page? Should these two keywords have different pages? But that exercise is the most fundamental, important part of SEO, honestly. So, beyond that, it's just how do we optimize these pages from a content quality perspective? And from an intent perspective? So, like, when the user searches for something?

How much does the content on our page meet their needs? That's half the battle. So new businesses might not realize like, oh, we need to have different pages for all these different things. But honestly, I would just boil on page down to that process structuring.

Jaryd Krause (11:48)

That's a great call. It's one of the most important things. So, for somebody that's looking at buying a site, they should look at the competitors, right, and see how they structured their back. Like, if we're talking about content sites, how have they structured their categories? Maybe subcategories, and then what keywords go into each one of those buckets? am I on the right track with that?

Lily Ray (12:15)

Yeah, so the thing about it is like, first of all, you should always kind of pay attention to top performers on Google, not necessarily just business competitors, because business competitors might not succeed very much with SEO. And so, I wouldn't emulate their strategy necessarily, unless it's doing very well. So, start with top ranking, but also a business competitor. Because sometimes, you might compete with Wikipedia, for example, you're not going to do what Wikipedia does, they have a very specific purpose, that's probably not going to be the purpose of your business.

So, you don't want to just say like, I want to copy Wikipedia for my strategy, like you want to copy. If you're going to copy anybody, that people that are business competitors that are doing SEO well, so I would kind of find out who those people are. And then copying 100% is not always the best approach, because you also want to have, you know, a distinct content strategy. And maybe you found some other subcategories that you can talk about that they don't talk about.

But from an architectural perspective, I would pay attention to how your SEO slash business competitors are setting up their sites, and just see like, oh, there's this whole other vertical that they talked about that we didn't even think about that might also add value for our site.

Jaryd Krause (13:21)

Great. And would you say there's too many categories, and too many keywords within each category or subcategory?

Lily Ray (13:31)

It depends. So, I would just start with what is necessary. Don't start with too many, like start with a small set that are core to your business. And then if you start to see that there's relevant subcategories, or what we call like, child categories, you can build those according to search demand, like oh, there's a lot of people that are searching for this other thing, we're going to make a category, but it's not the best approach to start with too many different things and spread yourself too thin. Really focus on the areas where these topics drive actual value to your business, not just traffic.

So, like, another mistake that people make is they say, oh, like we had an insurance client once who, you know, their target audiences, families, because they offer these different types of insurance for homeowners or whatever. So, writing about having a picnic in the park is I guess, to them seemed relevant because families have picnics in the park and families need insurance. So, like maybe they'll read the article and need insurance like it doesn't work.

There's too much of that in the SEO space to like, try to stick to content where you actually demonstrate expertise. And then if you continue to build content beyond that, you can go a little bit more upper funnel and talk about more like informational topics, but don't spread yourself too thin.

Jaryd Krause (14:48)

That's excellent. Because I don't think people think enough about the intent of the keyword and the intent of somebody going to the view that or read that or consume that content. Yeah, nobody wants to read about, how you can have a picnic in the park and be productive or know how to easily clean up your picnic in the park with your family and they get sold insurance.

Lily Ray (15:13)

It's just doesn't. And beyond that, like Google is not going to appreciate that an insurance company has this content on their site. Like it doesn't do anything for anybody, it actually just seems like a waste of space on the site. And like, you have to remember that Google is limited in its resources and its ability to crawl sites. It has what's literally called a crawl budget.

So, like, if it's spending a lot of time crawling content on an insurance site, that's about having a picnic in the park, it's gonna start to say like, the site is not consistent, it's not providing relevant information. It's not an expert in picnic. So, like, why are we talking about that? So, it's like, you really have to kind of drill down into your core areas of what we call at expertise, authority and trust and stick to those areas, before trying to rank for everything out there. Because it's a common law.

Jaryd Krause (16:01)

I love that creating content that is in line with always going to help build your EIT. And that comes back to the question like you said, You people can have a lot of fluff on their site, what's your take on quality versus quantity? Because there's, there are people out there that with a blog, that's dislike, let's get five posts up on the site a week, and cover as many topics as we can. What does that do for a site a blog?

Lily Ray (16:32)

Good question. I have a lot of experience in history with this question, because I've been in the SEO space for 12 years, and I've been working primarily in agencies, and I've worked on a lot of different clients that have a lot of different, like cadences for creating content. And I would say, five to seven years ago, it was all about how much can you produce, because it was easier to rank for a lot of different topics. So, companies were obsessed with traffic, and they were obsessed with creating as much content as possible.

And that's where we got like, content farms, and you get people outsourcing content, and freelancers. And there's this huge economy of people producing medium to low quality content, just because it used to rank better on Google, there was less competition, less scrutiny, all these things that's changed so much in recent years. And with the rise of EIT, expertise, authority and trust, it's becoming so difficult add to that millions and trillions of more pages to compete against on Google. Google's getting stricter, with not only what it ranks, but what it indexes.

So, a lot of this content doesn't even get indexed on Google. So, I'm of the opinion now, because I've helped so many sites with algorithm update problems. A lot of these sites have way too much content that's not valuable. And you can actually see a lot of benefit from eliminating that content. So, whether it's redirecting it to better pages, getting rid of even just like for flooring, getting rid of some content that doesn't meet the mark anymore, redirecting it to other properties that they own. But like, slowly trimming down what you have on your site, and just focusing on like, conversion driving pages as much as possible, that's going to help you in the long run.

Jaryd Krause (18:12)

Amazing. I like that strategy in terms of it's not really just a growth strategy. But why I like it isn't a direct strategy as well. Yeah. And that's the best, I think that's the best growth strategy. And it's so cool. So that's awesome. That's a lot of on page stuff. So what would you say is the 80-20 of off page?

Lily Ray (18:34)

Yeah, I mean, off page is kind of more important when you are a new business up and coming business, small business, like, I work on a lot of sites and my team work on a lot of sites that are pretty big names, where we don't invest as much time and energy into link building, because they're big enough brands that they get links organically, or maybe they have a separate PR team, and they're getting a lot of links to the press that they're doing.

It is for better for worse, kind of very important for small businesses, but it's also extremely important to do it. Right. So, what you just said about like thinking growth strategy that's like, risk free, hopefully, or minimizes risk. I mean, there's a whole spectrum of beliefs on this in the SEO space. But I'm of the opinion that you really, really, really shouldn't violate Google's guidelines, especially as a new business or a new domain.

So, like, you have to read what Google says about link exchanges, and paid links and spammy links and all these things. Because it's really easy to get manipulated into buying links that violate Google's guidelines. They're getting smarter and smarter at identifying those links. And either like, not considering them for rankings or worse, devaluing your site. So, if you're a new business or small business or whatever, like just try to get links in a way that's authentic.

Maybe there's people in the community that use your product and they have a site that they can link to you from or like local charities local meetups, like real content marketing. It's like, the long and hard organic marketing stuff that actually works as opposed to the short term gimmicks and hacks and tricks that people try to use that will get you in trouble later.

Jaryd Krause (20:15)

Yeah, I think about it through looking through the lens of you, if you're going to use Google to get traffic, that's a business partner. And if you would do something that your business partner could find out about, that is not good for them, and makes their business harder and worse, then they're not going to be happy. And you're tarnishing a relationship. And that can really put things in a bad light going on in the future for that domain or anything around that domain. Right.

So, I think people are like playing a game with Google and just trying to many people that, you know, playing a game with Google, and it was a lot, you know, 10 years ago, it was a lot easier to because Google hadn't had the guidelines and the resources to put around this sort of stuff. Yeah, and I think just playing against Google is you got to give them what they want. I know that if I'm to work with somebody, and under make the deal that much better. In terms of a partnership, it's gonna make it easier for both of us.

Lily Ray (21:20)

It's a good point, I think that there's a way to like, I actually know for a fact like, you can get your site into a bad place with Google where they don't trust your site as much, maybe they don't index your content as much. And there's actually literally like, if you do get in trouble, like a manual action, or, a penalty, there's human beings at Google, the web-spam team who are reviewing your reconsideration requests. So that's one of the few areas of Google where it's actually human reviewers.

And we had an example once where we actually submitted a reconsideration request that said, we are amps of digital, same of our agency. This is how we do things. We do things differently than the last two agencies that this company worked with, which are x and y. We actually named them, we don't do those things, we do these things, we're going to try to clean up their work. But going forward, you won't see this problem anymore.

And Google literally approved it in 24 hours. Like, right, wow. Okay, so there's really people on the other side, that's rare that it's like a human reviewing these things as much, but you can get back in their good graces if you do things, right. So, it's important to pay attention to your how the site kind of relates with Google.

Jaryd Krause (22:32)

I like that how you identified what was done previously. And it's not at your fault, That's at the site owners’ fault. And they're accepting blame and moving forwards. I tried to do that with a Facebook account that I had been disapproved with too many ads. I hadn't done anything shady, but there was just like some words that just weren't, they didn't want him there. And I would change them to try find the right word to do what they wanted.

And I got disapproved too many times. And then I said, Hey, look I stuffed up, I really wanted to make sure I could do help people with what I do? I didn't realize that there were so many words that you didn't want. How can I fix this? And how can we get this back up and running? It was a no deal on that end. But I think it's really good to just accept what has happened. If humans are reviewing it as a human, you kind of want to, I think it's great for somebody to change their tune to work towards something better than what they had done.

So that's coming back to the links, people creating links for just need to inject my domain with more SEO juice, rather than paying for them. Whereas they could spend that money on better content that can get organic links, because the content is that much more valuable that it's got so much data research, science, humor, connection that can allow organic links, is that something that you guys create content? Is that a strategy that you use?

Lily Ray (24:00)

Yeah, we absolutely create content. What we don't do that other agencies do is pick up the phone and call a bunch of journalists and everything and try to get the content in front of people, because that's, frankly, it's PR. And we have partners that we work with that do the PR component, we also have clients that have their own PR companies or internal teams.

So, I think the role of the SEO, I mean, there's some SEO agencies that handle that, which is fine, but my perspective is that the role of the SEO is to identify things that will do well in terms of link building in terms of like getting press and getting awareness that are on brand for the client and coming up with those ideas. So, like just one example where my personal site so during COVID, I created a forum on my site that said if you are a digital marketer and you want to offer freelance or pro bono services or your business and you need help with SEO for free, because it's Coronavirus, like it was the onset of the pandemic. Just fill out this form. I just launched that on my site.

And then of course, I had the task of like, matching everybody, which took a really long time. But I got like 300 Links in like three days. Wow. And I just shared it on Twitter, maybe on Facebook or something, but like it went kind of viral, because everybody wanted to help, right? So, it was like, I didn't even do this for a link building reason that was like, very, like, it was a genuine thing that I did.

But it got so many links, and it kind of makes me realize, like, if you're just true to yours, your brand and your business, and you do something interesting, or fun or exciting, or like heartwarming, or like emotionally provoking in a way, like, that's going to get so many links, and you didn't have to pay for them. You just did something good or interesting. So, to me, that's a much more effective strategy. And that's what Google wants anyway.

Jaryd Krause (25:47)

yeah, getting rewarded for doing something good is, you know, that's what happened, what happens, and sometimes you need to play the long game, if people read into this straight, like, sometimes we have a case study where people get a great result in a short period of time. They will need to realize that, Hey, Lily has been in SEO for a while she's got a bit of a authority and bit of traffic and a bit of a brand already on Twitter and all that sort of stuff. It's not like a you just start your Twitter account, and you'll get in a forum and you'll get 300 links within three days.

Lily Ray (26:18)

Of course, and that's a good point. Like, of course, I have an audience to start with. So, like, is there a way that you can work with somebody who does have a following to incorporate them into that process? And maybe you this is a really easy way to build links, interview somebody who is an expert in the area. And when the article is done, just be like, Here's the article with your name on it, like most people will tweet that or share that. So, it's a good way to get kind of like, an echo effect on your article.

Jaryd Krause (26:45)

Yeah, and the thing, the fact is that Lily, you did a great thing, right. And people want to be a part of a great thing as well. So, I wouldn't want to say it's easy, but the doing good things, you will get rewarded. So that we've gone through some on page 80-20 of On-page 8020 of off-page.

Now I think people will have sort of tuned in and now probably ready to hear some tech stuff. If it's not too over their head, what will be some simple but powerful tech SEO things that people could do with within their site.

Lily Ray (27:15)

So, tech SEO is only needed to the extent that it's not set up well in the first place. So, like, we deal with big complex technical SEO challenges, but maybe that's because the site was built from scratch, and there weren’t any SEO considerations done. And maybe there's all kinds of URL parameters on internal links and things that need to be cleaned up. But that's honestly at this point, that's kind of more so the exception to the rule than what we normally see because most sites are using things like WordPress, or Shopify or Magento.

And, Wix, for example, a lot of these CMS providers are thinking very heavily about tech SEO, they have solutions for fixing tech SEO problems are launching sites with good tech SEO. So, like, making sure every page has a self-referencing canonical tag every page that you want indexed. If you use Yoast on WordPress, that's going to happen by default to this some other plugins like All in One SEO Pack. So, there's like some common SEO plugins, you can install on something like WordPress, where like a lot of those best practices will be implemented automatically.

But you want to make sure that there's a solution for implementing redirects, that's always going to be very important. Whenever you change URLs, you need to implement redirects internally. Canonical tags, XML Sitemaps are very important. So always set up a Search Console account, submit the XML sitemap for your site, pay attention to the coverage report, make sure you have a robot’s dot txt file.

And the robots dot txt file can mention where your Sitemap is located, like pretty basic stuff, but honestly, like most new businesses, assuming that they're using one of the big CMS providers probably shouldn't have too many technical SEO hiccups.

Jaryd Krause (28:57)

Awesome. we don't need to go down that rabbit hole. But there's some there's some great XML sitemaps. And making sure that Google Search Console can see your site is very important. 80-20 of it. Right. So, I want to talk about where Google is heading. I'm very fascinated through the summit.

And maybe if you're open to it, we maybe we get you on the summit, the next summit we have, but I love to ask people that the question about where is Google headed with SEO? What changes? Do we foresee and say, the next five years or maybe more? Will we be listening to, articles being read to us that Google ranks instead of reading them or just watching them? what's your take on some of the things that you can see that may happen? If that changes that we should be thinking about as site owners for Google the next sort of five years or maybe even further down the line?

Lily Ray (29:52)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth doing some research about what's called mum. I've been digging into mum. It's still pretty new to me, it's new to a lot of us in the SEO space. But it's a new solution for Google to be able to do a lot of different things, but basically, like, index, all kinds of different content, including like image content and video content, audio content, which they're already doing to an extent, but I think this kind of like, greatly multiplies their ability to do that well.

And so, it's going to change the way that we search now. So actually, one example that came out like last week, or the week before that isn't mum, but it seems very similar to how mum might work is what's called multi search. So on Google lenses, I just tried this yesterday, it's pretty entertaining. If you use Google lens on your phone, you can take a picture of something, and then it will use image recognition to say like, oh, we know exactly what that is, like, I took a picture of a glass of green tea, and it pulled up like a bunch of different types of teas and stuff was pretty close.

But then you can actually modify it. So you can say, health benefits, like you can type that to the picture plus health benefits. And it's like, going to pull up all the articles that talk about the health benefits of green tea. So it's becoming more interactive, it's becoming it's not just voice or text, it's becoming more visual. You might notice now, like certain queries, return a YouTube video, because of the answer was in the content of the YouTube video, even though the YouTube video doesn't necessarily have the content written on the page, like Google found it in the video transcript, so much more interactive, much more visual, and frankly, like so much harder to compete in the SEO space, because so many different results are being taken by Google in the sense that they can scrape the content.

They can take structured data, they can figure things out on their own. They can acquire companies, whatever the case may be to own that data and display that data directly in the search results. There’re so many examples where Google has come in and done that to different industries, like flights and hotels and everything were very difficult. Yes, difficult to compete in those categories. So, I foresee a lot more of that happening.

Jaryd Krause (32:00)

Even the Featured Snippet, right, like people not needing to go to webpages because they're getting the answer in these in these snippets or bullet point lists. Yeah, we've had this discussion before. And I think it's a scary thing. And this is why let's not get down to the rabbit hole of this. But this is why people are turning to things like web three. Yeah, so I like the idea of Google lens.

Google lens is really like because it's adding so much value too. When you're out and about you don't know what something is, for example, an animal in Australia or something crazy like that. that's fascinating. Yeah. Cool. And how I guess people could create content around, let say somebody who's got a tea-blog, they could create content that gives the answers that could link to that image scan. I guess that's how they could benefit? Or is that something?

Lily Ray (32:56)

I mean, provide high quality videos, high-quality pictures, use alt-text properly. Like, if you think about that search result, it's all different pictures, right? So, it's not always the same stock photo over and over.

Like, they're ranking the people that have a diversity of images. So, it's becoming more and more important to take your own pictures, I think, provide your own unique images. Because Google doesn't want to just keep showing the same stock photo over and over.

Jaryd Krause (33:24)

that's right. I think that's really good. actually, makes people go further and deeper into their own domain.

Lily Ray (33:32)

Yeah, we've seen a lot of benefits for ecommerce sites that take photos of their own products.

Jaryd Krause (33:38)

It's good, it's good. These drop shipping businesses, they're going to be no longer existent in five years. So, I'm happy about that. Thank you so much, Lily, for coming on. Where can we send people? This has been such a great chat. I'm sure people are going to want to find out more about you and what you guys do?

Lily Ray (33:57)

Yeah. So, my personal Twitter is @lilyrayNYC like New York City. And I work for Amsive Digital. So, if you're curious about working with me or my team, we have a really amazing SEO team at Amsive Digital, based here in New York.

Jaryd Krause (34:12)

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on, guys. There'll be links to that in the show notes. We did talk a lot about buying sites before you buy a site, make sure you go away and get my due diligence framework free just go to buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources and check it out.

Don't try and do this yourself and buy lemon. So, thank you for listening, everybody that is listening. If you are looking to grow your site with friends or know somebody who has a site once a growth through SEO, or derisk at least make sure you share this podcast episode with them. So, see you guys, bye.

Lily Ray (34:43)

Awesome, thanks.

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Jaryd Krause is a serial entrepreneur who helps people buy online businesses so they can spend more time doing what they love with who they love. He’s helped people buy and scale sites all the way up to 8 figures – from eCommerce to content websites. He spends his time surfing and traveling, and his biggest goals are around making a real tangible impact on people’s lives. 

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