Meredith's Husband: 0:42

Hey, this is Meredith husband. I've got some SEO advice for you. But I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use Oh, how are you?

Meredith: 0:59

Oh, thanks. How are you doing?

Meredith's Husband: 1:01

I'm good. What's what's happening with you? What's this week been like,

Meredith: 1:04

oh my gosh, this is crazy week, I took too many shoots. It's hard for me to say no. And so now I'm just pretty much in front of my computer day in and day out. Just thinking of work. I mean, I'm usually always thinking of work. But yeah, it's a it's a very busy week. How about you?

Meredith's Husband: 1:25

Same starting a new just start a new project. And it's a it's a real? It's a handful? Yeah, I'll give you a glimpse into what are some some of the things I do day to day. I would like to know that actually, I think I've probably told you a little bit about this one. But yes, yeah. Right. So we just started this project. And we're doing the on site SEO. So we're doing, we're using sem rush, starting with a lot of the same stuff that I've talked about here. And so we've found in doing that they have almost 100,000 URLs that Google has identified that said, Yeah, we're not going to put these in search results, because they're a mess. So the next few months for me are going to be identifying and fixing close to 100,000 URLs. Well, actually, I'm not going to be identifying the individual URLs, I'm going to be identifying the causes of those technical problems. So hopefully, you know, there will be single issues that we could fix that might clear up, I don't know, 10,000 errors. Wow. Anyway, that's what I'm looking forward to the next few months,

Meredith: 2:29

kind of like untangling string? Yes, very much.

Meredith's Husband: 2:34

And we don't even know like, a lot of the rope is what's inside this ball of string. Maybe there's like a ball of rusty nails, we have no idea what's inside really

Meredith: 2:44

be excavating your way in, what are we talking about today?

Meredith's Husband: 2:49

So this week, we're going to talk a little bit about how to how you can steal some of your competitors secrets. So yeah, I think this is this is the kind of stuff that I think it starts SEO starts to get kind of cool when you get past the, the like the foundation, like I just talked about fixing 100,000 URLs is not a lot of fun. But it's stuff like this, that can be more interesting and engaging. But we're gonna look at links, we've talked about links, probably on every single episode. But we're gonna go a little bit a little bit deeper, and how you how use how you start to think about these, and how you go about actually building links, once you realize that they are important. And that's what you are, that's what you want to do. So let's say let's take you, for example. So you're a children's photographer in Brooklyn. So you want to rank just off the top of your head, you know, yeah, I want to rank for the keyword children's photography, and Brooklyn, photographer, Brooklyn. So you go to Google, and you do a search, and you see these other sites that are there. So how did they get there? And how can you do the same thing, if you're not already there? So you're on site SEO, which is one thing we've talked about will will help you do that, but that alone is not going to do it, you're gonna need need to build links. So you can go to SEMrush SEMrush. Can we do can sem rush can do a lot more than what we've already talked about. But you can go to sem rush, and you can say I want to know where this website is getting their links, and you'll type in their URL, and it will spit back a bunch of results about where that website is getting their links and that for the top ranked websites. This is going to be kind of the leading indicator of you know, how did they get there? Where are they getting their links? How good are their links?

Meredith: 4:27

You don't want to steal it from

Meredith's Husband: 4:29

not stealing, not stealing. Okay,

Meredith: 4:32

maybe that was because that seemed a little devious. I don't like the devious part. Yeah. healthy competition. Sure.

Meredith's Husband: 4:38

Okay. Let's say you're gathering competitor intelligence.

Meredith: 4:41

There we go much, much more like a spy.

Meredith's Husband: 4:44

Yeah, you're just gathering up public information. Okay, that's, that's better, but it helps you it helps you see it can help you see what they're doing. Can I wear a cape whenever you want, you can wear it. So I'm going to actually share my screen, I'll put a link below. So if you want to watch along, you can. You can watch this, although it's it's not going to be necessary. So once you go to SEMrush, you'll probably see actually, the screen that you see after login will always change depending on your personal settings. But usually once you log in, you'll have up at the top or in the middle somewhere there will just be a box where you can enter a domain URL, keyword, anything like that. If you do that, you can enter any website there. So you can go to your you know, whoever ranks number one for your keyword. And even if you don't have the URL if you don't know what website to check SEMrush can actually help you just type in your keywords. And it will start to say these are the competitors, you want to look at. Really? Yeah, that's a little deeper. And it's, it's not really necessary. Because if you just have, you know, you're a business owner, you probably have an idea of how people would find you online. So you just do that. You may already you may already know exactly what competitors seem to show up a lot in Google, in which case, he has typed their URL, but you type their URL in, and that will come back, it'll give you some information, I'll give you an authority score of the website, some organic search traffic insights. But what we're gonna look at here is backlinks. So there's a category called backlinks, they might give two numbers back the number of backlinks and the number of referring domains, referring domains is actually the more important of the two, because that's going to be the actual website that is providing a link,

Meredith: 6:25

or we don't need to know about the authority. That doesn't mean,

Meredith's Husband: 6:29

well, that's kind of the overall I'll get into that in a second. That's kind of just the overall link authority that SEMrush assigns to individual websites. So what that means is a does this website, have three or four other incoming links have their own? Or do they have 400,000? And do those links come from good websites or bad websites? So all that sort of goes into the authority score. So that will be important in this in a second, and I'll show you why. I didn't mean to give a hit. And that's okay. So in this case, we're looking at the individual backlinks. So let's say we were looking at your competitor. In this case, I'm looking at actual my old website, so we can see some incoming links. So what you want to do is you want to look at these and you want to first say, where are these links coming from? In some cases, you'll be able, they might be a website where you can go and get your own link, maybe it's a website where where people can comment or there it's a forum and those links are followed. Maybe it's something like a some sort of website where you can set up your own profile. Those are fairly easy.

Meredith: 7:38

When when they're places that say like, set up your profile here with photographers, blah, blah.

Meredith's Husband: 7:47

Well, it always depends. But often, a lot of times No, a lot of times if a lot of times if they're doing that what's happening today is websites are doing it like the company that sent you that email. Yeah, hey, sign up in we'll link to you. What they're going to do is they're going to know follow that link. They're going to try to mask it from search engines, and they're just trying to get their own traffic so that then later they might be able to charge you for your profile or, or sell advertising or the to they're trying to make money somehow. So often, often it's not. It's not worthwhile, sometimes it is, it really depends on the site.

Meredith: 8:23

What do you mean by nofollow?

Meredith's Husband: 8:25

So you can tell Google when you have a link on your website to another website? You can you there are some directives that you can give to Google, you can say, hey, this is a nofollow link. Don't pay attention to this. This is not something I want to vote for in terms of search engine ranking and things like that. If you're say, linking to a login page for something, you would say, Hey, this is nofollow. This is not supposed to be a page in search engines. So just kind of hey, Google, skip over this. Now, whether or not Google actually does skip over there, I think a lot of them, do you or do we listen to Google? Yeah, there is some discussion around this, around how much weight Google gives to this. But Google does say they do say do this. And there's some other directives, you can say, hey, this is an advertising link, or this is a user generated link, meaning like something, it's it's a comment or something users generate these links. So they are going to get lesser weight than if we write a blog about something and link a link to another website that way. Okay. Does that make sense? Now, you're just trying to provide Google some instructions, I seriously doubt that Google reads your instructions and just takes them 100%, you know, does whatever you say, but they, they you know, they're the ones who created the instruction. So they probably do pay attention to them, at least a little bit. So anyway, you can look at your competitor links, and you can get an idea of maybe some some of the ones that you can go get yourself. And you might find these websites, like we started building local links with white spark. They might be things like that. A lot of times they might be like, you know, another a blog, a media company, somebody who's writing a story about something and they link to a, you know, a resource on one of your competitors sites. Those are,

Meredith: 10:19

how about you go get doing that? Well, you can

Meredith's Husband: 10:22

see, you know, I've had clients where, where I say, Hey, this is where your competitors are getting your links, and I list a few websites and they say, Oh, hey, I know somebody who works there. I can just email them and have them linked to me. You never know. Wow, often, what is going to happen is you're going to see, okay, this this website. So I'm looking at my screen here, I'm looking at the very first link, it's from a website called SEO Liu M. I don't I don't really know how to pronounce that. I don't even know what this is. But this website has an authority score of 62. So that's pretty good. So that link is valuable. So if I were to click through here, I might find a number of things. Perhaps it's a link to,

Meredith: 11:02

you have to say that all again, because it sounded like you were being abducted by an alien.

Meredith's Husband: 11:07

That's unfortunate. When did when did they? When did the aliens arrive? What was I talking about? Okay, so let me let me back up. So I'm looking at, I'm looking at a valuable link here. So this link might go to my blog, one of my one of my old blog resources that I created. And this this website here, SEO, Liam might say, Hey, this is a really cool thing, check this out. If that's the case, that's those are when we talked about blogging for SEO. And one of the reasons you want a blog is to create resources rather than articles so that those resources attract links. Yes, this would be an example of that. And this is this is, this is why I call this stealing secrets from your competitor, you start to see, hey, what what blogs on what resources have my competitors created, that have enabled them to attract these links, right. And this is, this is the gathering, and it's why I call stealing because it's not, you know, they don't put this on their website, they might not even notice notice themselves. But this is you can say, Oh, hey, my competitors, ranked number one. And one of the reasons as they created these, you know, two or three resource blogs that have gotten a lot of inbound links, so they're very valuable. That's that so then how can I do something similar with my own site? Can I do something exactly the same? can I improve it? Can I do something a little different for my my own niche, and then that starts to give you ideas of, of how you're going to build your own resources, which we've discussed in the previous episode, a lot of work, it is but worth it, you know, you don't, there's no, like, there's no definitive action plan here, you don't, there's not a whole bunch of steps, you can look at these and just, you know, it's going to be informative. And a lot of these links, you're probably going to look at and think I can't get something like that, that's just luck. Or, you know, there's, you might be looking at websites that have 1000s of incoming links. If you can find just two or three, that you think, oh, yeah, I can go get those relatively easy, and you want to find links that you can get that are relatively easy, you know, the easier, the better. Unfortunately, very often, the links that are really easy to get are also not the most valuable. But this just gives you a sense, more than just hey, links are really important, and you need links, this will give you a sort of glimpse into what kind of links and what are your competitors doing internally inside their office, they they decide to write a blog about something, and some of those are going to be effective for them and some won't, this will give you a glimpse, and you'll be able to start to see which what things are effective, what things are attracting the most links, what things are ultimately leading to those number one rankings. And this is this is how you get started along that path. And it can be it can be it can be a lot of work. This is the part of SEO that is ongoing. Your your on site SEO like I'm going to fix 100,000 links with this or 100,000 pages with this website in the next three months. Once that's done, it's done. Right? The ongoing Oh, then we'll move into how can we continue to build SEO month over month over month? For the short, mid and long term? How are we going to do that? And there are there are a couple different ways you can go about this inside of SEMrush. There is like I said, once you log in, you can just type the name of a URL, and it will start to spit back this information. There's also if you want to go a little bit deeper over on the left hand side there's in this in a section called link building, there is a backlink audit, and it's the it's just like the on site audit that we did except it's not auditing your on site SEO. It's auditing your backlinks.

Meredith: 15:30

Hmm. What's the difference? Just again, I'm sorry, between backlinks and other link

Meredith's Husband: 15:37

links. Yeah, those two backlinks and links are the same thing. The term the

Meredith: 15:42

terms are say link in some says backlinks.

Meredith's Husband: 15:46

Yeah, it's the same thing. It's those two phrases. Those two words are used interchangeably. Technically they are backlinks. But you know, links is just a shortened phrase that I think people inside the industry started using because saying backlinks all the time. Just takes up so much time

Meredith: 16:05

it takes up the enormity of time and space.

Meredith's Husband: 16:09

Yeah. So same thing and I will put a link down directly to the backlink audit the backlink audit tool so that you can go directly there, and I think it's something that you can do even with a free SEMrush account. And I also I do want to mention when I when I link to SEMrush, that's an affiliate link, I just want to be totally transparent. Okay. And I know that you know, because I've told you, but when she likes know what affiliate links are just in case, yeah, yes, please. Okay. Good idea.

Meredith: 16:41

Hey, what are affiliate links, right? affiliate links,

Meredith's Husband: 16:45

you know, when you do a Google search, and you come across those articles that are like, hey, the top 10 software that do XYZ, and then it hits a little paragraph about 10 different things, or three different things, and why they're great, the pros and cons, and then it links to them. Yeah, well, when you follow those links, those are affiliate links. So let's, let's say I go and I want to do, I want to find out how I can do invoicing for my photography business. And I find an article that talks about, I don't know, 17 hats and some of the other solutions, I follow the link to 17 hats, and I actually buy it, a small percentage of what I paid to 17 Hats is going to go to you as an affiliate. It's an affiliate commission. When you see these, these articles like this, that have just a bunch of affiliate links, typically why they are created. They're just affiliate marketing engines. And the reason that they're recommending those 10 or five solutions is because those are the ones they can make money from.

Meredith: 17:43

Yeah, yeah. Oftentimes photographers will, will will do you know, this, this is my gear and Yes,

Meredith's Husband: 17:51

right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Same thing. And they will link to, you know, b&h or Amazon or wherever they buy it, and you can buy it, same thing. That is more, I think, the that's the right way to use affiliate links. That's like I'm recommending sem rush, I'm going to recommend sem rush no matter what, whether they have an affiliate link or not, I use it every day. Because they have an affiliate link, I'm going to include it. If you choose to use that link. Great. Like it, we get a small percentage helps us do this. It costs nothing to you. So ideally, same price,

Meredith: 18:23

you think, Oh, it is that's my question. It's the same price. So yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 18:27

So if, if you appreciate the podcast, which is free, by the way, and I hope I'm giving away some valuable information, if you use an affiliate link, then it sends me five bucks or 10 bucks or two bucks or whatever it is a percentage of whatever you buy. Now, a lot of things I'm recommending don't have affiliate links, Google, obviously, all the tools I recommend with Google, they don't have affiliate links. Whitesburg doesn't have affiliate links. So I'm still going to recommend them. I'm only recommending the things that I use and things that I like, the things that I recommend, I'm not forcing you to or pay no, no, no, no, no. When they when they do, that'll be a sponsor.

Meredith: 19:05

Okay, so my question is, so for example, if you are on a page, and let's say a photographer is recommending 17 hats, and you click on their site, and you go to 17 hats, buy something, then that person gets a percentage, it's if you took the link from that person and copied it yourself on to Google and found it a different way. So be paying the same amount of money. But the person who actually helped you find it

Meredith's Husband: 19:42

doesn't get anything correct. And I used to do that, to be honest, I used to do that I would see an affiliate link and be I don't want to follow affiliate links, because of the reason I explained, a lot of websites are just designed and they just recommend things where they make the most money. So so I didn't I don't appreciate that. I still don't you know by now, but not but but if it's authentic, if somebody you know, a lot of times I'll read, I'll look at a review on YouTube. And they say, Hey, my affiliate link is in the description. If the person went through the trouble of making a video, and gives me an idea. Yeah, like it cost me nothing. It cost me nothing. Yeah.

Meredith: 20:18

And it's a way to thank them and support them. Yeah, for giving you this information. That makes sense. That makes sense.

Meredith's Husband: 20:23

Yes. So

Meredith: 20:25

I support Nikon.

Meredith's Husband: 20:27

Are you expecting a free camera from Nikon? Because, you know, yeah, I just got off the phone with Nikon. And they said, Oh, mirrorless husband, it would be great. If you could just mention us. Right. It'll be a while before Nikon is sending us anything. Yeah.

Meredith: 20:46

I'm sure it's a eyes out there.

Meredith's Husband: 20:49

Yeah. Anyway, so I'll put a link directly to the backlink audit tool in SEM rush. Okay, so you can go check it out. And also also sem rush. I think I've mentioned sem Rush is like 100 bucks a month. It's totally worth it. It's worth it many times over. But you can I also have a blog, which I also link that shows how you can sign up for sem rush they have a free trial and Then at the end of your free trial, you can convert it to a free plan, which is not published on their website. That's a good bonus. Yeah, it has limitations. You can't, you know, you can't do a bunch of projects and track 1000s of keywords, and some of the tools are limited. But to get started, it's valuable. It's not bad. And none of the other SEO tools that I know of at least the professional tools, have any sort of free plan, they're all paid, and they all start at around 100 bucks a month,

Meredith: 21:40

I'll click through your link. That sounds kind of dirty.

Meredith's Husband: 21:47

And then you're also just your your, you'd be spending our money so that we could get a commission. Let's just, we can we can keep on I'm already spending a lot of money on SEMrush. It's, it's more than under bucks a month. So we don't we don't need to do that. Excellent. So what do you think? Does that all make sense? Yeah,

Meredith: 22:10

yeah, it does. You know, my brain is so slow. And I glaze over very, very quickly.

Meredith's Husband: 22:14

This, this is a new, this is a very new concept. And this is, you know, I kind of feel like saying links are important in your on site. SEO is important. Yeah, that's kind of the surface. But this year, you're starting to get, you're scratching beneath the surface and saying, oh, what kind of links and how is this really done? What's the strategy involved?

Meredith: 22:31

Yeah. My question is always okay, how do I get the links I write to somebody I asked them, like, that's my question how you get when you say, Oh, you see, they got the link. So now you go and get yours, then. That's sometimes,

Meredith's Husband: 22:46

sometimes sometimes, yeah. Sometimes, like I said, sometimes you can get links just by going into a forum and setting up a profile and leaving comments. That sort of thing will become evident. Once you start looking at these links. Sometimes you might need to set up a profile with all your business information. Sometimes you might, you might need to write to a blogger and say, Hey, would you like to me or you know, and you need to find some reason why it would be beneficial. Yeah, people trust me bloggers get these offers all the time, you need to offer them something, you need to say, hey, I have something that's going to that you can offer to your readers, it's going to make your website better for your users, it's going to make your users happy, I created this resource. Again, this is why we create resources rather than blogs, I created this resource that I think your readers would appreciate. And they may or may not agree. And they might link to you. You can't really, obviously you can't force somebody to link to you.

Meredith: 23:45

But it's worth it ask if it's something you also find interesting.

Meredith's Husband: 23:49

And I think I think one trick, I think it's important to ask bloggers or other influences or whoever you're asking, can you share this with your users? Can you share this with your followers? Not? Can you provide a link? Can you link to my website? Say, Hey, would you mind sharing this? If they want to share it on their Facebook group? Cool. If they want to share it on their blog? Cool. Do you want to share this? That's a much better way to ask them? Can you put a link from your website to my website? That's just a totally different question.

Meredith: 24:19

So so if you're in a Facebook group, and somebody says, Oh, what are some? Are they CRTs? That they're called

Meredith's Husband: 24:27

CR T's?

Meredith: 24:28

What are the things that CRVs? There's a cute word letter for

Meredith's Husband: 24:34

Oh, CRMs CRM? Yes,

Meredith: 24:37

crumbs. So if somebody wants to know Chrome, and they're like, which one should I do? And if I then say, oh, my gosh, I use 17 hats. They've been really, really useful. And I've been appreciative of them. Am I then creating a link? A backlink for 17 robots in the Facebook group?

Meredith's Husband: 24:56

Yeah, Facebook is a little different, because a lot of those groups are private. So they're gated. So Google is not indexing things. And a lot of you know, there's a lot of areas of Facebook that are going to be gated anything is private, Google is not going to have access to Okay, to be honest, they probably if they want to access Google, they probably have access, but they're not they're not going to use those for any sort of indexing. Any sort of rankings information is not going to come from inside a private Facebook.

Meredith: 25:26

All right, that makes more sense. Thank you. Yeah. All right.

Meredith's Husband: 25:30

I think that's I think that's kind of a lot is that. Probably a lot to

Meredith: 25:33

think about. That's definitely a lot to process. Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 25:37

So take that run with it. Or maybe crawl with it, or just dip your toe in the water. See how it feels.

Meredith: 25:43

Get your feet wet? Yes. Okay.

Meredith's Husband: 25:46

If you have questions, let us know.

Meredith: 25:47

Let me Oh,

Meredith's Husband: 25:48

I have an announcement. Oh, I created an Instagram page from here. Yeah, so you can now I think it has one post on it. It'll have more I'll do more. But you can send messages via Instagram too. You can direct messages. What is what is the Meredith's husband?

Meredith: 26:04

Oh, right. With apostrophe or just one word.

Meredith's Husband: 26:08

All one word, no, no hyphens, no apostrophes, just Meritus husband.

Meredith: 26:14

Oh, I did. I didn't see it. And I said I shared it on my page. I think

Meredith's Husband: 26:17

it has a I think it has the first 30 seconds from Earth. First episode. Yeah.

Meredith: 26:21

Yeah, that's it. You need a picture on it. Yes.

Meredith's Husband: 26:23

I'll Yeah. It'll, it'll tell you a little bit about

Meredith: 26:27

marketing. Oh, husband of mine. All right.

Meredith's Husband: 26:31

That'll be fun.

Meredith: 26:32

All right. Thank you so much for listening. Bye, everybody.

Meredith's Husband: 26:43

I hope that helped. I hope that helped your website. I hope that helped your business. I hope that helped give you a little bit of confidence that SEO was not this convoluted, cryptic, crazy thing that nobody can understand. If you did like it and you found it helpful. Please share it with a couple of your colleagues. Tell them what you like. Or more importantly, tell me what you like to let me know interview leave a review on Apple. Tell me what parts you like. And I'll try to do more of those parts. And again, thanks for listening.