Kyle Roof DEEP Interview [His BEST SEO Tactics]

• Posted On - May 2, 2023
• By - adminjon
• 0 Comment
• • SEO

– You know you're good at SEO when you can rank Lorem
Ipsum gibberish content at the top of Google. I'm about to interview the man, the myth, the legend, Kyle Roof. Kyle hit worldwide SEO famedom when you got a website
to the top of Google using completely junk
content in an SEO contest. Soon after that, Google
penalized that site, all of his test sites and even changed their terms
of service as a reaction. But I'll let him tell
you that story later. Kyle is also the founder
of High Voltage SEO, Page Optimizer Pro, as well
as Internet Marketing Gold. Today, we're gonna get
into his origin story. How did he end up here? After that, we'll get into
what everyone came here for, the SEO nuggets. What are his best skills
that pay the bills? And we'll finish things
up answering the question.

Why did he pack up all his life to relocate to Chiang Mai, Thailand? What's so special about this place from Kyle's point of view. And why not? Let's add some spice to this
interview to make it more fun. Since Kyle's moved to Chiang Mai, I've gotten to know him pretty well. I'm gonna randomly plant some lighthearted personal
questions in there to try to trip him up. Let's see what happens. Now as always, if you like
what we're doing here, remember to smash the like button. Not only does it help
my channel out a ton, but it helps the YouTube algorithm know what you wanna see more of. Let's get started. Kyle, buddy, thanks so much for coming on. Why don't we kick things off just talking about where you're from and what are you doing
now in the world of SEO? – Oh, thanks for having me.

I'm from Virginia and Arizona. I spent my formative years
in both of those places in the US. I'm the lead SEO for High Voltage SEO. We're a international SEO agency. We have offices in Phoenix,
Berlin and Melbourne. I'm the inventor co-creator
of Page Optimizer Pro, which is a on-page SEO tool. And I'm the co-founder of
Internet Marketing Gold. It's a place where we
test Google's algorithm, and then we have courses,
like my courses are there. I create courses. I speak at
international conferences. I'm on cool YouTube shows
like this one (laughs). It's about what I'm up to right now. – You've got quite the resume. I'm gonna try to make this
interview a little bit more, I don't know, let's see how it goes.

I'ma try to make it a little bit more fun than maybe you're used to, getting into some personal
questions and stuff. So let's take things back
into the high school days. Word on the street is that you were quite the
athlete in high school. Can you tell us a little
bit more about that? – Well, even (laughs). I know where this question is coming from.

Even even pre high school. When I was a kid, I was a
nationally ranked tennis player. At one point, I was number
two in the state of Arizona, and I was 11 in the southwest, and I was part of like a
development academy for players. I didn't continue with
it, but I did stay active. And in high school, I did
letter in three sports, and I played golf in college, and I was the first player from my school to be named all conference.

That was my sophomore year. – That's insane, man. But what did you actually
go to college for? – I started off as international business. and I took one semester of, I didn't even finish the semester. I took the first test, and the first test was right
before the drop/add date. I handed him my test, and I
went right to the drop/add, and I dropped that, and I actually majored in psychology. Psychology 101 is the
most interesting course you'll ever take, and they
do that intentionally.

It's actually their marketing plan. I don't think anybody goes to
college to major in marketing, but they know freshmen have to take like a psychology 101 type class, and they may get the
coolest class of all time. And I think that's actually how they get people into the
major, and they sucked me in. – Ah, that's what hooks you in, but you ended up going another route. You pursued law, as I understand.

How did that go? – That's actually. So to be a lawyer or
to get into law school, it doesn't require any particular major. And I think they talk about
English and psychology or other humanities and social sciences and business probably
are our desired majors, more so than like pre-law
or something like that. So getting into, psychology was a fine
intro into law school. But I went to law school
after that at Penn State, and then I became an attorney,
and I practiced in Virginia. – Did you enjoy it? – Not at all.
(both laugh) So I was a trial attorney. I think that's probably maybe the sexiest of all attorney jobs. I was in court every day. I did divorce, custody and
support and criminal defense. And I was absolutely miserable doing it. I did it for about four years.

– Okay. It's not surprising
that you gave up on it. I think I had about four or
five friends from college that all got their law degrees, and I think all but one of
them are still doing law, and I think we had a yoga teacher. One owns a clothing line. Like, they're doing anything but law. The opposite of that.
– Anything. But not even near it. Yeah, I see that. – Yeah, so what was the
opposite of law for you? What did you do after that? – I think I did what most people do, and I moved to South Korea and I taught English to
kindergartners (laughs). – The old south Korean
kindergarten English trick, yeah. Oldest trick in the book. What was that like emotionally? You you've probably had
this life set up for you. You got your law degree. It's hard to do. And you have this path set out for you that you're gonna get a nice salary.

You're gonna end up rich someday as long as you put in the hours. What was it like giving that up and going into a commodity-type
job teaching English, pretty much anyone can do it, in a completely foreign country? What was that like emotionally for you? – The initial justification was this is just gonna be for a year. My plan was to do it for one year, and then kind of figure out
what kind of law I wanted to do, if I wanted to stay as a trial attorney, and I just needed just to
kind of recharge the batteries or maybe find a different path within law. So I didn't give it up like
all at once.

It was a process. I ended up staying in
Korea for five years. So the one year turned in and
it kind of just extended out 'cause it was it was easy to be there, and it was a nice place to be. But one of the reasons
I think I was miserable was the lack of travel. When I was in ninth grade, I
was taking world geography, and I remember high school was
not a fun time for me really.

And while there I was
learning the rivers of Europe. I remember thinking like,
"This is a waste of time. When am I ever gonna see the Danube?" You know, that was like this little river going through Hungary, and I was like, "This isn't gonna happen." When I got to college though, I figured out that you
could do semesters abroad.

And I did a semester in Greece. And part of that was actually
a trip for a week in Hungary. And I distinctly remember
standing on the Margaret Bridge, which goes over the Danube, and it expands in between
both sides of the city. And on the left, you can see Parliament. On the right, you can see a castle. And I had this like (snaps)
flashback moment to that moment, right in ninth grade when I was like, "When am I ever gonna see the Danube?" And there I was standing on
a bridge over the Danube. And that really kind of got
me thinking about travel and having international experiences. In law school, you can't
do a semester abroad, but I figured out you
could do a summer abroad. And I did a summer actually
in Budapest in Hungary and split time between there and Prague in the Czech Republic. And again, when I took that
trip, I really felt at home with the idea of traveling
and with being overseas and doing international things.

So when I got into law, I realized I couldn't take any more trips. You do have like kind
of standardized vacation where you can get like two weeks, but as a trial attorney,
cases come up all the time. So there's really no way
to set a two week vacation. And if you were to go to Asia, that's a day and a half of
travel on either side of it. So like these types of things
that I really kind of decided that this is what I
wanted to do within law, I couldn't do them at all. So getting out of law and then seeing that I could do something
more international.

And I mean, immediately
going to South Korea, which is obviously overseas, that made the whole transition
a lot easier for me, that I didn't have to. It wasn't a justification. It was like, "This path isn't gonna
get me where I wanna go. I wanna be overseas. I want to have international business or do something internationally." And that just never was
gonna happen within law. – Sure. So the law was gonna lock you down. I suppose teaching English
kind of locks you down, but you have summer vacations
and stuff like that, but then eventually you stumbled upon SEO. Was that because you
wanted to make more money, or was it because you
wanted more free time, ability to travel? Like how did you get
SEO? How'd that happen? – While in Korea, we ended
up opening a business. We got a Korean business partner, and we had to build a pretty
complex website for that.

And then I had a really strong dev team because of that complex website. And I thought, "You know what? I could probably general
contract websites." And so that's what I started to do. And then that was actually
going pretty well. And then I heard about
this new thing called SEO, and I was like, "You know what, guys? We could actually do SEO for the clients that are really happy
with our product anyway. And now we could get maybe
&100 a month out of them, or 200 even." And that seemed like a good idea. So we got into SEO as an extension of the web design company. – Awesome. Here's a question from the community. What's one thing that you
wish you knew back then about SEO that you know now? What's one piece of advice you wish you knew when you started? – I wish I knew that
I'm worth more than I am or that I thought that I was.

It's easily.
– More than $100 a month. – Exactly. It's very easy to undervalue yourself and undervalue your services, especially if you think like, you're concerned that
people won't hire you because your prices are too high. So I think it's really easy to start undercutting what
you're actually worth. And I think if I had known that earlier, it would have moved my
success along a much quicker. – Okay, all right. So you started off, you
got your company in Korea. Let's speed things along. Eventually, at least I know,
you got kicked out of India. What the hell happened there? – (laughs) Yeah, so
things were going great. And I brought my brother into the company 'cause he does web design and development, and we were using freelancers
primarily in India.

And I was like, "I got a bright idea. Let's go to India and
open a company there. And then we could have people that worked exclusively for us. It would keep our costs down. We get more production,
and we can take on more." And so that's what we did. And we went to the small town in the foothills of the
Himalayas, and we were all set up. My brother was at the
company at the time in India. I was in the US. And the building we were at, the business was on the first floor, and then the second floor were apartments, and that's where my brother was living.

So we're told we're gonna get a shakedown from the police at some point. There's a knock on the
door. It's the police. "We'd like to see your business papers." My brother shows them because
we did everything above board, and they say, "These
are the wrong papers." And he's like, "Okay,
how much do you want?" And instead of asking for a bribe, they put them in handcuffs,
and throw him in jail. And he's talking to the chief of police, and chief of police is like, "These could be the right
papers. I don't know. You have two choices. One, you can get out of town tomorrow. Or two, you can sit in jail and wait for the magistrate to come, and the magistrate will sort this out." And my brother was like, "Well, when does the magistrate come? And the chief of police
is like, "I don't know." So my brother's like, "I think I'm getting
out of town tomorrow." So my brother grabs all
that he can, gets out.

We were friends with our neighbor. They had this exact same setup,
business on the first floor, and then the top floor was apartments. And we find out from them that
as soon as my brother left, the police came in and
took all of our computers, all of our furniture, like all
the stuff that we had done. And our landlord magically
had a new tenant in three days later. And keep in mind, this
was a mixed-use space. And we had a six month deposit, and we had just paid a month's rent. So basically our landlord got
seven months worth of cash and had a new tenant in, and the local police department
got a new IT department. So.
– All right. Amazing. – And that really pushed
things forward in terms of SEO, because then we had nobody to do the SEO. Because I don't code,
I took the SEO clients, and I really had to learn SEO that day so I could keep them and
pay my own rent next month.

– Okay, so it was a blessing in disguise. – It didn't feel like it at the moment, but (laughs) it definitely
paid off in the end. – That's awesome, man. Okay, so what was your
breakthrough SEO moment? What do you think was the moment when people started to recognize you, not just like you're getting more clients, but you're starting to get
noticed in the community of SEOs? – 2015 was the first conference
that I ever spoke at, and the topic was on SEO testing. And I thought that, and this was a really
high-level conference with a lot of great SEOs, and
it's a smaller conference. It's kind of thing where it
can be a little interactive and people can ask questions
while you're speaking, if appropriate, and I realized, I thought that this would
just be kind of collaborative. So this is what I'm doing in testing. This is what I've figured
out. What are you guys doing? And I kind of thought
that that's how it'd go.

What about five minutes into the talk with the questions people are asking, I realized nobody's doing this at all. And that's when I realized, you know, my SEO had been based on that because when I started to learn SEO, and I was like, you search
for, is this a ranking factor? And you get three yeses,
three nos and three maybes. And I was like, "Well, that's
not gonna work at all." So what I started to do is I realized, "Oh, I could put up my own test sites." And then I kind of figured out some ways that you can actually
then test specific things. And I just, that's what I thought that high-level SEOs were really doing. But when I found out that
they weren't, then I realized, "Okay, this is something that
I can really capitalize on. And I could build businesses
around this kind of concept." But about a year later, one thing that then really stuck out to me was somebody quoted me back to me, that you said this thing.

And actually several people
at the same conference. I wasn't speaking at this
conference. I was just there. I got recognized, which I
thought was pretty weird. And then people were quoting
something that I said, and I was like, "That's pretty bizarre." That really felt like
– That's unreal. – Then I felt like I'm
really, really onto something. – Nice, man. And you certainly made a name for yourself around this whole testing
approach with SEO, which I wanna dig into a lot later, but let's get a sense
of where you're at now. What is the scale of SEO
that you're doing these days, maybe in terms of number of clients or customers or students,
what does that look like? – Sure. You know, I was thinking. I remember the first
time I pitched somebody for $400 a month, and that was a level up, and I wasn't sure if they
gonna take it or not, and they end up saying yes, and then that really did help
my bottom line at the time. And now I'm not involved
in the sales team at all, but I see pitch decks, and they go out, I see that we're giving
them three options, and the middle option is like 8K a month.

And that trips me out. Like I can't imagine, I can't
imagine ever getting there. I couldn't imagine getting
there, that to be like, our middle offer is 8K,
and they're a warm lead, and it's likely they're gonna
choose one of these options. That to me is unbelievable. – God bless. God bless this industry. So in terms of a breakdown of earnings, what portion would you say
is coming from your agency versus Page Optimizer Pro versus IMG? Like what does your earnings
breakdown look like? – Most is from the agency. Although, the agency and POP are all pretty neck and neck-ish in terms of, not revenue,
but the profit margin, because the profit margin is
significantly better on SAS. A lot of the money that within POP is still going back to POP. So we could be making more, but it's still a lot of development. IMG has really nice ARR, if you know that term, annual run rate, but the profit margin
isn't quite there yet, just because again, we've had development and stuff like that, but that should be coming
around pretty soon, too.

– Nice. Okay, cool. Who is the best character on "Ted Lasso"? – The best character
on "Ted Lasso" is Roy. (both laugh) – That's incorrect, but let's move on. – It's clearly, clearly Roy, because Roy has the most
subtle character development of all the characters (laughs). – I see nothing in that man. Let's move on. Tell us about the Lorem Ipsum fiasco. – You know, you call it a fiasco, but you know the scene in "A New Hope" when Obi one tells Vader, "Strike me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." – Who could forget? – I think that pretty much sums it up.

The short version of this story
is there was a competition in SEO Signals Lab to rank for the term, a rhinoplasty Plano. Rhinoplasty is a nose job, and Plano is right outside of Dallas. You had 30 days, and it had
to be a brand new domain. So you couldn't have a domain
you've done anything to, and after that, you could pretty much
do anything you want. The team and I, from
High Voltage, we entered, and we took fifth out of 27. 27 professionals jumped in, and only nine, I think,
actually got anything to rank, which is pretty interesting, when you think about people
that are pretty confident in their SEO skills to
join a public competition. We took fifth, but then
two weeks later, our page, and nobody did well, by the way. The winning side was on page
eight. We were on page nine. The about two weeks later, we
hit page one, number seven. And then about two weeks after that, we were number one, and we
were a number one in the maps. And a couple of weeks later,
we actually wiped out the maps. And we were just the knowledge panel. Like we were rhinoplasty Plano.

And people lost their minds about that because the site was
written in Lorem Ipsum, and we figured out what
kind of like keyword length for things we wanted to do. We printed out Lorem Ipsum, which is random, fake Latin
texts, if anybody doesn't know. And then we did the math, how many times we need our
exact keyword in certain places, variations in certain
places and contextual terms. And then we copied and pasted those terms into the Lorem Ipsum. And people lost their minds, I think, because they've been told that all you need to do
is write good content, and you do need good
content for conversions.

There's no doubt about that. But when it comes to rank, rank is a completely different thing because Google can't read. Google is an algorithm. It's doing math. And so if you give the algorithm
the math that it wants, you can rank very, very well. – Love it, love it. Does this trick still work today? – Absolutely. So I got a lot of hate mail (laughs) after showing that the
first time, and then. – From who? – From a lot of big SEOs and people just saying
like how lucky I got, or it was such a small
term and this or that. And one thing that nobody
could explain to me though, okay, let's say it's a low
competition term, that's fine. There are 27 professionals
going after this term. Last time I checked, there were 10 spots on
page one, give or take.

And that means three pages should have been filled
with professionals, and not even counting the sites that had been there for years, because there are plastic
surgeons in Plano. And yet we beat them all. Like nobody really, they
were kind of bitter about it. It really never got past that point. But what I did the next year, so I was on a speaking circuit in the fall and into the winter of 2020.

What I did was I was speaking at five different big events, and I ranked a page in Lorem
Ipsum in each of those cities. So like, and all but like
one of them are still up. I think only one came down. I think it was yours, the
rhinoplasty Chiang Mai. That one might not be
there, but Bali is still up. Garden Grove, which is in LA, which is right next to
where Disneyland is, is up. Couple others are still there. I can't remember. Oh, Milan. And those are all still up and living and thriving and doing great. – It's funny that the
Chang Mai rhinoplasty one didn't didn't stay up. 'Cause that's probably actually
the hardest competition one, 'cause of all the nose jobs in Asia. This is like standard thing here. It's probably cutthroat.
– Yeah, yeah, yeah. – Here's a question from the community. Have you ever thought about
getting into the affiliate game? Do you have any plans to make waves there? – Right now, we have several clients that are very large affiliates.

So we're kind of in the game
vicariously through them. I picked up some domains or some small sites that
I plan on doing something, but it's more of a time
issue for me than anything. And I need to get organized is
probably what I need to get. I need to get somebody in
charge of it on my team, and then run it that way. But just haven't been able to
put the resources behind it. But I do see myself at some point having a portfolio of 30 to 50 sites that are generating revenue, and that'll happen down the road for sure. – Fair enough. We would like to welcome
you to the dark side whenever you're ready to make that step. – (laughs) I'll happily join. I'll happily joined. – Cool, cool. All right, so enough of the backstory. Let's give people what they want to hear, which is basically SEO nuggets. – They didn't wanna
hear about my backstory? I thought that's why everyone was here.

– Excuse me. I mean, everyone, you
can sign off right now. – Just go. – Everything that actually matters. Now let's get into some SEO, and I'm gonna dig into,
one-by-one, some of the main, at least from what I've
heard you say to me, are your main SEO tactics. So let's start with compound SEO. Can you first break down what
compound SEO and how it works? – So that's the term that we use for the technique in the agency, but the foundational concept is to figure out what
a site's authority is, and authority, I don't define as, so like some third-party
tool metric number.

What it is is it's, what
level of keyword Google will trust you without doing SEO? So the idea is that you launch a page, and Google will instantly trust you. I think everybody's kind
of had the experience where you have maybe a longer tail phrase, and you don't do too much SEO to the page, and you launch it, and you're just instantly
on page two, page three, and it starts drifting up. It was bottom page two, top of page one, or bottom of page one, before you've like, you haven't done anything to it.

And you just think you're an SEO god. You do something then do a
keyword that's nearly identical in terms of everything you
can see from outside metrics, and you launch, you
don't crack the top 100. And it's like, what's the difference
between those two terms? They look identical. And the difference likely is
that one was in your tier, and Google just trusted you with it, and the other one wasn't. And so in order for you
to win that other term or to move it up, you need boost. You need something that's gonna carry you out of your authority
level or your natural tier. And you can do that, but the idea is that you are then susceptible
to the whims of Google because Google gave you that
boost outside your tier.

So if we will changes something and it doesn't like that boost anymore, you didn't necessarily get penalized. You just get dropped down
to the place that you're at. So what compound SEO is
trying to do is the idea of, is posting within your tier
so that you're getting clicks and impressions without really any SEO. And that the idea is that as
you get more and more clicks, you move up to the next tier and then can go after a
different set of keywords and then go after a different
set of keywords and et cetera. And you grow so that you have the site that's built on an
extremely strong foundation and is much less susceptible to any kind of traffic
volatility or updates in Google. – Sure. So it's like you're staying in your lane. Also, I'm picturing an
analogy of rock climbing. Like you wanna be able to
get to these high keywords, but in order to get there, you eventually got to get your handholds and your foot holds on the low key words. – Exactly. This also answers a lot of questions too.

Like, is there a Google sandbox? Well, no there isn't. It's just you start a site at zero. So what keywords will Google trust you at the very beginning? So you have to lay that foundation in order to start moving up, and the lower the competition-type keyword within your tier that you go after, the quicker you can get results. You can be on page one in a month if you've chosen the right keywords. – So you wanna draft your way up. You always wanna write in your lane. I guess the first question
that I would be having if I were a reviewer is, is there some kind of
table where I can see what tier I'm in at any stage of the game so I can kind of figure out
what keywords I should go for? – Yeah, the framework of this, I'm borrowing greatly from
Chris Carter from SERPWoo, and I've spoken to Chris about this.

(laughs) So he knows, I'm talking about, these sorts of things, but we were doing this in the agency. We had these concepts all laid out. This is what we were doing. And then I saw Chris talk about this, and the framework he talked about really does a very nice job, especially as an intro to what this is. And then you can kind of
build on it from there. But if you search for
SEO without resources from Builder Society, he has
an amazing article on there, and on the article is a chart. And I would say that chart
is a great place to start. I think you'll want to modify it a bit as you get more comfortable
with the concepts, but it's a great jumping off
point to kind of figure out what your tier might
be and how to move on.

And the rough idea is
it's based on the clicks or it could be the impressions
that you're receiving from Google currently. So basically you look
at a three-month span, and you take your low clicks
day and your high clicks day, and I would toss out any outliers. And then from there, that
gives you that range, that basically Google is trusting you. And what you can do is
you go after keywords that have the monthly search
volume within that range. So that's kind of the rough idea for what you're shooting for. – What are you using for search volume? Just whatever HRS or SEMrush tells you? – No, no, no, you wanna
use Search Console. You want as accurate as you can get. Obviously there's some
lossiness within Search Console, but that's gonna be the
most accurate, I think. You can also, if you've got
something directly on your site, some plugin, Clicky, that's
one, you could do that as well, but I'm not sure I
would do an outside tool unless they're getting some
sort of data from my site.

– Okay, all right. So the impression I get
from this is it sounds like a good old slow and steady
wins the race technique. Like you're always gonna be
writing a piece of content within your tier, it's got
the highest chance to rank, but do you think there's any disadvantage on not shooting for the stars, like not shooting for
the best hosting company, and instead of going for what's the best way to set up a router on a network, whatever, like little, tiny, long tail keywords? 'Cause you know how random Google is. Every once in a while, you could hit a home run
with a very beginner website. So you kind of lose that
with this technical. Would you say so? – I think you should absolutely be going after those terms as well.

I think the idea is that
compound lays the foundation, but you should have
those pages on your site. You should have pages on your site, even if you're never gonna
win them, like best hosting. I promise you're never gonna win that, but you should have that anyway just for topical coverage and
having a complete website. But on top of that,
even those dream terms, you should definitely
be going after those. And you should be one of the
things that you know work. You've got techniques and concepts and you know these are effective. You should totally be doing that. And then you should continue
to do the foundational work with something like compound. The dirty secret is that let's say you are all links all the time. Like that's all you're doing. You're just slamming a site with links, then you should definitely be doing this.

Because sites that do this can take on more of the dark side. And what happens is that
that's where, compound itself, these concepts aren't gonna
give you those traffic owners, but when you add links into
it, you get the traffic owners, for sure, and also I think it amplifies the other outside things you might be doing as well. I think it increases the value. – Awesome. We'll talk more about
onsite optimization later, but do you put in less effort
on the super easy keywords and more effort on like
the best hosting keywords? Or how do you decide how much work do you wanna put in each type? – Right, because it's
keyword, it's research-based, and maybe that turns off a lot of people, but the concept is that you
really wanna find something that you don't have to SEO.

Those are the keywords
that you're looking for, are keywords that you don't
have to do any SEO for. So you're really just
putting it in your title tag and your H1, maybe one time in the body, but then you're just
answering the question or you're giving the information, and then there's really
no other SEO after that for these types of pages.

For those target pages though, those things that could
bring in a lot more ROI, that are more difficult, I'm going all in on those
in terms of SEOing those. I'm thinking about link campaigns. I'm doing on-page. I'm doing POP and on other
on-page techniques for those, but for the compound stuff, you're trying not to do anything. – Makes a lot of sense. Here's another question,
bot related to compound SEO, but related to, well, you'll see. Why is Southern Comfort the best drink? – Ah, very good question. It mixes with everything. So if you're like, "Oh, I
want this, I want that," you can do whatever you like. It's good on the rocks.
It's good in a shot. And you can maintain it all day. – Okay, all right. All day, all day. We just wanna make sure. Okay, cool. – That might be the best question – Next question.
– I've had on any interview. – Good, good.
(Kyle laughs) Well, there's more on
where that's coming from. My next question is related to siloing. You've told me that you feel like siloing is one of your main strong suits.

– Yep, yep. – I know it's nearly
impossible to verbally talk and describe a particular silo set up, but maybe you can try, and I'll get the editor
to like draw something as we're speaking about
it, maybe illustrate it. – So when you think about,
say, that target page, that main money ROI page, so
I'll call that a target page. That's the page that
when somebody searches for my money keyword, I want
that to show up in Google. So I've done all my on-page to it. And maybe I've got some
link, building campaign, but at the same time, the
next thing I want to do is I wanna capitalize on my own authority. Like I wanna capitalize on
how valuable my own site is. And so I can do that by
posting other pieces of content to support that target page. Now I use, this is
where compound comes in. So for my supporting pages,
I'm doing them within my tier. And that's how I integrate
this into our on-page strategy. But then once you've got them built out, you want to interlink
them in a certain way.

So what I'm gonna do is
I've got my target page, and let's say I've got
five compound pieces. I will interlink all the
compound pieces together. And then I will link from each
of them up to my target page. So they're all linking to the target page. They all link to each other. I do them just kind of in a
sequentially, A to B, B to A, and B to C, C to B, C to D, et cetera. That's how I linked them. If possible, I also try to get
one link from my target page into one of the silo pages. So you kind of complete the
circuit, and it goes around. That's not 1,000% necessary,
but that's how I do it. I also try to do these things in groups of say five to seven. And that's more of a practical issue because it's usually easier to manage them in terms of how we're putting
like a campaign together. And then also if you
need to remove a piece or something needs to change, you can usually easily
find like where it is within its little smaller groups.

So let's say you had 20 pieces of content, that could be anywhere
from three to five silos, is how I'd probably do it, separate silos, all linking
up to the same target page. – Okay, do you ever break the rules? It sounds like it's pretty structured, pods of five or six, and
you got this back and forth, linking between the children
and then up to the parent. Do you ever break that,
and why would you break it? – I do client work primarily, so there's often some
constraints with a site. We can't link from here to there
for whatever stupid reason. And they're all stupid
reasons, by the way. But it just, for whatever reason, we can't do it exact, and that's okay. You want to do it as best that you can. I would make a distinction though.

There's a distinction between like, we have to do it this
way for whatever reason and half-assing it. And usually when I see
people that are like, "Oh, I tried, I linked
like you told me to link." And then I look at it,
and it's just a mess. And I'm like, "This isn't
anything that I talked about." And then you hear all these excuses, and that's all they are, are just excuses. They aren't, "We couldn't do it because corporate wouldn't let us." (laughs) That's a whole
other thing than just like, "Oh, I was too lazy," and now I'm making excuses for being lazy.

You know what I mean? So if you can do it
correctly, do it correctly. – Okay, all right. Is there such thing as
too much interlinking, like if you have a super
important best hosting page and you have 50 pages on
your website linking to it, that's obviously bigger than
your pot of five or six. Is that okay in your
book or is it too much? – I think only one time in my career I've ever seen something
where it looked like they might've over baked the interlinking, and it was a massive, massive, massive, massive e-commerce site. But after that, I have
a hard time believing that you'd have too many internal links. I think, I guess it's possible. Like it's not impossible, but, yeah, I think you really gotta. I think what would happen is you're building mass pages
on your own site, right? I think that's how it would happen. Like you're doing some
sort of mass page build inside your own site and
using all those for links. I could see that getting off the rails. – You're getting into the
1,000s of internal links, rather than.
– Exactly.

1,000s upon 1,000s. Like you've got some, what is it? Shaker or whatever mass paste, boop, and then all of a sudden you've
done it on your own site, And it's like, no. But then the same thing
is like, that's the same, you'd have the same problem externally. You could run into that exact same issue when you build that mass page site, and all 5,000 pages linked to one page. That might be problematic. It's probably the same on your own site. – Mm-hmm. How do you handle internal anchor texts? – I think the best way to handle
this is to be descriptive. Tell people where they're
going or why they should click. And within that, it should contain either the
exact keyword you're going for or some very close
variation, a partial match. And it's also gonna
contain contextual terms. And I think you're gonna get the best of everything in that. I'm not a huge believer
when it comes to links, that Google can read around
the link for context, but I'm confident the Google can read inside the link for context. So you can have longer hypertext links where it will include contextual terms.

It'll include variations, or it might include the exact keyword. And I think that is a solid way to do it. And you'll never run into any link ratio, anchor text ratio issues. – Got it, cool. And overall, what kind of results
are your siloing technique combined with compound SEO giving you? – I mean, we're crushing it. It was in 2015, when I first kind of got
some of these concepts of how to put this together. We picked up this client that did high-level market research, and it's the kind of thing
like aviation market research. So their clients are like
Boeing and stuff like that. And the search volume
was ridiculously low, like 10 searches a month
for these kinds of things. And they were going up
against massive companies, and when I realized on their site, they had like three years
of this amazing content. They've spent tons of time producing really, really great content. And it was all on point, but there were no links in
any of this, and I was like, "Well, let's go through
this three years of content. And then let's group them with their 10 different
divisions that they had." And so that's what we did.

We interlinked all those things,
and then we link them up. And that was like the basis
of my interlinking strategy. But we went from not relevant to page one for 9 out of 10 of their terms. And when you looked at their
site, their DA was one. Their TF was zero. I mean, they had nothing going on there. They had done actually no SEO. It took a little time to
put all this together. It took about two months,
I think, to do all that, to categorize it all, to link it. 'Cause, again, we're
figuring out as we go. Like, "Okay, we can do
this and this and that." We had all these page one results, and they fired us because
we didn't do anything. All we did was interlink
within their site. And, yeah. – I mean, they had all
the assets right there. I mean, another client
would have 1,000s of links, and you don't need to build anymore, but you're just taking advantage of what they're not taking advantage of.

– Yeah, they really saw that
we did absolutely nothing. And I was like, "Are you
kidding me? This was magic. This way, we're now competing against all these massive
firms in your industry. We got you to page one for
all these key money terms, and, yeah, you're right. We did nothing, did absolutely another." – Client SEO, I tell you. Come over to the affiliate side, and then you're just
chased down by Google.

There's that.
(Kyle laughs) – Well, you know what? For everyone listening
on the affiliate side, if you add in compound as a strategy, I think, those Google risks go way down. – Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And covering topical maps, which is what compound SEO is all about, just being the complete mega authority on a piece of top of content. – Well, I think that's
one of the biggest things right now in SEO, if
people aren't doing it, is Google favors sites where even if somebody lands on the page, they might not get the answer there, but they know the answer
is somewhere around it and somewhere nearby. And that's what I think
being an authority means, is it's topical coverage.

You've answered all the questions. And in order to answer all the questions, you need pages that
answer those questions. So why not build out these
pages that answer the questions? It satisfies a lot, it takes
care of a lot of things, where I think you're gonna
start ranking for those things. You're gonna pick up featured snippets, your authority's gonna go
up in terms of the clicks and impressions you're receiving. You're gonna support your target pages because as those pages get stronger, now they're passing more
juice up to your target pages. And at the same time, I think it's what Google is looking for, to reduce like all those things with e-issues and medic
issues and stuff like that. Google will see that you're the authority, and you're going to be less susceptible to all those problems. – Yeah, man. I think 2022 is gonna be the year where people start to
catch on to this technique. I think people started
to take a hold of that with the interview with Corey, and like you're talking
about compound SEO, and I think it's gonna
become standard practice.

Now it's gonna be a race of who can produce content the fastest, which will make things more
challenging for everybody. Cool. I wanna jump into
on-site optimization. I heard you're kind of into it, considering you have a
software that does it. So what would you say are the key places to do onsite optimization
on a given article? – I think, first and foremost,
people really overthink it, like really, really overthink it. You need to get your keyword
in the top four places.

And that's in your title tag, in your H1, in paragraph tags and in the URL. And that's 60% of, 70% of SEO right there. And you're done, you know? One caveat, if someone's
listening to this, if you have an established
page, don't change your URL. You will be giving
Google a brand new page. So don't do that, but do
it on pages going forward. Your title tag and your H1 should match. Again, don't overthink it. People really wanna out
clever Google for some reason.

In testing that I've done,
I've known for a long time that Google prefers your
title tag and your H1. It was actually part of my talk in 2015, now that I think about it. Google wants your title tag
and your H1 to be the same. Well, you know what Google
announced in October? "Oh, we prefer that your title tag and your H1 were the same, because then we won't change
your titles within the SERPs." It was one of the things
that they announced.

And we've known that for a while, but again, people, I don't know
where they get their advice, but they just try to like out
clever Google for some reason. Make it easy. Again, Google isn't reading. It's trying to figure out
what's going on on this page. Make it as easy as you can. So get your keyword in
the top four places, get your page title and your H1. Your H1's the title the human see. Only have one H1 on your page. You've really done a lot of SEO. From there, you can get mathy, and that's where something
like POP comes in, where then you've done those things, and you've hit where you think, "Okay, we've gone that far with that." Then you can start to get mathy with it and start to climb the
ladder in terms of ranking by then figuring out how many
times to put your keyword, it's variations, it's contextual terms in very specific places.

– Cool. – I'd also mentioned though, have an SOP. I bet 98% of the people
listening don't have an SOP. Yet, you need an SOP. – What do you mean by SOPs,
standard operating procedure? – The thing you're going to do every time. We're gonna do these things every time. We're gonna do them in this
order, and stick to it. But one other thing then
that I would say is like, even if you have an SOP, you
need to make predictions. What will happen? So that like, if I do this, I expect this outcome in
about this amount of time. Because then what happens
is you can decide like, "You know what? This isn't working." And then, you know you need
to change something up, or you might find out
that the niche you're in is more difficult than you realized or easier than you realized, because you, "Okay, this should happen
in about three months," and it happens in six.

Well, then you can start to
make some business decisions on when we decide to
move into this or that, 'cause you know about how
long things are going to take. And that also gives you an
opportunity to adjust your SOP. "Okay, we've done this
three times in a row, and it just really hasn't worked. So we need to find something else." And then you can grab that shiny object that you've been dying to do and plug it into the certain spot where you think things aren't working. Consistency, repeatable processes allow for repeatable results
and a lot of success.

– Great advice. And what would you say, when you combine all three
of these strategies together, compound SEO, your siloing
and your onsite optimization, what would you say is your hit rate and the percent chance you
write a piece of content, it's gonna make it to page? – On the compound side, so for
the things that we're doing as supporting pages on the site, my hit rate's about 80% on those.

– That's great. – You know, it is, and it
drives a lot of what we do. Keep in mind though, that
means like 1 out of 10, 1 out of 2 times, I'm just
flat wrong, (laughs) you know? But that's how it goes. Because we're doing research
as best we can, right? And it looks like this term should work because it follows our formula. But again, that's so repeatable
that it is that successful. When it comes to on-page, like let's say we launch a new page, and we're doing on-page, and then we're beginning
the siloing process, I'm really expecting that to hit somewhere between three and five, depending on how competitive it is. Higher, if it's lower competition, but three to five is a
pretty reasonable number for on-page for real terms. And then from there, then you realize, "We need to do a little more on page. We need to really go
aggressive with our silos or whatever link building
campaign we're gonna do." – Sure. What is your team structure look like? Or at least in this writing process, do you have your authors
themselves right and optimize? Or do you send that over to SEOs? Like who does the actual
on-site optimism part? – It centers around our content editor.

So we have the SEO team, if you will. So we have people that we call them OPRs, our on-page recommendations. We have people that are
trained to do those, and then they get sent, and they're in there working
with the campaign managers, because the campaign managers
know of what the strategy is. So, okay, we need these five OPRs. So then the OPRs are done by those that are qualified to do that. That goes to the editor. The editor then sends it to the writers.

The writers then write, and then the editor comes
back through is gonna edit. At that point, they
should be pretty close, count-wise, SEO-wise. And the editor is gonna
edit for things like grammar and tone, but then also for
some on-page SEO issues. And then those goes back
to the campaign managers for final review before it
gets published on a site. – Sure. Okay, cool. What's your thoughts on
keyword density, fact or fish? – Both. I think you can think of keyword density in terms of signal area. So factor area. So like your H1s or your
H2s, your paragraph texts. You can think about
density within those areas. But if you think about
like on a whole page, I think that's absolutely incorrect, 'cause Google isn't
looking at a whole page. Google's looking at specific signal areas to see how many times you're
using your terms within there. So you could think of it as
density in the signal area, but I think term frequency
within the signal area is a better description of
what you should be focusing on. – Sure, sure. So you can definitely spam a title tag, but your overall document looks fine because there are different buckets, is that's what you're saying?
– That's right.

And I mean, let's say you need, let's say you need your
keyword once in N2, whatever. You could just write the keyword, and then your density is one, but that doesn't mean
you're over-optimized. You know, that's okay. It's more of the term frequency, I think that you used at one
time in that particular area is probably a better
way to think about it. – Sure, sure. I have a story. We used to have a website
in the beer niche. Why would I ever pick that? But basically, we ranked
number one for the keyword, how to brew beer. But that keyword, I think, has like 60,000 volume
or something like that.

But the other keyword, how to make beer, we were on like page seven. Couldn't figure out why. So we ran it through
some basic TF-IDF tools, like Text Tools, I think
it's got like a free version. It's just like pretty simple, just counts words and stuff like that. But we were within term frequency ranges for how to brew beer,
but how to make beer, we just wrote the crap
out of the word, make, on the page, just a billion times. All we did was tone that down. We replaced with synonyms. Then we jumped up on that
keyword to page one as well. So that's when I was like
a true believer on TF-IDF, keyword density, whatever
you wanna call it. You should, at least on competitive terms, think about how often you're
writing certain words.

– 100%. I mean, that's the
foundational concept in POP, is that there are these
different areas on the page, and how many times you need
which terms in which areas. I totally believe it.
– Sure. Sure. Where do you source your writers from? – I had to ask my content
editor this the other day. So I'm glad that I did. Cult of Copy as a place we go. That's a website that's a copy website.

Onlinejobs.ph.
– Facebook Group. – Yeah, and Upwork are the three. but we built a strong enough team. You get a writer, and
some work, some don't, but the ones that work, then what we've done is we've
got a strong enough team that when we need another
writer, we ask them, 'cause they all know
people, and they're usually, your talk on A-players,
A-players know A-players, right? So somebody that's a good writer is gonna. The likelihood of them
knowing a good writer is very, very good. We have a big enough pool now that most of our sourcing comes from, "Hey, do you know a writer?" But to kick it off, Cult
of Copy and Online Jobs are two good places to start. – Sure. Awesome. Would you ever say that people take things a little bit too
far with onsite optimization, like trying to get 100% POP
score or something like that? – Yeah, it's funny how
people's brains work, and you see it in that for sure.

You know, POP might say like, you need this one term one time in paragraph texts on
a 5,000 page article, and they really freak out
when they can't do it. And I'm like, "I don't think that one term is gonna make or break
that entire article." And the other thing you
see people struggle with is let's say they've put
a term in like JavaScript, and POP is struggling with seeing it, but you could run it through
the Mobile-Friendly checker, and you can see that
Google's picking it up. For some reason, they can't
grasp the idea that, well, okay. So your score is a 98%, and, yes, if that term was seen, you would be 100%, but you know you're at 100% because Google is
actually seeing the term. We just can't parse it. People really flip out about that. So those are the things that
kind of strike me the most. Like it's a range, you know (laughs)? There's a range that you
need to get your terms in, and as long as you're in that
range, you're good to go.

I would say if you just
snuck in the range, maybe you wanna do a little bit more, but if you're somewhere in
the middle of that range, you're gonna be fine with your on-page. – Sure. It makes sense. We talked a lot about the personality type that becomes an SEO. And on the DISC scale, D-I-S-C, there's often the C-type
personality, which is calculating, but you could also say compulsive and needing to get that 100%. – We deal with a lot of those people. They struggle. They need that one term. They need to see the 100%. Like their brain just can't
quite compute when it's like, "You're a 99%. I promise
that's good enough." And they just can't quite handle it.

– Need a perfect core web vital scores. Yeah, there's tons of
these little things in SEO, but I promise they're more
distracting than rewarding. – That's right. – Yeah. Okay, well, here's the hypothetical. Imagine you found this
perfect compound SEO keyword. It's right within your tiers.
You've on-site optimized it. You did your siloing,
all your special magic, and you don't rank. You're on page seven. What do you make of
that, Google broken or? – No, no, Google's not broken. Google hates me, personally. It's a personal attack. I would say, first of and
foremost, it wasn't in your tier. Like you can do your
research as best you can, but you are gonna have some misses. I mean, that's just all there is to it. Yeah, I mean, that's
what it comes down to. So I'd say first and foremost, just it wasn't in your tier, and that's something you
just got to let go of.

'Cause as I mentioned, my hit
rates 80%. That's awesome. But that means there are two misses, ones that I was pretty
sure were in the tier, and they just were not, that's it. And let that go, you know? Even though you're like,
"Man, this should be perfect. It should be easy," and
it's not, let it go. Don't stress over it. – Fair enough. What do you think is the most
critical technical SEO issue? – I think Google crawling your site. If Google can't crawl your site, you're never gonna rank
for anything, period. And some issues that I see, I'm conscious of crawl depth a lot. Again, kind of getting back to like putting the keyword
in very specific places 'cause you don't wanna
make it hard for Google. Why burry your pages six
folders deep in your site? Why are you making it hard? Make it easy for Google to get to the pages you
want them to get to.

And I think folder
depth is an issue there. In some older sites or sites
that have interesting CMS is I see chained redirects as an issue. And in my mind, it's the
same thing as folder depth. You're asking Google to do a lot, to move from here to there to there to finally get to the
page that you want to rank or Google to crawl so they
can see what you're doing. And again, why make it difficult? So crawling, I think, is an issue. Make sure Google can crawl your pages. 'Cause that's kind of step one. Then once they can crawl,
then they can index, and then once they can
index, they can rank.

So it kind of starts with
that crawling concept. And that's what I think
is really critical. – Sure. On the other hand, what's the most overrated
technical SEO issue? – It has to be duplicate content. People really freak out
about duplicate content when they shouldn't, and duplicate content is a very easy fix. The last time I tested this, I think you only had to
change 1 out of every 11 words to get past Google's
duplicate content filter.

So like if you've got pages that are, and people assume they
have problems, by the way. Is the page actually being filtered? Because Google will show you that. You do the search, and
then you see at the bottom, Google says, "I filtered out 100 results because they're duplicate,"
and you click on that, and then you see your page. Okay, now you've got a
duplicate content issue, but otherwise you don't. So people probably maybe are
having an issue with a page and we just assume duplicate
content and run with it. So duplicate content it
is not as big an issue as people think it is. And if you are getting filtered
by Google, you can fix it. I think keyword cannibalization, maybe that's an unpopular opinion, but key cannibalization is a
very close second in my mind. It's not as big a problem
as people think it is, because they just assume
they're having, I think, some issue, and they're
not actually identifying that hey have two pages that
are cannibalizing each other.

– Okay, cool. Here's a couple of random ones. The first one, I know you love music. What's the most embarrassing
concert you've ever been to? – I went (laughs). Yes. I saw Michael W. Smith. – Who? – He was a Christian
artist from the early '90s. And the Newsboys opened for him. That was pretty cringy. It was very cringy. And the Newsboys had
this thing, they're like, I think they're a band
out of like Australia or something like that, and I think they're
supposed to be hip and cool. I was there with my friend George Watkins. – What's up, George?
– And it was at the Scope. And we were sitting in the area, like there was like kind of a floor area where I think you could stand,
or maybe there are chairs, but everyone down there was standing, but then like everybody on
the sides where we were, so we were kind of in the actual seats.

'Cause it was used for
hockey and basketball. We were in the area where
you would be sitting to watch like the hockey game. And we just sat the whole time, and everybody around us was standing. And I was like, "I really
don't wanna stand, George." He was like, "Neither do I. I don't wanna take credit
for any of this." (laughs) – Okay, all right. Here's another random question. It's more related to SEO. What do you think about
EMDs? Do you like them? – Love them.
– Hate them? – Love them. Go. – Why? – I think, you know, so one of the top places
you can put your keyword is in your URL. I think you'd get that, or
at least some credit for it, within the domain, so go for it.

– Sure, sure. I like to look at it as like, the URL is the hardest thing to change. So once you optimize for it, like Google knows you're
committed to that topic, and you can't really back out of it. – Yeah, I like them. I've never seen anybody have
a problem with it either. People would always like, "Oh, you're gonna mess up your
internal links or something." I've never seen that before. – I mean, I guess when you're
building links yourselves and you're more susceptible to like your own off-site
optimization mistakes, 'cause you can't send a brand anchor. – If you're really concerned about it, you could use relative links. They don't have to be absolute links. So. – Yeah, true that, true that. Next question, let's talk about
everyone's favorite topic, and that's link building. You yourself don't mention it too much. You mostly focus on on-site SEO
and stuff like compound SEO, but what's your thoughts on link building, and what kind of links do
you build, if you do any? – We have an in-house team
for our link building.

We also have some extra
external resources that we use. Yeah, so our main thing is we do outreach. So within our silo, something that I didn't talk about before, is not everything needs
to be a supporting page in terms of that it's
like the compound stuff, but we use, we would
link magnets in there. So it's something that's
going to be part of a campaign that we're going to do link building to, and we're gonna sit that within the silo. So the idea is that we build links to it, and that juice passes
to all of our silo pages as well as our target page.

So then it kind of
spreads out and goes up, and you can really start creating
this little engine of good where you really juice it up. And so when we do link building campaigns, we rarely linked directly
to the target page, but we will build out something that is, we call it shareable,
something that could be shared that could attract links.

And the ideas of then we'll focus efforts on bringing links into that, because then it benefits
everything within the silo, and then they all, as
they juice up as well, then they're benefiting each other, and then drives more
power to the target page. So we'll kind of include that
within our silo campaign. We'll have a link, something that is a link
magnet to general links. And so then we'll do outreach for that particular piece of content. – Do you have an example of
like an effective link magnet, just so people can understand
what's the difference between a normal page that you wanna rank and something that's
built for getting links? – Yeah, you could do like,
if you have access to data, then data that people need to source, infographics, if you
wanna get back into those, those actually kind of work.

If you like scholarships
or those kinds of things, like something that you would be sharing across to ever things to get people in, that will be the kind
of thing to put there. Something I always like is
do good in your community. So organize a canned food drive, and then you've got a page, you say like, "Here are the details of
the canned food drive. Drop them off at this place at this time." And then you share that page
so that when people link to it, now they're linking into your silo, and you're doing good at same time. – Love it. Awesome. Next question. Do you think it's possible
to rank without backlinks? – Yeah, for sure.

Of course. We do it all the time. One of my courses on Whitehead SEO, I did a whole thing where I
showed taking a site from zero, like absolute zero and taking
it up in ranking for terms. And that was all based on posting content within our tier and interlinking it. So I guess there were links
if you count the interlinks, but there was very, very
little external links going to the site. – Do you think there's a limit? Like do you think you can rank for best hosting without backlinks if you just wrote enough content, (doorbell rings) maybe it gets to a million pages? – I think you could, but there's someone at the door.

I think you could, but then you're just talking about time. – Sure, sure. Okay. Do you wanna go get the door? – Not really. – Okay, all right. Have you ever bought links? – Yeah, of course, certainly. No, I think that's a misconception. You can buy links. It's just what type of
links you're buying. So you can buy citations. You are allowed to purchase
something that is informative, that helps Google understand who you are or what your organization is. So you can buy citations, and you can get into business directories, and all of those have a link. You are also allowed to advertise. You can advertise your
site and your services. And there's a thing
called native advertising. And the concept on native advertising is that it looks natural, but it's not. This is what goes into your
Facebook feed or whatever. It looks like it's a post,
but it's actually an ad. The same thing can be
said for a guest post.

That is native advertisement. And the idea is that it looks like they just happened to write an article about how amazing you are, and linked to your site, but it's an ad. And so long as you've
identified it as an ad, it's completely legal, and it's
within Google's guidelines. So as long as you're
doing something that way, that you're saying this is
an ad, then you're fine. – Okay, got it. Okay, I can sleep now. 'Cause up until this point, I was just having trouble sleeping and just feeling so guilty
about breaking the rules. – I could see it in your face.

– (laughs) Thanks. Thanks so much. Here's a question. Have you ever walked
into a neighbor's house in the middle of the night
thinking it was yours? – (laughs) I have. I don't think I got in though. I got through the outside
gate and into their garage. The jury is still out on whether I actually broke and entered, but I think it was just a trespass. – Okay, Got it. Okay, now that we got that cleared away. – I would also mention that I did have to leave my shoes behind (laughs) because for some
reason I took my shoes off. – Okay, good, good detail. Good to know. Let's talk about SEO testing. We touched upon this before, but please describe what a
single variable SEO test is and why it's important.

– So the concept on
single variable testing is you want to eliminate as
many variables as possible. So you can get down to the point that you are just testing one thing. And if you can test one thing, then you can see if it
is a ranking factor, if it's a positive factor,
if it's a negative factor, if it doesn't do anything at all. And so the idea is that,
when you're deciding, should I do something in SEO, it should be based on a foundation of, will this move the needle? And then you want to then
get down to one thing to see, does that thing move the needle? And then you can build your
SEO foundation from there.

– Sure. I can see it as a, I mean, in
my personal experience of it, it's more like a SEO time-saver, right? There's no shortage of
SEO theories out there on what works and what helps and what not. And you could get bogged
down on wasting time and company resources
trying all these things. And half of them do nothing. Actually, I think you
and me can both agree that more than half of them do nothing. 'Cause when I run SEO tests, they do something like 20% of the time. Most of the time, the
test is a waste of time. – I agree.
– Do you agree? – 100% agree. – Yeah. So I think like everyone can agree that SEO testing is super important. Why do you think that no one does it. Like off the top of my head, I can only your name six people, and that's the people in our testing. So why do you think people don't do it? – I think because it sucks donkey balls. (both laugh) Just put that on my gravestone.

Kyle Roof, it sucks donkey balls. (both laugh) Promise me, Diggity. Well, I mean, so they're difficult. I think first and foremost, they're difficult to conceptualize. It's easy to say like
get down to one thing, but then I've spoken to a lot of people. Like I remember one guy
was getting advice from me on how to set up an SEO
test, and he's like, "Okay, so I'm gonna do this,
this, this, this, and this." And I was like, "Well, you know, you're actually testing
like 10 things in that. So what you need to do
is actually do this, and get it down to that one
thing, and then if that works, then you can go onto the next thing." But I was like, "You're
were really looking at a series of a bunch of tests." And then I never heard back from him, because that's an amazing
amount of work to do, right? So they take.

First, you have to conceptualize them, and that's not easy to do. Then you have to set them up,
that's also not easy to do. I think you have to let them run, and there's a month or
two of your life gone. And then at the end of that two months or one month or whatever it might've been, then you realize that you got
nothing out of it, you know? (laughs) And so your success
rate is very, very low when you're doing these things. And then you have to repeat it. Because you can't just do a test one time and feel really, really good, unless it's an extension of
something else you've done, but you probably need to
do them at least five times and get the same hit rate
to feel pretty confident that you've done something that, okay, this is really working.

And that's very time-consuming
and very difficult. And I think that's why
most people don't do it. – Another thing that sucks donkey balls is when you're running that test, you can't have a Google algorithm update because it's going to just
completely explode your results. – That is also problematic. And there've been so many
massive updates in the last year that really screw up a lot of things.

– Yeah, totally. It's funny, in our testing group, we have this weekly
testing group on Friday, we share anything that we've learned, and whenever there's an
update, everyone's just like, "Of course, I have freaking nothing because all my tests
were just destroying." – I think in the last three months, you might be the only ones that actually, I think, gotten a couple
that they could finish. Like I'm having indexing issues like crazy with my test pages. – Yeah, yeah. What's a cool thing you've discovered through testing in the last year? – You can still rank a
blank page. That's fun. So you could have all your content, you can set your CSS display to none, and Google will rank that page.

– (laughs) Okay, awesome. Based on your testing, are you noticing any trends
that Google is moving towards? Like what can we expect in
the years coming forward? – Well, getting back to indexing, I think Google's biggest
problem right now is indexing. And I think you can source
it back to when they decided to switch over to mobile-first indexing. I think that legitimately broke something. My guess is there was something
in the original index, and the people that wrote
that original indexing aren't around anymore, and the new guys don't
know what that thing is.

And I think they really messed up when they made that switch. And it's caused a lot
of issues within Google in terms of indexing. So. – Any improvements that you're seeing, or is it just getting worse and worse? – There's a tool by Carolyn Holtzman. She has a thing where she
monitors simple indexing, which is like new content coming
in, and complex rendering, which is like rendering a whole
page including JavaScript. I think in the last 100 days,
there's only been one day. By the way, Google does
both on normal days. Like in normal indexing time, Google is doing both of these things. There's only been one
day in the last 100 days that our tools detected Google doing both.

So not great. It has to get better
at some point. It must. But the thing that I've
been doing within testing and also within IMG, some tests, a bunch of tests been done on this, are the concept of indexing zones. So there are ranking factors,
there are places on your page that Google is looking for terms
and those will impact rank, but not all ranking factor zones
are indexing zones as well. Meaning you can put a term here, and it could affect the rank of the page, but you can put a term there, and that might not help the page index 'cause Google isn't using it
to actually index the page.

The big ones, your H1, H2, H3, H4, those are all indexing zones,
which again, gets back to, why would you put your
keyword in those things? It still blows my mind
when people are like, "Well, I tried to get creative with this." Like, "No, you're just
shooting yourself in the foot." But even it gets back to indexing the page for a particular term. If you just put it in the major spots, those are the top four we
talked about, you'll be fine. Google will index a
page, but people don't. And so in addition to
having issues with rank, I see a lot of, in addition to the issues that are going on in Google anyway, you're gonna end up with
more indexing issues because you're just making it harder for Google to figure out where
to put it into the service.

– Sure, sure. Very cool. Very cool. Before we start asking some
questions about Chiang Mai, which a lot of people in the community have been asking about, like why did you move to
Chiang Mai, et cetera? Let's ask some questions about mindset. Now, I think anyone who's
hung out with you personally or met you at a conference
or seen you in Chiang Mai at the meetups or anything like that can easily see that
you're an extroverted guy.

Like you always like to be in the mix. And that's kind of contrary to
like how most SEO's operate, just sit behind their
computer and nerd out all day and then maybe jump on
Facebook to talk to people or something like that. But do you see a benefit for networking in the SEO community, in the SEO industry? Like what do you think the upsides are of getting out there and
just speaking with people? – Yeah, I always think
you should say yes a lot. You know, when something's going on, say do all the events,
do do all the things, as Matt Diggity says, I don't think you'll ever,
ever hear me say like, "I think I'm gonna skip the
mixer after this conference." – Never once.

– You need to talk to people, and you need to meet as many as you can. And I do understand that that's difficult for a lot of people, but
there are things you can do. You can help organize the event. You can help organize local meetups, and then people have to talk to you. You can be a resource for
things and get to meet people. Because what I realized is you need to be, like think about what you want. Conceptualize that thing
that you really want. And then you need to go to where that is. You need to be there because when people are making
the decision on those things, you want them to think of you. And the only way for them to
do that is if you're around. I understand that COVID has made things a little bit more difficult
in terms of in-person, but you can still do this in
an online sense, but you know, when you think about like, I want clients, okay, who are your clients? Who do you want, and then where are they? Where are they physically? Go to there.

Go to that place and be there and then be so that you're
constantly on their mind so that when they are then
looking for someone to hire, it's you. Or in a place where they're
like, somebody needs a referral, well, you're on their mind
'cause you're constantly around. You're in that place when
business deals are happening, or JVs, you need to be in that place when people will consider like, oh, we should JV with this person. And you can only accomplish
that by being there. So I understand that it's
not easy for a lot of people to go to events and to talk and all that. But that's what I would say, mindset-wise. Figure out where the
thing is that you want, and then get to that place. – Sure, sure. You have the worst FOMO
I've ever seen a human being in your entire life.
– (laughs) No. – Would you say the FOMO is
related to this mindset thing that you wanna be where the
decisions are being made? You don't wanna miss out on an opportunity or is this another disease? – That's a great question.

Interestingly, my doctor
thinks I'm an introvert, and I'm masking it. So maybe I'm overcompensating for the fact that I'm trying to be an
extrovert and doing it this way. – Mm, maybe.
– Maybe. – Okay, but you can agree. You're the worst FOMO ever, right? – Is it me or Will Tribe? Let's be honest. Let's be honest. – Yes, sure, sure, okay, fair enough. (Kyle laughs)
You might be tied.

Okay, cool. Let's let's finish things off asking some questions about Chiang Mai. One of the questions
I'm getting from people in the YouTube community are asking, so what's up a Chiang Mai? What's it like living
here, stuff like that? – I think it's a life
and business level up. At least the opportunity is there.

You still do have to put in the effort. I mean, you can't just
show up and be like, "Okay, Chiang Mai, give it to me." You still have to be in that. But the quality of life you
can have here is amazing. And then there are so
many high-level people within digital marketing that
you can become friends with, again, by going to the events. We have a weekly SEO meetup.

It blows my mind that there are people in town that don't come. – Sure. – At least just sit there.
– Yeah, absolutely. – Like at a minimum. I mean, people are giving
away great information. They're talking about SEO. People are bringing up good
questions, and it's all levels. There are beginners to advance, but everyone is very, very helpful. So again, this goes
back to the whole thing. If you need something, I
know I could ask somebody. Like I need this, I know
that there's a resource that I could go to and
actually get that thing. And it's about going to it. So Chiang Mai has that opportunity.

I would bet, I moved from Phoenix. I'm confident that like per capita, or at least within the
capita, there are more SEOs. The SEO count is higher in Phoenix, but the community is so strong here. And the resources that are
instantly available to you here are so much greater. – Cool. What made you move to Chiang
Mai in the first place? Like why did you decide to leave Phoenix? – It was that idea of,
think about what I want, and so I'm thinking about
my businesses and my career, and I want it to be with the A-players. I want to be around
people that will push me, and then also be in a community that I know that I can
instantly plug into, be in that place where
decisions are being made, choices are being made,
things are actually happening. And so Chiang Mai was the spot. I think most people
would agree, it's really, if not the hotspot, it's
one of the top five, I think, digital marketing
hotspots in the world.

– Yeah, I like how you put the moniker, digital marketing hotspot,
'cause it's not just SEO. I think one of the great things is, we go to dinners quite frequently with our group of friends
and stuff like that. And we've got people that have
exited e-commerce businesses. We've got SAS friends. It's
it's all over the board. We've got people in
generations older than us, people in generations younger than us. So we get to see the whole
gambit, all the time. And one thing I like about it personally is you never encounter a non
entrepreneur in Chiang Mai. Everyone's an entrepreneur. So everyone's speaking
worlds of possibility. Everyone's talking about
like what they're gonna build and stuff like that. It's a different conversation
than I have in the states.

Not that I have anything
wrong with the states, but I like to be in
the realm of creativity and possibility as much as I can. – That's a great point. I'd
never thought about that. I think practically it's
because everyone has to be. Because you can't have a visa working physically within Thailand. So it has to be online. So if a foreigner is in Thailand,
they are working online, and nearly all of those are
entrepreneurial in some form. – Yeah. One big fear I have,
before anyone moves here, and this happens every single time, is because most people
experience Chiang Mai during Chiang Mai SEO conference,
and then that's insane.

There's 800 people and everywhere you go, no matter what restaurant
or coffee shop it is, there's a CEO's there. And I feel like it gives
people a fake opinion of what Chiang Mai is like. So I get super worried
when people move here. Definitely worried when
you were moving here. I was like, "Oh, is he gonna like it? Is he gonna be disappointed?" But what have your thoughts been so far? – I think it's exceeded expectations. I knew it was gonna be, I was pretty confident
it was gonna be good, but it's been fantastic. Maybe during the conference because there's 800 SEOs at the conference and there's probably another
800 that are just in town because at any given point in time, maybe you could reach somebody and grab, "Are you an SEO, or do you to do it?" And they would say yes.

Maybe you can't do that now,
but there's still so many. It's an absurd number of people. but I didn't ponder it for a while, but I think you hit the nail on the head that it's because they work
here, and to work here, you have to be doing
something not in Thailand. And as a result, that's why everyone here is in digital marketing in some form. And the infrastructure
here is really good. So the Internet's great. I work at a coworking spot
most days of the week. And that's really, really good. I mean, the guy next to
me, he has a whole like, who's calling me site, you know? And it's based out of the UK and Spain. And so he's working in digital marketing, but he's doing something nowhere near anything that I would ever do. He's in the backend figuring
out if it's a spam call, I guess, I don't know. And then, so talk to him
about what he's doing.

That gives me ideas, inspiration. It's just cool. And when you're around successful people, you become more successful. You're pushed to be more successful. And so that's all still here, even though maybe it's slightly smaller than during the conference, they're still here in high quantities. – Sure. Give us a list of ridiculous things you've outsourced here in Chiang Mai. – Yeah, if you're an SEO
and you like optimization, you can optimize your life
here, I think, in a big way. – It's a little bit
embarrassing, but go head. – The big one is I have a driver, so she drives me around
Monday through Friday, pretty much as much as I
want wherever I wanna go. And that's from say like maybe 8:00 AM to around 6:00 or 7:00 PM. I try to keep it, not that late for her, but she would go later. But the thing is, he's
not just a driver though. I would liken her to
like a valet in the 1800s or like a private secretary
that they had back in the day, where the person that travels with you and like takes care of everything for you.

So like she's a fixer. I don't know where to find this because in the US I would
get it at this store, but that store doesn't exist. Where do I get it? She's like, "Oh, I'll find it. We lost a package once. Like it was mailed in
and it was just gone. And I gave her the number, and she's just screaming into the phone. And then five minute later, she was like, "Okay, I found your
package. It's in Bangkok. It's gonna be here tomorrow." I was like, "Yes!" That's awesome. So she is unbelievable and huge. I have a full-time housekeeper. She's 8:30 to 4:30 every day. Cleans the whole house,
does all the laundry. So she runs errands, she go to the store, and she also will cook
as many meals as we want. So we can have a full-time
cook if you want. We actually get tired of it (laughs). How terrible is that, right? Like, "Ah." – You're going to hell. – I know, I know. I'm okay with that.

That occurred to me the
other day, I was like, "I don't think my next life
is gonna be as good as this. (laughs) This might be the pinnacle." We have a part-time nanny
'cause I have a son. We could have a full-time nanny. Everyone that has a small child has a basically full-time nanny. I have a personal trainer. I
have a private doctor in town. There's a masseuse that
comes to the house. There's a person does
manicures and pedicures for us. They come to the house. We did a private party, not too long ago, and we got a local chef in. We just contacted somebody, like, "Hey, do you know a chef?" And we got this up and coming chef that's about to get his own restaurant.

And he cooked in an amazing
six, seven course meal in our home. – It was awesome.
– Unbelievable. – Just awesome. – Yeah, just all that kind
of stuff is just silly. – Yeah. Yeah, it's silly. It's embarrassing. But if it's here for the taking, if we got to take advantage of it, and really everything you listed off, it's not that expensive. You're looking at maybe 1 to
1.5 K extra for all of these.

– Exactly, right. I mean the private doctor,
how stupid is this. I go in and consult with
him, and it costs 200 bahts. That's like six bucks. (both laugh) I think he wasn't trained in the US, but I think he was
trained in like Singapore or something like that. It's not like he just
got his medical degree in some back alley somewhere and now was claiming to be a doctor. Like he's an actual doctor. $6 a visit. – That's crazy.

Well, dude, let's start to wrap this up. First, I wanna just
wanna say thanks so much, but I've got a couple
more questions first. What kind of pieces of advice do you have for new SEOs just starting out and wanna get your level of success, wanna go down a path that you have? – I mean, you actually have to do SEO. I see people worrying about SEO, and worrying about SEO and doing SEO are two very, very different things. And a lot of people are
like, "Should I do this? They post, "Should I do this or that?" And it's okay to ask questions,
and I think you should, but you should also come up with a way for you to find the answer yourself. Because then you can, like if you ask a question in the future, you can determine if it's BS or not, 'cause you have a framework of
what you know actually works and what doesn't. So put up some test sites. They don't have to be
like Lorem Ipsum sites, if you don't want, but
put up a hobby site.

And then when you hear
about a new technique, now you've got a site you can go do it on before you are doing it on
something you really care about. So do SEO. Be in it. If you wanna be a speaker, I think you definitely have to do SEO, because you wanna come up
with new things every year, and you wanna talk about new topics, and you can see the
speakers that are doing SEO, because they're coming up with new stuff, and you can see the speakers that are not. And I think also you wanna be
able to back up your claims. I had somebody, someone was
arguing with me about something, and I said, "Okay, well,
here's what I did." And I showed my stuff. "Now, can you show what you've got?" And they called that a low blow. It was a low blow that I asked them to show what they were talking about. – All right, cool. Final question. If POP, Surfer and Cora
went to a parking lot to have a fist fight who would win? – Well, if it's on processing power alone, Cora is gonna kick our
because Cora is so ridiculous that you have to run it on
your own computer (laughs).

It won't run in the cloud so if it's based off
of that, I'll go Cora. – Okay, Sounds good. All right, well, thanks
again for your time and thanks again for being so open. I guess I'll see you later this week. – Sounds good. I appreciate it. – Take care, man. Peace..

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