SEO Advice from SurveyMonkey Director of SEO and Growth, Eli Schwartz

All righty! Let's jump right into it. So, first question: does SEO still matter in 2018, or can companies ignore it and focus on other channels?

So, this is a question I get asked a lot, and I've been asked this question in many years past, and sometimes the quoted answer could have been maybe. But now I definitively think that SEO absolutely matters and will matter even more. The primary reason is companies were using other channels to drive acquisition, and startups could start the company and think of, say, PR or paid media. They've raised the money, they use paid media to generate buzz and generate new clients, but those channels have now gotten significantly more expensive. Brand CPCs on AdWords have gone up; Facebook has made it a lot harder to get organic reach, and now you're paying for traffic on Facebook. PR, in our world where we want to measure everything, it's not as measurable.

And then what happens is companies do spend a bunch of money on those different channels. They're maximizing their paid budgets on Google, they're maximizing their paid budgets on Facebook, they may even go into Bing and say, "Hey, maybe I have some potential market opportunity on Bing." And then they're like, "What's next?"

What they do is they look in their analytics tools; they're like, "All right, we've got a breakdown of the channels. We've got a list of traffic. Don't know anything about that channel. What to do to get more?" We have referral traffic; those are outbound deals. Some of those people link to us, and some of those things we did intentionally. We have our paid channel; great, we know what we're doing there. Organic, so this is an untapped channel; we don't know how. What we did? We followed some best practices, we read "SEO for Dummies," we did what we thought was right, driving business, very little investment. And then they think maybe if we invest in it now, we'll get so much more, and we'll intentionally be working on this channel.

So I think that's where we are in 2018: like this is the untapped channel. This is the channel which has been driving business for free, and now companies put effort into it, and it'll actually generate significant returns.

Mmm, and where should they get started? Say they are at just like the bare minimum— you know, they have a little bit of content, maybe a blog or something. But where should they really focus their energy in the beginning?

It really depends on the kind of company. So if it's an e-commerce company, they want to think about architecture. Companies in any e-commerce company thinking about SEO should have thought about SEO before they chose their e-commerce platform. So they want to make sure the site is structured properly to scale.

So what do you do if, like, you get a new distributor and now you're ready to add 10,000 products and your website can't handle 10,000 products? Now you're going to load it up, and each URL's going to be one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The next one is one, two, three, four, five, six, eight. So that's not going to scale for SEO; you're not going to have any way of putting in your right product descriptions and optimizing against likely competitors that are selling the same products.

So that's e-commerce; they should focus on good architecture or should have focused on good architecture long before. Media, that's kind of different. That's where they can look at what has worked for them in the past, and my favorite search tool is Google Search Console because it's from Google. It may or may not be as accurate as it can be, but it's probably more accurate than other tools which are sort of projecting what the actual truth is.

Using that tool, they can see what's working: "Here's what we're getting traffic on." Then marry that data with analytics: "Here's what's actually performing and converting for us." That's where they should double down: build more content there, build more conversion elements on that, and expand.

Mmm-hm, who's doing it really well?

I think media companies have actually gotten around to doing this really well. The way they cross-link and just have every sort of page possible... So you take like an item in the news today; they've got all these cross-links to things they've written in the past, which suddenly can become relevant to the searcher. It's not newsworthy anymore, but if someone searches it, like hey, maybe they want to hear about a cow that got struck by lightning four years ago. There's a display ad, so I think media has got around to like really maximizing the value of their content.

When it comes to e-commerce, it's really only Amazon that's doing it amazing. Amazon has, like, you know, built a structure where every single product, and they have billions of SKUs, somehow is discovered by the search engines. If you manage to put in the right keywords that match that right product, you will find it.

And what are the— okay, so let's be a little bit more specific. So what are the exact mechanisms they're using to be crawlable? So for the most important thing when it comes to SEO and making sure that your site is somewhat optimized for SEO is that the site is fully crawlable—so no orphan pages.

Amazon has built this structure where no matter what the product is, it may be something that there's only two customers in the world for that product, it is somehow cross-linked. If Google drops their bot anywhere within the site, it will crawl the whole site. It may take a long time, but it will find that page. That's where anybody that wants to do this right has to think about, like, what is this thing that I'm putting on, whether it's an article or a product—like what is it related to—to make sure that there's a path for that page to be found by users.

That's where Amazon's doing an amazing job, making sure there is taxonomy for every single page. Every page is discovered and can be ranked around relevant queries.

So in the context of a company that's not an e-commerce company, would you recommend using plugins to display relevant content to link to other pages or building your own? How would you actually set up that architecture?

So for media, the article, you can use a plug-in because all you're trying to do is create relevance and get links. If users click it, great; if they don't click it, okay. But like, things should be built for users.

Okay, when it comes to e-commerce, there has to be a good plug-in or something built internally because you're not going to want to have, like, say, a red sweater cross-linked over to like a dog leash.

Yeah, right. So like that's where a plug-in that sort of, you know, correlates between hey red and here's a red dog leash, that's not going to work. So you might want to build something internally. Again, media, like what a lot of media companies do is they're just sort of looking for relationships.

One thing I found to be very effective for cross-linking is just randomization. So if you randomize your URLs, make sure that provided your randomization algorithm is correct, every single URL ends up being cross-linked. If users click it, great; if they don't end up clicking, you still have achieved that level of cross-linking that Google can discover it.

So just literally random pieces of content, or products, added in there. Products not so much, because there is a user experience to that. When it comes to articles, it will work really well because, you know, again, someone's reading some article—they're reading about, you know, something that, you know, President Trump said today, and there's an article about, you know, somebody getting struck by lightning. They may click it, and it could be relevant. And, you know, who's to say that we shouldn't— that's not not a matter of article; that might be interesting.

Yeah, oh, I think that will always be interesting.

What about paying for links on other sites?

That's an absolute no-no, according to Google. However, people still do it, and they're doing it through like a business development relationship. If it's done purely just to get the SEO link, okay, then it's not advisable because you know someone could report that to Google, and you don't want to go down that path of buying links.

It seems like there are so many of these don't-do-these no-nos. What are the other things people should absolutely watch out for?

The big one is, is anything that you're not comfortable talking about, maybe to your mother. So like, you know, hiding text at the bottom of the page, so you're building a bunch of content like—you know, if it's not something you're going to be proud of, that's probably something you shouldn't do. If it's something, the way Google really puts it, if you're doing it exclusively to rank for SEO, then that's probably something you shouldn't do. They have a bunch of rules around that.

But really, like there's nothing you should be doing that's just for crawlers, okay? It should all be for users. You know, maybe if there's some relevance for hidden text on a page for users, you might have an explanation, right?

Okay, and then are there things that were maybe quite useful in the past that are no longer relevant? Like I'm thinking, like, you know, meta keywords or stuff like that. Are there things that are kind of just like no longer useful?

So meta keywords is a great example of something that's no longer useful. And the reason meta keywords existed is because Google and other search engines actually were relevant at the time; they didn't have a really good way of understanding text. So now we're like in this stage of development around search where Google announced today that Google Home understands Spanish. So, like, the understanding of spoken words and their understanding—well, it's not even in English, so you know, they don't need you to put meta keywords on a page to say where you're trying to rank for. But back then, when you know search was early, they kind of did. Google was more advanced than other search engines, as they were able to determine what the page is about.

Mm-hmm, however like meta keywords were still a signal of like maybe what's on the page. Of course, marketers can spam that by putting like what they thought would be the most relevant words, which were usually porn. But yeah, that's what people were searching for.

And what about actually—so we obviously, this is on YouTube. When YouTube asks for keywords, do you recommend people use those?

I mean, like we use them, but to a limited extent. So YouTube's different because Google's not great at really understanding what the video is about. Yeah, so by giving more information, and it could even be a transcription, it's those keywords that you put in—you're giving a better indication of what the video is about. With YouTube, though, it's really hard to guarantee your ranking.

Yeah, so the more information you can give, the more likely you have a chance at playing that game. One other place where keywords are really important, and they're hidden, is when you're trying to rank an app on the App Store.

So one Google—the way they rank an app is based on all the visible text. So it's the name of the app, which is sort of like the title, the short description, which is—forget how many characters—but a shorter paid description of the app, which you see right above the fold, and then the long description, which is thousands of characters, or you just fill in whatever you want. So all of that goes into what Google's going to rank the app on Google Play.

Yeah, on iOS, there are keywords, and I think you have a hundred characters hidden. So if you're trying to rank an app on, like, you know, let's say selling something random, but you think that people are going to search for keywords, that's where you would hide it. No one would even know that's what you're trying to rank on.

Oh man, okay, gotcha. And so when it comes to actually like building out your SEO, like what is the kind of content that's important? Because, you know, we talk about content marketing, we talked about it in podcasts before, we've talked about it in the context of YC and other companies, and oftentimes people just kind of copy what other companies are doing, and, you know, it's not always the most effective strategy.

So how do you frame like what's the most important content to be working on for your company, whatever that might be?

So content—something that people have talked about forever. In the headers, they think content is king, and they've used it for, like you said, content marketing. But really, that's something that we always need to underscore when it comes to SEO, is because people stop using content. If you fill up a page with images or video or JavaScript, you no longer have content.

So Google, as much as they say they're really good at understanding and ranking JavaScript, they're not because in real time, when they're looking for your content, you are handicapping yourself by not having just raw text words on the page.

So when it comes to like SEO, content—raw text words on a page. So, and you know, it's not really a truism that more is better, but it sort of is because if you have a product description and you only have a hundred words, and that somebody else has the same product, but they have a thousand words in different ways of describing the product, more than likely, they will get more search traffic because as people search different keywords related to it, they become relevant because they've used the words and you're not relevant because you have not used the words.

So in that sense, more keywords are better. More keywords or more words are better. More words are not better if all you're doing is filling up that word with emptiness—like if you're describing, you know, a mug and you describe many different ways, like this is a mug that is a cup that you can drink, or you can, you know, pour things in, and there are all these irrelevant keywords—that's sort of a waste of time, and it won't convert for you because users are going to read that; they're going to realize they're just going to be super confused.

But if that's where people add in, like, reviews and that sort of thing for e-commerce, so reviews can be tough too because Google can understand that it's user-generated reviews and it may not be as high-quality, but that's something where, like, I don't know—those are one of those things where you have to take that question and test it from an SEO standpoint, like if I had reviews on this, am I going to rank more on different keywords and get more traffic, or is Google going to look at that and say user-generated, and not send more traffic for the content that's in the review?

Gotcha, okay. So then what about, you know, your consumer company that’s not an e-commerce company, and you want to get into generating content that will drive traffic for you? Where do you start? And then let’s go through the actual workflow—let’s think of an example company; they're selling a service.

So you want to come up with anything related to that service, and the content is two-fold. The first kind of content you're going to need is the closest to that service. Let's say the service is plumbing; you're just a good old-fashioned plumber. So you offer different services that people need, like unclogging drains.

So you want to have a piece of content that talks about unclogging drains. Now, when people search, and this is something where you don't really need to rank on unclog drains anymore because Google is very local. So if you're in San Francisco and you're a plumber, and someone searches unclog drains, you now have a much higher chance of ranking on unclog drains than Roto-Rooter, which is just national. By adding your—dress your guests; your address should be there, and you need to have some sort of local signage.

But Google’s going to show for unclogged drains; that’s a need, a plumbing need right now. Google doesn’t help to even show someone not in your area, okay? So you want to have that piece of content.

Now, as you build out that content, you can move further up the buying funnel, which is right now I have an immediate problem under clogged drains, but how do I make sure I never have a clogged drain? You can have best practices and how to maintain your plumbing.

So as you build out this fuller site, it can even go into like how do you hire someone to renovate your house and make sure you have quality plumbing, and what’s the kind of piping you should choose, and let's say you're going to buy it yourself where should you buy it?

So there are many, many different avenues of content, all related to your original service, which helps you establish yourself as an expert in plumbing.

Yeah, I mean, and pipes and clogged drains. But how are you actually—so if the angle is like it’s just taste, like it’s just opinion, and you figure out, like if you really understand your customer, you can know all these things. But is there a more programmatic way to be like, okay, customers that end up on our site are looking for XYZ thing? How do you find out those terms, those queries?

So you won't know until you start. So the best way is using Google Search Console. You can see the kinds of things people are looking for if you don’t have that content. So say you've had a great piece of content on clogged drains, but everyone searching about like unclogged bathroom sink—like that's the specific thing they're looking for and you don't have a piece of content on unclogging bathroom sink.

Yeah, time to write that piece of content.

Now, before you start, what you can do is you can go to the Google Keyword tool—I think it's called the Google Keyword Planner. Now they keep changing it, so if you're in the Google Keyword Planner and you're searching for keywords related to what you need, so you're looking for drains, you're looking for clogs, you're looking for unclog—and that should give you a bunch of ideas along with search volume about what people are looking for.

You can also use my favorite paid SEO tool, which is called A Hrefs; they also have a keyword tool. So you're getting ideas, and from there, you want to sort of battle-test those ideas by launching them and seeing what kind of traffic comes in, seeing how it performs.

Like maybe you have this great page on unclogging drains, and all people do is learn and never fill out a lead or never call your phone number. And are you tracking that through Google Analytics? Are you using other tools? What do you recommend?

Analytics would be my favorite tool for tracking how their performance is going on as far as traffic coming in.

Yeah, so even though you can't see the keywords people are searching on Analytics, you can see the URLs. So you look at the URL that's generating traffic; you see the conversions—hopefully you've tagged your goals in Analytics—and you see the conversions that come through, and you know what's your best-performing content.

Now, you can take that same URL, put it into the Google Search Console, and then see the kinds of keywords you’re even getting impressions on. If there are keywords that are getting impressions on but people aren't clicking, that’s an area of optimization. If your keywords that you're getting impressions on, people are clicking but not converting, that’s another area of optimization. So it’s very iterative; you’re starting with getting ideas, maybe starting with keywords, building it, and then learning from the planning from what you're getting.

So you said that it's important to have raw text on the page—that's the easiest to parse for, you know, Google—and now there are things that are crawling your site. How do images affect all this, and are they important at all?

So the most important thing to consider with SEO is that you're doing this for users. Yeah, you're doing this because users are going to use Google, then find your website on Google, and then click through into your website, and then hopefully experience your website and do whatever you want them to do—whether you're generating revenue from ad impressions, you want them to click another page; if you're generating leads, you want them to fill out the lead for them; if you are selling a product, you want them to buy it or whatever that is.

So images help with that user experience. So if all you're doing is putting text on the page, none of us like to look at raw walls of text. So the images in that sense should fit in with their user experience.

But there is an SEO aspect to that, and that is people like Google Images is one of the largest—if you want to think about it as a separate search engine—it's one of the largest search engines after Google.

Mm-hmm, I think YouTube is number two, but Google Images is definitely up there. So if you put images on the page, one thing you can do is make sure the images are titled. So the actual JPEG file or PNG file are tagged with the keyword. So say you’re selling coffee mugs, you want to call it like coffee-mugs.jpg and not just some random file name that came from the camera.

Mm-hmm. You also want to put alt tags or alt text around the actual image, which is still needed in today's day. But Google eventually will figure out what images are like; yes, figure out images are. Alt text is the version of meta keywords—like meta keywords used to be—so Google didn't know or doesn't know what the images are, so you're saying with images?

Yeah, and that helps you rank. The actual ranking formula for Google Images is really, really hard to discern, but if you follow best practices, like you have this chance of, you know, people searching, and then there's this additional avenue of people finding content.

Yeah, well, it seems like Pinterest has been the one who unlocked that, right? Like if many things I search for and I click through, I end up on Pinterest, and I'm forced to log in. So that's essentially them doing a great job of SEO around the images.

And then they have these unique images, and they show up on Google.

However, there is something interesting about your Pinterest question, which is Google specifically does not like search within search. Google would much prefer that you don't go to Pinterest, that you go directly to where that image is. But maybe that site didn't do a great job of optimizing the image, but Pinterest did, so now Pinterest is that layer in between.

Mm-hmm. So if you just sort of follow best practices like Pinterest does, now you’re skipping the middleman, and they’re coming directly.

Are there best practices around, you know, like technical aspects, like literal resolution of the image—anything like that?

Not as far as I know.

Okay. It’s really raw, and sort of like put your alt text in; you could put a title around the image and caption it. Yeah, just give—there's also relevancy, so like the kind of page that they mention sort of gives more signals.

But for now, I don't know that Google is really looking into the quality of the image, and they're not yet— I don't think throughout a place—but their understanding with images and then choosing to rank it.

Gotcha, okay. And so say, all right, so now we've built out our content site—let's keep with like San Francisco plumbing—and we've made, you know, 20 blog posts about whatever we think someone might be searching for.

When it comes to distribution, are there any like non-intuitive pro tips that you would recommend? Like are you suggesting people start getting paid traffic through their sites, or do they just leave them up and hope for organic?

You can't hope for organic; you can wait like years for the organic traffic to show. You need to be proactive about that. However, in the meantime, and yeah, actually like when your organic strategy should start when you put up the website.

So in the meantime, you can be generating paid traffic, and then organic has time to grow into a—until organic becomes an important channel for you. We’re sharing things on Facebook or sharing things even with friends and family helps, is that if you've created content—let’s say again on the San Francisco plumbing—you've created the best guide in the world about how to unclog your drains, and you share that on Facebook, now other people may share that too with their friends and people see that.

And then someone out there is going to decide that, you know, they're writing a blog about DIY, and they just have to link and recommend this blog post that you've written or article that you've written about unclogging drains. And that's how you're getting links and you're starting the distribution of that for, again, and from there, Google discovers it.

You can also go and, like it— you know, as you build your website, so, you know, it's a service website—get yourself listed on all the directories.

So, you know, Chamber of Commerce and other directories for your neighborhood. So the directories don't really give links, but they give avenues for discovery. And then as you get discovery, you can generate links.

So a pretty common question in word around SEO is links, link building—all that kind of stuff. Is it important? And if so, how would you go about doing it?

So links are what differentiate Go when Google first came out. So at the time, there was Yahoo and a bunch of other crawlers and indexers and search engines, if you want to call them that. And what Google did differently is they ranked a site based on the quality of the links, and it was sort of academic.

Like if you were an academic and you've come out with something interesting, other academics were going to cite you. So Google determined that if you were—and they had this PageRank patent and algorithm—that if you were quality and other people, other websites would link to you, so that was how Google sort of grew into that.

And then, of course, people spammed it; they bought links and they did a bunch of spammy things to get links and traded links and all that. Links are still very important, but they're not important in the sense they used to be where people measure them by quantity.

Like my competitor has a hundred links to this page; I need 101 links, and if I get 101 links, that will guarantee I rank ahead of them. So that doesn't work anymore. What you need are quality and relevant links, and it could only be a handful of links, and that’s all you need.

What Google's doing is this is the algorithm borrowing a sort of link equity from the pages that link to you. You can make your page more valuable and relevant for all the other queries that people might find you.

So it doesn't have to be like this page, say Stanford, is talking about metaphysics, and you're talking about plumbing. Therefore, you can only rank on metaphysics because metaphysics is linking, right? But like that link value is helping you rank better on plumbing because if Stanford thinks you're a good plumber, you might be a good plumber, right?

Now where I like to do link building, and where it's the most effective, is to create interesting content. This is sort of where SEO goes hand-in-hand with PR. You're creating interesting content that people might want to talk about, and then from there, people might also want to link to it.

One good metric of measuring if you're on par is do people share about it on Facebook? What do they like it? Because if they—the motivation to like something is the same as the motivation to link in.

Something one—if you have a website, so the most successful link building campaign I ever did wasn't even really an intentional link building campaign. I was living in Singapore; I did a survey with a company, or an agency that measured the cleanliness and satisfaction of people around bathrooms.

And I heard called the restroom association of Singapore, and we created this survey, and I created a bunch of interesting questions around people’s bathroom habits, which is something people are always interested in. From that survey, I turned it into an infographic and a blog post, and then just kind of put it out there, and I basically got links from every single media site within English—media site within Southeast Asia, and even got translated into other languages.

And that just—that was like what—like they were mentioning it and they were just providing due credit back to the original source with a link. So if you're doing creative things and you're doing good PR, that’s sort of like a good SEO effort because you’re getting that link to that content.

How many links you need still?

We wouldn’t know.

Where do those links need to come from?

Like that, you know, you can’t know. But if you're working on these processes and making sure each page is linked, then you're doing what's necessary to get that link value into each page.

Mmm, and are you spending time and energy and money on PR itself, or do you just mean like hopefully organic traffic?

Yeah, so I'm thinking of this as like PR mindedness rather than actual PR. From my experience, the PR people I've worked with, they don't necessarily do things for SEO. So I've even worked with a PR agency where, like, they were proud of an article that showed up in—or an article that was in print, and they gave me the PDF. That did nothing for SEO, obviously.

I mean, they just—yeah, yeah. But if they’re doing something where there’s actually a link over a mention, with like, here's a credit back to the source, that would be a link, and that would be valuable for us.

Yeah, okay. And then as an individual, like thought leader type person thinking about link building, do you recommend people go out and like, you know, blog on other sites? Is that still an effective strategy?

It is an effective strategy as long as it’s not spammy. And I got an accidental sort of link—probably the best link I ever got to my blog is I was working with a professor at Stanford; he invited me to his class in an interesting seminar—not passionate about things related—there's an interesting seminar.

And he asked me to do him a favor and take notes, and I got this idea that if I took notes, maybe I could turn it into a blog post. And if I turn it into a blog post, maybe he’ll publish it. And I, you know, asked him if that would—that was something he'd be interested in doing, and he did. And now I have a blog post on Stanford's website linking back to my personal blog.

So that is a guest post, but there's nothing spammy about that.

Like this was content the professor needed, and that's something that can be repeated. Anywhere professors are like anybody— they can be baited in with by their egos, and you can write content about them, and they're very likely would link from their third classroom web pages.

Well, also if you just make something good—like this is something that is overlooked time and time and time again. It's like make something good.

Yeah, that is the underlying fate of ingredient anything related to SEO.

Okay, good content will get good likes.

Yeah, perfect.

And so how much time do you give yourself to really test an idea and test to see that something's working?

It depends on the scale of the idea. So when it comes to a piece of content and the website's brand new, could you have a really, really long time to know if that content's resonating?

To get ideas around it, how many years?

Does that mean it could be a year?

Okay, but if like, you know, it's a going concern—say, you know, it's Y Combinator—you've already got a ton of traffic. You know that you put something up; it's instantly going to get found, people are going to search for it; that could happen in a matter of weeks.

Mm-hmm, okay.

And what about all this in the context of mobile? Like, I know the habits are very different, so there's a lot of talk about mobile-first and Google moving to mobile-first.

Mm-hmm, and within that what people forget is that there's still only 24 hours in a day. So yes, we've been on our mobile devices all our waking hours, but more than 8 of those waking hours, we’re actually at a desktop or laptop.

So we're on a larger device, so it's not that we shouldn't optimize for the desktop anymore. It's just that you need to consider mobile and need to consider user behavior.

There are many, many products that are probably never going to be bought on mobile, like probably no one’s going to buy enterprise software on a mobile device. And I highly doubt, at least in our first-world economy, people are going to book their entire vacation on a mobile device.

You know, probably like, you know, do a little searching, and you know, while you’re sitting on the train, where should I go? What should I see? But like before you shell out thousands of dollars, there’s a desktop involved.

Or, you know, if you’re doing, let’s say, Black Friday shopping, you may read some emails around things around Black Friday deals; you may do some searching on your phone, but before you go and buy like a brand-new TV, you’re gonna go to a desktop site, look at that, and look at as many images as you can. Read reviews, possibly even purchase it on the desktop.

So yes, Mobile is growing; we need to take it—we need to consider mobile users—but not at the expense of desktop users.

So with that in mind, what are the best practices to account for both when it comes to SEO?

Not much. It's really taken into account that there's a smaller screen, and people are clicking through on search from a smaller screen. And then the biggest thing that you really need to keep in mind is that it's not about ranking in the top ten results. You actually have to rank in the top three results.

And you just try harder because of mobile devices. You know, there's just less results.

Yeah, I mean that does seem to be the permanent challenge, right? Like getting from the second page to the first page and then to the top of the page.

Do you have any—mean, obviously like you've written about this pretty extensively online, but like what are your pro tips?

So rates really matching user intent. So as we discussed, like the user is the most important. So understanding the user and getting in the user's head and finding the queries that the user will search for to find your content.

So it’s not about like what do I need to do to be in the first page because that's like a very vague goal. You want to be in the first page for what your specialty is.

No, our plumber specialty is unclogging drains that are very old, so they—that only matters, and they can charge—let's say that plumber can charge a lot of money for their specialty. So that's what they want to be in the first page for.

Write a lot of content for that specialty; make sure they're found on mobile devices in the first couple results on the desktop, and for sure the first couple results.

But just generally ranking for like this broad term, that's very hard to do. And if you’re not a big brand, it may even be a brand if you can’t spend against it, like a lot of cash.

Yes, and in the international context, how do you think about getting to that? Assuming that you have a clear intent, say you're going to franchise your San Francisco plumbing business is going to open up in Beijing—what should you be thinking about?

So international is the untapped opportunity in SEO, but it will probably remain untapped for a long time because the products and services most American-centric or English-centric websites offer aren’t necessarily relevant for a global audience.

You can take a couple of steps into becoming relevant. So say you’re e-commerce, if you partner with a company that can enable shipping to other countries, so you don’t actually need to do the shipping yourself.

You just need to make sure you get yourself listed or make whatever integration you need necessary in order to get things out to other countries if customers want to buy. At least you’ve enabled that.

You can also take other sort of payment, like work with a payment provider that may be able to take other currencies. It may come into you as dollars, but you just want to work with that gateway that can take the pound or take the euro, because if you’re just working with a standard payment gateway, like if someone doesn’t have a U.S. credit card, they can’t advance.

Okay, so that’s an opportunity just to expand a little bit. Maybe if you have an audience in another country, that's where you can take one step forward into SEO where say you have that audience in Beijing, you might want to create one page about your product in Chinese and then people will discover it, click through, and that’s an experiment I’ve tried in the past.

Where like you localize a page, you have your CTAs in that local language, click the CTA, and then bang, you’re in English.

Mm-hmm, so you’re obviously—you're kind of filtering out a lot of people, but you’re also going to get people through that where, you know, if they may be a potential, you know, customer of your product, they would still go through that funnel.

So you’ve broadened your appeal; you’ve broadened your potential base by having your content translated, and you can potentially get more customers at the bottom of the funnel.

All right, yeah. In general, international is a huge opportunity, but probably not relevant for most companies.

Hmm, okay. And so let's use YC as an example, right? All of our content is in English, it's at Y Combinator dot com. Right? Do you build another website with a separate top-level domain, or do you add, you know, Chinese translated content to your main blog? What do you do?

So you used to be best practices where you would build another website for customers in another country. I no longer think that's the best practice.

Okay, and the reason—I’ve tested this a few times—and the reason behind that best practice is that users trust something local more. So a UK user is going to trust a code UK. Google actually hides URLs in search, to begin with, and you can’t— you know, they test it sometimes—it comes in, sometimes it comes out. On mobile, you don’t see the URL at all, so that doesn’t matter. Users don’t even know that you’re com versus code UK.

So with that in mind, you have a great website already; why would you split your efforts and create a new website?

So what you’re going to do is you just want to open up a new directory that’s very explicitly another language, and you want to follow the two-letter naming convention or the three-letter naming convention, so Google understands exactly what it is.

So if you’re going to Chinese, I think it would be zh for Chinese. If you’re going—if you’re going to UK, it would be UK or GB.

Mm-hmm, so Google understands that localization aspect of like, "Hey, this is hard to get it somewhere else."

Mm-hmm. You wouldn’t want to go to like, you know, say Spanish and just, you know, do SP-ES, that would be hard for Google to understand.

And with that, you’re doing a subdirectory, not a subdomain.

Hmm, okay. And then you are just having your content machine translated? Are you paying for translators? What are you doing?

Again, user-centric. If content is machine-translated, the machines have to be very, very good.

Yeah, if it's very good and it's not that important content, then that should probably work. If you really want to get users through funnel and you want to make sure there’s no misunderstandings, you should hire local people to translate for you.

Okay, so, you know, in the context—let's use YC as an example. It's pretty easy. You would just take, say, like our top 100 blog posts, pay for a translator who's like native in Chinese or Spanish or whatever it might be, post it on the act of Y Combinator dot com site in a new subdirectory dedicated just for Chinese?

Right, okay.

And then, meaning like a new subdirectory on the blog, not a subdomain?

Right, okay.

And link that through the nav on the blog?

What’s the best practice there?

So you could do it through the nav on the blog, but it may confuse your existing English users. What most people would do is have some sort of language selector at the top or the bottom of the page.

Mmm-hmm, again, with the user mind. And the language selector should be an HTML link which switches over to that new directory.

Mmm-hmm. What you don’t want that to be is a JavaScript link where it sort of reloads the page and brings up the new content, because—and Google possibly couldn’t follow it.

Mmm-hmm, okay. And so all the content is actually there.

All the content?

Well, so all the content you've translated is there, right?

So you don’t want to have any sort of automated like I change—I'm changing, let’s say EN, to automatically CH or something?

Okay, gotcha.

And then in terms of appearing on separate search engines across multiple languages, what are the best practices for that?

So there really are no other important search engines in the world. I mean, they're locally specific. So there's Baidu for Chinese, so if you care about China, then it's Baidu. If you care about Korea, it's Naver.

And other than that, I mean, it’s Bing and wherever Bing has penetration. So if you’re following best practices for Google, that should help you rank on Bing. That doesn’t necessarily help you rank on Baidu, and that's for China-specific reasons.

Mm-hmm. In order to rank on Baidu, you actually need Chinese hosting. And the reason for that is, obviously, China has censorship. And Baidu is concerned that you're not—if you're not local, they don't want to take responsibility for your content. If you're local, you're already complying with laws on what kind of content you can have because you're local.

Mm-hmm, so if you’re not local, you're going to see a huge rankings hit. Your website will be significantly slower, obviously. You know, getting behind the Chinese firewall.

Yeah, so if you care about China, there’s a lot of things you need to do. It may even be advisable for China, again, this is China-specific, not Chinese language, to have a separate Chinese domain because to have that Chinese domain, you're again complying with the laws, and Baidu will rank you.

Korea's different. Korea has Naver as a search engine. I don't remember the breakdown of Naver versus Google right now, but what Google used to not be dominant in Korea, and they've been increasing dominance through their Trojan horse of Android.

So Google is obviously very closely partnered with Samsung and LG, you know, Korean companies, and as Korean users use these products, they use Google. Prior to that, Naver—which is a search engine, but it was also sort of like an AOL where they offered everything from forums to chat to blogs and search—there again, their ranking algorithm is very different and sort of rudimentary when it comes to Google.

So unless Korea is a specific target for you, what China is is a specific target. Google is all you're going to need.

Right, okay. So thinking again internationally, like GDPR just happened. What should people have in mind? And like why do you think SEO is important in the context of GDPR?

So I'm in the middle of writing a blog post about GDPR and the benefits for SEO. I think GDPR is one of the greatest things that has ever happened to SEO in the last five years for American companies, for everyone.

Okay, so one of the requirements of GDPR is updating privacy policies. It's why everyone got an email from everybody else they have ever engaged with about a privacy policy update.

Privacy policies also have to be very clearly defined and linked on websites, so now what you have is one-page privacy policy that appears on every single website or every single page of a website. To me, that's the most amazing way of cross-linking through an entire website.

Words in the past, you may have had a tough time of like how do we get users from a homepage over to this deeper page? Now you have this deeper page, which is linked to a privacy policy, and if you know you can involve a sitemap, they need to make sure that privacy policies there, you have one commonality between everything: every single page on a site is a privacy policy.

Mm-hmm. So that's one advantage. The other big advantage is that paid budgets are now going to take a huge hit because of GDPR.

We've gone to this nightmare scenario where you don't know if your paid budgets are working because you can't track users until users agree to be tracked. So if you reduce your paid budget, we're going to put it right. You're the only house, you're going to go and put that as an organic—and you're going to start ramping up for organic efforts.

And then the other thing that I think SEO really benefited from this is paid has always sort of cannibalized SEO because it's everywhere.

Mm-hmm. You may have discovered a website by organic, and then you got retargeted, and maybe you end up converting with paid. With the reduction of paid, SEO might actually get—they're going to see that full-funnel conversion SEO all the way through.

And is this affected how you do like any SEO practices?

Not necessarily. I mean the other benefit to GDPR and SEO is it’s one of the few channels that works without GDPR, like without any opt-ins.

Like Facebook, if you know—I don’t know that the stats are out yet of people refusing to use Facebook because they don’t want opt-in through the privacy policy, maybe they're not in the platform anymore. But you don’t need to agree to Google’s privacy policies and cookie rules in order to use Google.

So you go in Google, you won’t agree to anything, any tracking; you're still now going to search and find websites.

Okay, great. So if someone wants to employ all these tactics, who should they think about hiring? Who should be brought onto the team?

So the people that I found to be the best at SEO are incredibly creative and are very curious. They are able to develop a hypothesis around what should work, and they're basing that on other things they've seen, things they’ve read, things that Google’s talked about. Google, as a whole, guides on SEO best practices—they put out a guide on best practices as well as a guide for their search quality raters of how to evaluate websites, so you can see what Google’s thinking.

So you want someone that can take all that, come up with ideas, but also is incredibly analytical so they can understand what works and learn from past performance of websites and measure their own testing.

So how, say, you’re a startup founder, right? Like maybe you have 10 employees or something like that. How do you even evaluate the applications you might get?

It's sort of hard. You want to look at someone—like I think someone that, you know, was entrepreneurial in the past and demonstrates that creativity. But this is something where, I think, you're—the on-site in-person interview or phone interviews; we ask a lot of questions; it's really where you're going to flesh out their creativity and that analytical ability.

Yeah, looking at a resume, I've looked at many resumes; if people have done SEO, I discover they don’t really know anything about SEO; they’ve just done SEO.

When you talk to someone that would be good in this seat—and it doesn't even have to be someone that's ever done it before—you’re asking them creative questions.

Like how would you solve this? Or like what do you do if you woke up in the morning and your organic traffic disappeared? Like where do you go first? How do you troubleshoot this issue?

And just understand their ideas. They'll make mistakes; everyone's going to make mistakes. But you want someone that you know has that natural curiosity and creativity along with the smarts to really be successful in this.

Actually, what is your answer to that?

That's a great question. Your organic disappears overnight; what do you do?

That's happened to me multiple times. Okay, so the first time it happened to me, I was working for a startup, and I remember the exact date—February 24th. I don’t remember the year, and it was the day Google rolled out the Google Panda update.

So up until this date, which I think he was in 2010, the best way of writing content was to write as much of it as possible and come up with every keyword and rank on everything that you could think of.

And these are the days of email where you actually had guides on how to pour water or how to boil—you know crazy stuff. Anyhow, and may still exist.

So we had a site; I was working with a company, and the company I was at, we had content for every possible iteration. We had an automotive review site, and we had every car, we had every review, we had every picture, and we lost 65% of our traffic one morning.

So at the time, I was measuring rankings. I no longer believe in ever measuring keyword rankings like we discussed; we’re focusing on a user, so it’s not just generic rankings.

I started with looking at our rankings—what we’d ranked on number three the day before we were now at number eighty. And so it started with that, then going into analytics, looking at the URLs that got hit. And then after that, oh crap moment—it looks like this is a Google penalty.

And it wasn't until I’d probably say midday until the blog posts had been out of like hey, whoa, we first put out the blog post like we've gone out and destroyed half the internet!

Who changed the way things work, man?

Okay, that's—and then what did you do to fix it?

So we actually had to rip the band-aid off. So we lost 65% of our traffic; we ripped off, we took down tons of content. We brought it down to like 80 to 90% complete loss of traffic.

So we took it—intentionally took away organic traffic and rebuilt up our high-quality content. We architected everything we were going to do, we ultimately recovered, so we recovered with a 20% gain on what we had in the past.

Hmm, and how long did that take?

That took only six months. We were lucky that we ripped the band-aid off; we were able to do it.

Nowadays, they could happen a lot faster.

Yeah, at the time, we were waiting; we were waiting for Google to rerun that algorithm. Once they reran it, we were back in the good graces.

Now, like things are more automated and algorithmic, where if you got hit by the penalty one day, you cleaned it up, did everything possible, maybe filed a reconsideration request, you can be back in a couple of weeks.

Okay, that's not so bad.

So going back to this person that you're evaluating to be hired for your company—say you pick someone; you think they’re good; you hope they’re good.

How do you set metrics for success? Like how do you set a goal and then how do you measure it, and how do you know if it's working? Like what should you be looking for, and really, like how much time should you give this person?

So if they’re creative, they should be—it should be coming up with creative plans right away. So coming up with a strategy of how you're gonna grow, and they're also gonna require a lot of investment.

Yeah, if they're coming up with a strategy around content, you got to buy the content.

So that's the first thing you're going to want to look for is like what is our strategy? How are we going to grow? How are we going to increase your SEO traffic or get SEO traffic if we don't have any to begin with?

Mhm, that's the first metric. I'd say within 90 days you want to have that plan.

Mmm-hmm. Moving forward, you're gonna measure against that plan—like are we getting traffic? Did we make any mistakes in our forecasts and our estimates? And then again assessing your creativity: how quickly can they iterate and pivot if they're wrong?

Mhm-hm. So you're looking at the growth in traffic like that's your primary metric.

Once the traffic starts coming in, put some goals in that. If it's a start-up, you can have things like 100% to 200% growth. If this is an existing company that already has tons of organic traffic, maybe it's all more manageable to have 10% to 20%, but those are your metrics you're going to apply to this person.

Okay, got you. And then I would look at traffic and dollars coming from this channel. And what you never ever want to measure for anything related to SEO is rankings.

Like how many page one or how many position one rankings we have, because those aren't yours to have. Those are—yeah, Google could change your mind, or your users could change their minds— and like that is the wrong way of aligning your SEO efforts.

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of true across the board. Like all of these systems, if you engineer the employee incentives for them to just game it, that's what's going to happen.

And if it's not directly tied to your bottom line, you're wasting everyone's time.

Absolutely!

What about these two? Like, so you mentioned A Hrefs; you mentioned Google Analytics. What are the other tools people ought to be considering to like, you know, say you brought this employee on, right?

Like what do you need to install the first day to ensure that you're tracking all the right things?

So tracking can really be done with A Hrefs. It can help you track keywords. Again, I'm not a fan of tracking keywords; A Hrefs can help you track links. So if you're building links, it's just a good way of seeing what Google’s recognized—not Google, but like A Hrefs and hopefully Google recognizing it.

Google Search Console that’s free; the other piece is the technical piece. So as you're building out a site or as you're, or if you're working with an existing site, you need to use a crawler to try to imitate how Google would actually crawl the site.

So my favorite tool there is called Screaming Frog SEO Spider. There’s a similar one that only works on Windows called Xenu Link Sleuth. Okay, so you're using these tools to really crawl a site, and you can get back all of your SEO metadata; you can see all your redirects, you can see all your canonical links, which is pointing to duplicate content; you pick up all your image URLs, find all your JavaScript.

It's really just like recognizing the whole site that is relevant for a small site, but just an interesting tool to have in your tool set.

The other thing you can do with that tool is crawl your competitors. Now I wouldn't recommend crawling your competitors from your company IP address, because if the competitor is savvy, they may see that show up in their log files like, "Hey, why is this IP address tied to my competitor now calling me?" And they could make them upset.

So yeah, use at your own risk.

Okay, but this is a great technical tool to just understand how sites are structured.

Mmm, cool.

And what about if someone just wants to get into SEO? Like where do they start? What courses should they take? What would you do?

So no courses to take really; it’s a creative pursuit. Yeah, you have to, you know, start drawing art in order to be an artist here. But the way I learned this was I was working for a company that would—and I was managing affiliates.

And at the time, and it might still be true, the most expensive AdSense keyword and AdWords keyword was mesothelioma—the lung cancer related to asbestos. So I decided to see, like, well, I needed to write content in order to get content matched to this AdSense keyword.

So I decided to write content related to mesothelioma and see if I can get ranked, and that was really my first SEO project. In the process, I wrote something about John Edwards, and I don't remember the connection to—at night, this is when you could still see all the keywords coming in.

I saw keywords coming in related to John Edwards, and I'm like, "Well, for I write more content on this, maybe I'll get more traffic," and I did. So that’s where you start. You start with like an idea; maybe it's a personal blog, maybe it's something you're passionate about—create content, get the traffic in, and learn from it.

And if that makes you excited to try more, then this is something for you. If this is like, "Well, this is taking too long, and this is really boring, and I’d much rather be like an Instagram influencer," awesome!

And well, thank you so much for coming in. If someone wants to reach out to you and learn more, how can they connect?

I like LinkedIn a lot; I respond to all my LinkedIn messages, and you know, I've done a decent job of making sure I can be found on LinkedIn.

Man, that’s great. Okay, that’s also rare, and yeah, it sounds like an effective strategy.

Yeah, thank you.

All right, thanks, Ben!