SEO Myths and Misconceptions

  📍 📍 On one hand, the tactics and techniques that work for SEO seem to change increasingly frequently, but on the other, the underlying principles of what it takes to rank well on search engines remain the same as they pretty much have done for years, which is why I’m so pleased to be joined by SEO consultant Natalie Slater to help us navigate some of the myths and misconceptions of SEO, what’s happening with AI content and some of the fundamental SEO principles to be aware of when planning a website migration.

Natalie, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Great to see you again. Natalie, just to start things off, can you give everyone a bit of an introduction to who you are, your background and some career highlights? So I’m a freelance SEO consultant and I’ve been freelance for the last five years.

Prior to that, I was head of SEO at a couple of agencies, one pure play SEO agency, one network advertising agency. it’s given me a range of experience across all kinds of sectors, all kinds of brands. All kinds of SEO problems. I’ve mostly been focusing on technical SEO probably for the last five years, but I am an all rounder SEO strategist and yeah, I hope I can give some information today.

I’m sure you will. what, what, led to you leaving agency life and setting up as a freelancer? It was just the right time to do There was a bit of a, I still wanted to be hands on with the work. I was leading a team, and there was a requirement for me to move away from being hands on, and I wasn’t quite ready to do that.

it just, happened, and, I’m very glad it did. The timing was good, considering the pandemic and everything. There seemed to be a shift towards, Brands going more with freelancers. It just all fell into place. It was Yeah, it was the right time right place and all of that everything conspired to work in your favor That’s great.

you touched on you were previously head of seo for some agencies looking at your linkedin some serious names in there. So head of seo for mccann manchester that’s I would describe that as that’s a big job and I think most You business leaders might be surprised that they can hire someone of that credibility, that experience, that seniority on a freelance basis.

And I don’t know if there’s anything you want to add to that. for sure, the kinds of brands that I worked with at McCann, I, it gave me the opportunity to work on huge websites, huge enterprise websites, high street brands, like big names. And it exposed me to a wide variety of problems at that kind of level, the kind of revenue that was coming into those brands.

Even as a freelancer, I’ve probably come across similar, problems. But I don’t think I’ve ever come across the kind of exposure to those brands since I worked at McCann. Yeah. Okay. And I started this podcast because I’ve, I felt for some time that businesses Beyond a certain size, when they have a marketing need, if it’s not something that requires a full time employee on a permanent hire, their default is probably to go and hire a big expensive agency rather than look at hiring freelancers.

It’d be interesting to understand why you feel that might be. possibly reputation. Possibly it’s just, That’s the way it’s been. That’s, you go and get an agency when you have that kind of need to fill a resource gap. I would say it’s shifting. I would say it’s shifted. I think it might be shifting back.

I think the brands might be more inclined to employ agencies again. But I do know that there was a quite an increase in demand for my services during the pandemic. So I think people became more open to hiring freelancers to solve those kind of problems then. Yeah. And I suppose the tools that are available to, to, to businesses to work with a team of freelancers, as opposed to having a single point of contact at an agency, it’s just made everyone’s life a bit easier to go down that route instead of working with a, with an agency instead.

Yes. With SEO, it’s something that’s ever changing. It feels perhaps it’s changing more frequently than ever now, but at the same time, there are some principles, some underlying principles for SEO that seem to have remained the same for years. Could you talk a bit about some of the myths and misconceptions about SEO?

there’s been a bit of a moving feast, certainly lately. A very major update has rolled out. I just need to caveat a few things I’m going to say, and we’ve talked about this before. But we’ve had a major algorithm update that is still in the process of rolling out. And there’s been a lot of comments, a lot of chatter in the industry about changes that have happened at Google that have affected the quality of search results.

Changes, personnel changes, and strategy changes That kind of put a question mark over, SEO and what we think works. I’m not saying that’s absolutely changed the whole thing, what I was gonna say, but it has introduced a bit of, bit of uncertainty and a bit of color to, to SEO as a whole at the moment.

Really it’s a, you just dunno it add in the whole AI scenario and it has made this industry much more. Interesting for me, I, I believe that things were very similar for many years. So there were, all of the main principles of SEO have, rarely been the same, but I, believe they are starting to change as a result of these kinds of, new influences.

that wasn’t the question you asked. You asked about myths and misconceptions, but I just wanted to. But yeah, but before you get back onto the myths and myths conception, something that you mentioned about changes in personnel, I’ve, read some conspiracy theories, maybe they’re not conspiracy theories, but maybe it is genuine insights into what’s going on at Google.

But where it’s been a deliberate strategy of actually degrading the quality of the organic search results to encourage more clicks on ads to increase revenue. People that is a conspiracy theory, people do. I don’t know one way or the other, and I don’t really want to nail my colors to either side. I do still believe Google are trying to achieve the right thing, deliver the right results to the user.

I believe they’re still attempting that. I think it’s one of those I don’t wish to use the words malice and You know the whole kind of, oh, you think it’s like a big master plan and actually it’s somebody’s just got something wrong. Yes. Don’t attribute to malice what you could add, but I don’t wish to throw that at Google, but you know what I mean?

I, think the stuff from, that’s been coming out is that there are just bugs in the system because of an over reliance on machine learning and the people aren’t there to deal with the bugs. I don’t know enough about it. I just think, I feel that the algorithm is not actually working in the same way that we’ve always assumed.

And there’s just some kinks in the system. But yeah, it makes for interesting times. 100%. And then so on to the myths and misconceptions in that case. Yeah, it’s, when questions like that are asked, are Google deliberately, they, are deliberately trying to gain revenue out of Google Ads, there’s no two ways about it, but, are they making the organic results worse to extract more money out of people?

I think that would be unethical, and, I can’t say one way or the other, can I? But those things, and so people may misunderstand and believe that the more you spend on Google ads, the better your organic will perform. There is no direct line between those things, but a brand that has the budget to spend loads on Google ads will undoubtedly be a big enough brand that’s gained enough of a reputation for Google to be valuing it highly in organic search results, so it’s not you spend more, you get more.

If you’ve got more to spend, then you’ve probably got a, better brand and Google will favor you for that reason. So things like that. I’ve, heard the opposite as well from, I had a boss, not, he wasn’t a marketer, but he was absolutely convinced that the reason, the website for that business wasn’t ranking better was because we were spending money on Google ads.

And Google were therefore somehow degrading our organic performance to keep us spending on the ads instead. But, I don’t believe for one moment that the two are connected. And Google have said as much as well. Yeah, I think nothing would surprise me anymore after the stuff we’re seeing at the moment.

But Just take the company line as read. There is no connection between what you spend on Google ads and how well your SEO does. You have to just take what’s been stated. other misconceptions like, more content is always better. yes, more content is better if it describes the, product or service or the topic in, as in the correct amount of detail.

And The right amount of vocab. Yes, bigger is better in that case, but if it’s absolute nonsense, then more content is not better. Do you think Google can infer the quality of the content that’s being produced? Or is it based on user behavior and backlink profiles? Both. Okay. all of the above. again, that’s another thing that seems to have changed.

Since we last spoke, there’s been comments about. But this can be taken either way. that links are no These are misconceptions, but it’s all deliberately obfuscated. It’s all deliberately ambiguous. but one of the things that’s been stated from a Googler lately has been that links are no longer as important in the Google algorithm.

Now, to what degree, we don’t know. I’ve been in the industry for 15 years and I’ve seen grew up knowing that links were the most important thing in the algorithm. If they’re slightly less important now, then they’re still extremely important. And even if, they’re like 15 percent of, we always used to, understand, we say it’s 50 percent links, 35% content, 15 percent tech.

It was an arbitrary distinction. It was really just explained to clients, you need all three of these things to work, but we weighted it like that. Even if that flipped, even if it was now it’s 15 percent links, 50 percent content, 35 percent technical links would still be extremely important.

All three, you can’t have SEO success without all three of those, but you can’t really, you could have short term success. Through loads of link buying it with terrible content that you could, but you like by brute force, you can have short term success with spinning up a load of content via AI.

But so many of those brands have been, negatively impacted by the latest core update. the SEO results is to just keep at technical on page and link building. Yeah. I think you made a really good point of regardless of how heavily each of those areas is weighted in its effect on SEO, it’s like a mathematical equation of if any of those inputs to that equation equals zero, the outcome is zero.

If you’re totally failing on the tech, if you’re totally failing on the backlinks, it doesn’t matter how great your content is, you’re just not going to rank. Yeah, exactly. and you touched, on the AI generated content and what’s been happening there recently. so I think Google started rolling out a, an update in March.

It’d be great to understand a bit about what you’ve noticed, in terms of the search results and how AI generated content, content is being, impacted. I haven’t, I’ve not been directly affected myself. I know a couple of brands that seem to have been negatively impacted and they haven’t been heavily reliant on AI content. It’s not been a helpful content thing that has caused them to decrease in this update. It’s just they’ve been caught in the crossfire, I think.

but And there are then some brands who have been doing, white hat, reputable content generations, content generation that have also been slapped by this update. But for the most part, it’s sites that have created a large volume of content, thin content generated by things like ChatGPT, not a lot of, discernment in what’s being created, just, that’ll do, And it was very successful for a good two years. It went against the principles of Google’s webmaster guidelines. But now that, they’ve been negatively impacted. but also it’s, not finished rolling out that. So there were lots of, there are a few different facets to this update.

One was a spam facet, which was dealt with in a couple of weeks. The rest of this, which is content related. Google hasn’t confirmed that the update has finished rolling out. So it’s still a work in progress. I should just timestamp. This is we’re recording this episode towards the end of April. so by the time it gets published, it may well have finished rolling out.

But, yeah, it’s, interesting what you say about the AI generated content. Some of the stuff I’ve read about on online forums is that the, I guess it depends on how severely people have been impacted, but a lot of it appears to have been. people receiving manual penalties for the AI content that they’ve been publishing, as opposed to it’s just been a wholesale degrading of how that content is valued by the algorithm.

Yep, I’ve seen that. And I think it’s good. I do sympathize with Google somewhat because There’s an entire industry of people who are incentivized to try and manipulate the rankings based on what tools are available to them at the time and what seems to be effective. And, Google are trying, they have different incentives, don’t they?

They are, trying to serve up to maintain their dominance in the search engine market. They have to continue being able to serve up results that the user finds useful and valuable. and relevant to their search queries. and we’ve got, like I said, we’ve got an entire industry of people who are, regardless of the quality of content, just trying to get their site ranking.

If that meant for a couple of years that they could just spin up literally thousands upon thousands of articles that mean they can start capturing traffic from all sorts of permutations of low, volume, long tail, queries very quickly. Why wouldn’t they do that? But we’ve all had experience of, doing a search on Google and just you land on a page and go, That’s clearly AI generated.

It’s got no value to me whatsoever, clicking the back button. in a way you could see this, outcome coming down the tracks from quite a long way away. Yeah, and even at the point, I think this was two years ago when they launched what was known as the helpful content update. I think myself and other colleagues were predicting that update was going to, I lose track of time.

Maybe it wasn’t two years ago because chat GPT Became a big thing in early 2023, didn’t it? But, I do that the, initial helpful content update, I think everyone assumed was going to slap AI generated content and it didn’t. and the reason people assumed that was that Google’s documentation on what is helpful content explicitly said needs to be written by a human being.

They’ve adjusted it. Because I don’t think they can, firstly, they’re about to integrate AI generated results into, their own results. you can hardly, it would be a bit hypocritical to say, no, your content needs to be written by people, but we’re going to be able to compete with you by serving up AI generated stuff.

It’s not, on. I think you can’t fight against something, it’s a very useful tool. It. Humans need to be much more discerning about what they allow it, they allow themselves to go out with, from generating stuff with chat GPT. That’s, I truly believe that, but it’s not going anywhere. So yeah, we, you, need to be pragmatic about these things.

I think, well to, to your point about we’re incentivized to game the system as much as possible. I think it does depend on your. your position, your and the kinds of brands you’re working with and the kinds of budgets they have and your horizons as well. Yeah. If you’re working to try and achieve results in three months or else the client’s going to ditch you, then you’re on the clock, aren’t you?

Whereas if you’ve got a client who’s taking a longer term perspective, then do the right thing. Yeah. And in those situations, I’m often like, I’m probably not the SEO for you. If, you need to 10 X your. Something in three months virus. Yeah. I’m like, no, that’s not the channel The kind of seo services i’m providing you won’t help but you’re absolutely right Other seo tactics could achieve that but I would always be taking a long term view.

Yeah. Yeah something that keeps you very busy is repairing Website migrations that have not gone You when it’s been handled by, say the IT team somewhere else. Yes. Sounds like fun. Yeah, it’s, that’s, so I, I, attempted to do a talk about this recently. I was not so well, I don’t think it came off very well, but I, tried to, put my thoughts across on website migrations and still wondering why so many do still fail.

I discuss it with, colleagues and the answer seems to be because the SEO isn’t involved early enough, or the business doesn’t understand the risk that’s attached to a domain migration or change the URLs or a platform migration or wholesale changes to content. They just think, I don’t know what they think.

It’s, probably that for the most part, it’s probably that people are under extreme time pressures and. There is a belief that we can deal with that after the fact, but I, Yeah, I’ve, been brought in to, to analyze why so many of migrations have gone wrong. I’m like, no, I really do advocate just bring in an SEO just for a day, just to review the thing, just to point out where, this could fall down.

Just give yourself a fighting chance, which is probably doing myself out of a job, but, but, That’s why migrations go wrong. You need an SEO to be involved as early as possible. If a migration has gone seriously wrong, and the organic search traffic’s tanked because of it, is it the sort of thing that, when it’s resolved, the website should be able to recover quite quickly, or is it more challenging?

I’m gonna say the SEO thing. Thing, which is, it depends. It totally depends on just a variety of facts. some things can just bounce back. if they were, if for example, traffic has tanked and it was because something was blocked in the robots, do TXT, usually those things that’s, like it was switched off and now switched on again.

there shouldn’t, there isn’t, there’s def definitely no one answer here. So sometimes. You can see quite a quick recovery and other times you might be, unreasonably penalized for having made that error. So it’s a waiting game. so many of the sites I’ve worked on, we’ve seen a bit of a step change back to visibility, but then it has taken.

Months afterwards, until the next algorithm update. There’s an example I use in, the talk I’ve done lately, it’s an, it’s a historic example of a, of an electronics appliances retailer that moved domain. I don’t know the, internal story, I just know what happened from an external standpoint.

They, moved, to a domain that had a bad, Like they had a load of links into the domain from what you’d call bad neighborhoods. It was all gambling and porn sites and their extremely visible website just absolutely flattened and it took them three years to recover their visibility so Wow, they fortunately they had the brand You know and sustained them but organic Didn’t perform as well for them for three years Wow, that is, that is incredible.

I’ve not heard of an example like that before. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say, but you will have heard of them. They advertise a lot. Okay. Yeah. So it’s, been a serious dent in their revenue somewhere and someone’s probably gotten, some serious hot water over, over that. if, someone’s absolutely adamant, if a business is absolutely adamant, or perhaps they just lack the resource to, to go outside and hire an SEO, even for a little bit of guidance, are there things that you would recommend they check or at least consider, when it comes to a migration?

Yes. Just at a top level, try to understand whether your URLs are going to change. Firstly, understand what’s going to migrate. So what’s, there’s, lots, there’s different types of migration. is it the sorts of ones I deal with relate to a domain change? So if it’s a domain change and all your URLs say it’s a domain change, all your URLs are going to be the same.

The content isn’t changing. You’re just moving to a new domain. The due diligence you need to do is, there anything about that domain, is it historic, is, there anything about it that is suspicious in any way, like the example I spoke about. But then if, all, it is a domain change and everything else is staying the same, that’s, probably lower risk, provided there isn’t any nasty surprises.

it’s the URL changes. And then the URL changes are also a little bit more straightforward than the third example. URL changes are, you need to ensure the redirects are there. And a developer is, often capable of doing that. the things you need to watch out for are they the right kinds of redirects?

They need to be 301 redirects in order to have SEO value and demonstrate to Google that this thing is permanently moved elsewhere. I’ve seen a lot of JavaScript redirects in 302s this week that’s blown my mind. always 301s. Ensure that pages are redirecting to their most like for like counterpart.

don’t redirect a load of things straight to the homepage, no blanket redirects there’s been, especially in M& A stuff when brands have been acquired and it’s we need to consolidate this asset over here. Yes, but there is an SEO friendly way of doing that. Don’t just sweep it all.

It’s like sweeping under the bed or something like that. You need to, everything needs to be, carefully mapped. So yeah, just if you are a marketing decision maker and the only people involved in your migration are IT developer people, just ask how the redirects, can you share the redirect mapping with me?

let’s double check that. there’s other stuff as well, like you need to consider your analytics, you need to, there’s plenty of sites that have migrated and have not reinstated the analytics or have moved, or, There’s two extremes. Analytics hasn’t been put on the site or they’ve just changed to a whole new instance of analytics, Google Analytics, completely.

And so there is a, a discontinuation of the data. So you might not even know if you’re having a performance issue. So that’s very important. And then often in a migration, when it, if it involves a rebrand or a some kind of refresh, there’s, often a desire to change not only the URLs, but the content, and that’s, the one that’s a bit of a, you can never really know what’s going to happen from changing your content, even if, I think if you had terrible or thin content, content that was lacking in some way before, you can be quite confident that if you’ve then built on that, It’s not going to be risky.

But if you had, if you were phrasing things in a certain way, And now you’re phrasing them in a different way. There is risk attached to then changing that content in a migration because you don’t know exactly how Google is understanding your content. And you need to be prepared that you might take a short term hit or even a long term hit if Google’s understanding of your content isn’t what it was.

So when that’s happening, I really do think an SEO specialist should be involved. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Thank you for that. Absolutely fascinating and Natalie before I let you go I am asking everyone for a book recommendation for a marketing audience. So don’t know if you’ve got one available I will go for it’s an old one the seven habits of highly effective people That’s the one I always recommend to When I work in teams that one really stayed with me Okay, I’ve not read that one.

I will go and check that one out. Thank you very much. And how can people connect with you afterwards? I’m on LinkedIn. yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best, platform just. Just search my name, I’ll pop up. I will include links in the show notes. Thank you very much. Natalie, you have been a wonderful guest.

I know we’ve only just scratched the surface of, what we, might’ve explored in this podcast and all of your knowledge and experience on it. But thank you so much, for, coming along, thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and thanks everyone for listening.