Kyle Roof Website Review – Key Areas To Improve SEO On Your Site – 204

Jesse Dolan: Everyone got a great episode here for you today. We’ve got Kyle Roof back in doing another episode and we teased a few months ago that he’s gonna be coming on and we asked everybody to submit your website for him to do a teardown and a review of a website. And that’s what we’re doing here today, so stay tuned. I’m doing this episode here from my camper. So if you are watching on YouTube and you see the background looks a little bit different, that’s because we recorded it while I was on vacation. Kyle was in San Diego. He lives in Thailand. He was visiting in San Diego. So both of us kind of on remote location going through it I think you’re gonna love some of the things that Kyle breaks down I learned a few things and I think you will too. Check this out.

Jesse Dolan: All right. Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host Jesse Dolan. You’re with a great guest today, Kyle Roof, joining us from California. How you doing, Kyle?

Kyle Roof: I’m good. I’m good. In Cali. But I do wish I was back home in Thailand. Not gonna lie.

Jesse Dolan: How long till you head back home?

Kyle Roof: Uh, one more week in the U S and then I’ve got two weeks in the UK and then two weeks in Europe, Ben home. So long trip.

Jesse Dolan: Oh yeah, I can see where the longing has already started to set in then. So that’s quite a trek.

Kyle Roof: Yeah, I just want my Thai food.

Jesse Dolan: Nice.

Kyle Roof: So good.

Jesse Dolan: Well, let’s get into this. It’s early in the morning. I know you’re in the West Coast like 7 AM. I’m in northern Minnesota up here in the camper. Everybody was watching online. We’ll kind of see us in our transient backgrounds here, I think. But appreciate you jumping on early this morning, Kyle. You were on. several months ago and we talked about users, I’m sorry, listeners to submit their sites to have you do a review. We’re gonna go through one of these and just kind of give your observations on what you’ve seen. For some improvements and then also talk a little bit about AI and SEO, the intersection of that, which is kind of the hot topic for anybody in SEO or looking at it right now. So I guess I should tell everybody too, if you don’t know who Kyle Roof is, check out. Just Google Kyle Roof, right? Definitely SEO rock star, well-tenured, knowledgeable speaker. You heard him talking about his travels. I’m assuming a little bit of that travel has something to do with SEO and speaking and teaching. Kyle was back on episode 70 with us and is the, what’s the right word, Kyle? Is it founder, inventor, creator, mastermind behind Page Optimizer Pro, POP? Give you some accolades for that as well, which we are huge users of and supporters of. So all of that, being said  Kyle, thanks for coming back on today. Let’s take a look at that website.

Kyle Roof: Good to be here, happy to be here.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, man, let me share my screen so we can have that up as we’re talking. If you, it’s kind of talking offline, if you want me to show certain things, Kyle, or did you want to drive and show it, what would be easier?

Kyle Roof: Just start on the homepage. Start on the homepage and we’ll chat.

Jesse Dolan: Let’s pull it up here. Here we go.

Kyle Roof: There we go.

Kyle Roof: I don’t know about you, but the first thing I always do when I come to a website is I scroll right to the footer as an SEO. I go right to the footer and I like to see what’s in there and what they’re playing with. Because when you think about things on like, from an EAT perspective, like is, who’s responsible for this website and who’s responsible for the content? Usually… it’s gonna be in the header of the footer, most likely the footer where you can find that information. And I always wanna think like, can a bot easily find this information? So there’s a lot of good happening in this footer, especially in that, the first thing I wanna see is that address. So right under where it says LEAP and then Metro Vancouver, there’s a phone number that I like, that’s a local phone number, and then they have the address. The next thing I do is I’ll right click. And I will view the page source. And I’m going to see if that address and that phone number are in schema. Because what I’ve found is that, playing especially with AI tools, AI can find, like we say, is there an address on this page? AI finds about 70% of the time, which tells me that’s probably what Google can do as well, somewhere in that neighborhood. But once you have it in schema, then you’ve actually properly identified it, making it as easy as possible for a bot. to understand that this is a real entity, this is a real business, and they have a real address and a local phone number that matches that address. And Leap, they’ve got that going on. So if you were to look at the page source, they have the address and phone number in the schema, and that is an excellent, excellent sign.

Jesse Dolan: And for everybody listening, of course, Kyle’s explaining, but if you’re watching on YouTube, I’m sharing the screen. I’m not showing the page source. We’re just looking at the homepage here. So Kyle’s talking through it. If somebody doesn’t know how to check out the page source, I guess reach out to us. I’m gonna give you a tutorial what we’re talking about here. But yeah, that’s basically the encoding that you’re not seeing when you’re just looking at this as a normal human being. So and we should say to Kyle, I should back up. and tell everybody whose site this is. Joel, the Tevs, sorry Joel, if I said that wrong, submitted this site and he had said, we’re using Pop and I’m hoping to get some feedback from Kyle. We run an MSP in Vancouver, highly saturated market, lots of competition. Make sure we give full credit there and what site we are looking at that Kyle’s taking us through. So sorry for the interlude there, Kyle, but yeah, we’re looking at the footer. Finding some good stuff there matching it up, there and coding with the schema there. And so far, you’re liking what you’re seeing?

Kyle Roof: Yeah, the next thing, and I want to get your opinion on this. So, they’ve got… kind of at the bottom of the footer, this site is protected by reCAPTCHA, and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. And if you hover over privacy policy and terms of service, those are actually clickable links, and they actually go to Google’s terms of service and privacy policy.

Jesse Dolan: Okay.

Kyle Roof: Can you claim Google’s privacy policy as your own?

Jesse Dolan: Sure, why not, right?

Kyle Roof: Is that something that people do?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, let me see.

Kyle Roof: I wasn’t aware that you could do that.

Jesse Dolan: Let’s follow that here. Yeah, you’re right, look at that. Okay, so that’s interesting. Usually you’d be having that go back to your own privacy policy, right, and in terms of service, so.

Kyle Roof: Yeah, that confused me a little bit, but you know, it comes like an in signal. I think just having clickable text that says privacy, but also you can have those texts that says term service. So it’s probably all you need. It’s not that Google is going to be going in and like actually. Reading your terms of service to see if they’re good or not. It’s just the existence of the page. Um, so I imagine that probably satisfies it, but I just thought that was a little odd, I’d never seen that before, but I was like, maybe, maybe people are doing this and I just haven’t seen it.

Jesse Dolan: No, that’s the first time I’ve seen it. Would you mind Kyle for anybody that’s listening or watching that isn’t super knowledgeable about why this matters? You’re talking about the privacy policy in terms of service, right? That reel that exists, you can click on it. Why does that matter to Google?

Kyle Roof: Well, there’s gonna come a point where Google’s gonna decide if you should be in the index in the first place or not. Like, are you a legitimate thing that should just be in search results? And that comes back to them what we’re talking about with EAT, E-E-A-T, expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The idea is like, is this just a trustworthy site? And so one of the things that I look for is… Are there signals on this site that Google would identify to say that this is a trustworthy site that should be in the index once it kind of hits a certain traffic level. And eat signals too are pretty easy to knock out. You can get a lot of eat type stuff done in a day. And so a lot of times I wanna look and see how serious the site is, like how are they taking their running of their business and the running of their website by what they’re demonstrating in terms of the EAT signals that they’re putting out. And so for example, like the address and phone number in the schema is fantastic. That’s a really strong signal. And then as I’m looking through and kind of trying to identify other signals, that’s when I found them, they’re just using Google’s privacy policy in terms of service, which I had not seen before. And maybe it’s like, you know, you don’t know everything about SCI. Well, like maybe this is a trick that people have identified and I just didn’t know about. Or they’re just doing something a little odd.

Jesse Dolan: Right, I guess we’ll have to move back with him and ask him if that was unintentional or get the feedback there, but thanks for expanding a little bit on, you know, why the stuff matters, right? Why are you even looking at that? Yeah, what is EAT for everybody and what are these signals here? So at least continue though. What else are we looking at?

Kyle Roof: So this thing to me though, those are great. The next thing I would do is click on the blog. And I want to look in and see what they’re doing for their articles.

Jesse Dolan: Got that at the bottom there, let’s see. Go back up. Need anything to tell?

Kyle Roof: Right there, there’s a blog.

Kyle Roof: Yeah. Yeah, there we go. So things I’m going to look at here are I’m going to click into that article, and I’m going to look and see, identify the author. Now, what they’re doing is they’re sorry. What they’re doing is they’ve got the website as the author. And you’re allowed to do that. That is, if you go through the Google guidelines, it talks about who can be an author. A website can be its own author. And I know that Google says that’s OK. I personally don’t like that. Because authors are an opportunity to show Google that you have real humans that are writing this content and real people that are behind the content and responsible for the content. And so personally, I would actually have an author here. Whoever is actually writing, I would list them as the author. Because what I really want is an author bio page that talks about who this author is, what qualifications they have, what experience they have, those types of things. And then within the author bio page, I want to have person schema that helps Google understand this is a real person. And then on the articles themselves that I’m writing, I’m going to link to that author bio page to make the connection that This author is somebody within our company, within our organization. And this is really art. And that kind of makes a really strong connection between the content that’s there and the people behind it. I think that’s a missed opportunity here. And that’s something that I would change up.

Jesse Dolan: And if somebody’s gonna implement that Kyle, how tricky is that to take this existing blog article, right, where the company is the author, if they were to retrofit this or fix that, is that just as simple as going in to that actual blog post, changing that, and then creating this author page you’re talking?

Kyle Roof: I think so. I think you can actually probably do it in mass and probably some sort of WordPress setting where like this author is now that author sort of a thing. I’m sure that you could do it fairly automated.

Jesse Dolan: That’s a good one. Why would somebody choose to have the company be… Sorry, go ahead, Kyle.

Kyle Roof: Oh, no, I think a lot of people do it because they want to kind of hide who they are. I think that’s what a lot of people do that for is they don’t necessarily want to be the face of the company or be responsible for the content, which I get, except that really contradicts the idea of eat on who is responsible for this information. So while Google definitely says you’re allowed to do that. On the other hand, they’ve got all this eat stuff going on. I wouldn’t do it because I would want to identify who is the actual human behind this work, essentially. The next thing we’ll look at, so notice the published date on there, May 15th, 2023. Go ahead and click in so we’re actually on the article itself. I think, yeah, just click there. So here we are inside and we’ve got the URL. The next thing I wanna do is up at the top of the URL, which I’m not sure is gonna show on the feed, is I’m gonna put cash colon, and then I wanna see the last time Google crawled this page.

Kyle Roof: Now comes as a 404. That’s hilarious. I did this yesterday and it showed up. That’s really interesting that it’s a 404. I did it yesterday and it was May 15th. It was the day that they published and that was the last day it was crawled. That is a little concerning. You really wanna see a cache date probably within the last seven days or so that Google is coming back to this page and checking it out and likes it. When you notice, and I did a couple other of their blogs and the last cache was like a month ago. Um, that’s a little concerning to me that Google is not coming back and, and liking this, you know, and loving it and like seeing if there’s something new going on, I’m not sure if that’s because they’re not posting regularly enough. Um, that they might want to up their, uh, content schedule. Uh, I’m not entirely sure why there would be such a gap or a long time in between. Uh, cause I mean, if they launched the page and it was immediately cash, that’s a great sign. Google is coming in. checking out your fresh content, it’s odd to me that Google never came back. And I saw that on a few other things too, like the cash day wasn’t too far from the published date and it’s been a month or even two since Google’s gone back to the page. That to me is a little problematic. I think what I would consider doing is upping my content schedule to see if you could get Google coming back and, um, checking out the pages a little more regularly, cause the sites that Google’s crawling, um, more frequently are sites that usually rank better.

Jesse Dolan: So what you just had me do there to show everybody a quick cash colon search, a search operator in Google, right, to kind of restrict the results. Could you just give a quick explanation on what that is that we just did, right, and how to test that on your own site if everybody’s  listening, wondering what the heck you’re talking about?

Kyle Roof: Sure  all you need to do is at the very front of your URL, where it has the HTTP part, just put cache, C-A-C-H-E, colon, and hit Enter. And what’s normally going to show up is a picture that Google has of that page. And it’s essentially a snapshot of the last time Google went to the page and what Google saw. And it tells you it’s not always 100% accurate. Google does come to the page more than what the cache is. But it does kind of give you an indicator of when was the last time Google was here, when was the last time Google was caring about this page, and what did they see on the page. For example, I had this client way back in the day, and they were using this like weird, like brand new JavaScript thing that was like the latest and greatest, and their devs were all excited about it. But Google couldn’t crawl the pages. And so Google’s cache on every page was a 404. Like. They actually not that, uh, not what you saw actually there that like, Google just didn’t have a cash. It was a Google only saw every page on their website as a 404. Like that their entire website was one giant 404 and they didn’t think that was problematic. I was trying to explain, I was like Google thinks that your site is an entire 404 cause that’s all the Google’s caching. It’s a good thing to see

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, that’s something you could want to fix sooner than later.

Kyle Roof: It’s a good thing to see like what Google is actually doing. That’s right, that’s right

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, I know those search operators. If anybody, yeah, if you’re working on your site, there’s a bunch of different things you can use to just use Google as a tool even more so than just for straight-up search. So that’s a cool one. That’s a real cool one. So thanks for the explanation.

Kyle Roof: Yeah, you bet. So the next thing I’m going to look at is I’m going to see if I can figure out their content plan. And so for within this article, for example, I’m going to scroll down and I’m going to see if I can’t find links that are internal links going to other parts of the site. And those links are within the body. And the spoiler here is they don’t have any. So. This is a great piece of content. You can see the obviously a lot of care and time went into writing this. They’ve got the headings. It’s well portioned out and it reads well. So it’s definitely there for that purpose. But from an SEO perspective, I’m not entirely sure what their plan is. I went through a few other articles and also didn’t see what the plan was. So I’m not sure like if the plan is to rank this page for what service does an MSP provide. Maybe that’s the term they were going for, which is fine. But I don’t know what other purpose or if there is another purpose. And so what I would do if I were coming to this is I try to decide what content I have currently. Why do I have it? What, what is it trying to accomplish? And then what I think I would do is identify some target pages that they’re going after and use the existing content that is gaining its own authority. It’s, it’s, it’s growing in keywords. It’s getting impressions, it’s getting clicks. And then I would actually set up a virtual silo. That’s links. That’s a silo or a cluster that’s created by links within content rather than URL structure. URL structure doesn’t matter at all in this. What I would try to do is identify, okay, I’ve got this target page. I’ve got these three blog posts. They’re doing pretty well. I’m going to link from those blog posts to my target page to see if I can’t push it up and use my own strength. I think they have a real opportunity here to take this amazing content that they’ve written and maybe use it for a purpose to push other pages. And so that’s a huge thing that I would do with this site coming in, is organize the site into virtual silos in order to benefit certain target pages that are going to bring me the most ROI.

Jesse Dolan: Kind of like you’re saying, this is a, there’s some energy that went into creating this blog post, right? And adding maybe to the standard process, what you’re talking, just another two minutes or three minutes of taking a look at your existing content, what’s performing well, maybe search console, you know, whatever, and apply that to finishing this post. Yeah, it could definitely make a big impact and easy to add to the strategy at the end of the day. So.

Kyle Roof: So when you look at like what they’ve got in terms of the structure of their site They I couldn’t really identify what would be a target page necessarily, you know I’m sure that they know what the most important target pages are Those the one a target page would be that we want this to show up in serps This is when somebody searches for basically our main keywords. These are the pages that show up It’s it’s not easy to see what those might be. I imagine they are something here within the blog in addition to all of their other blog content which looks like very good content. So what I would do, and that’s okay that it all sits in the blog area, it doesn’t have to be sectioned out into a particular place, but I would identify these are the ones that are going to bring us the right clients. These are the ones that are going to give us the best opportunity for ROI. Those are the ones we want to show up when somebody searches for their most important terms. I would identify what those are and then I would take the other blog posts that are performing well and use them to create that silo and I think that could probably do a lot of good for them. Because they’re taking so much time to create these really great articles, I think they could really take advantage of it.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, creating content, whether you use an AI or not, creating content is definitely a labor intensive process. So anything you can do to then leverage that once it’s put out there, right? And you can get the most run out of it, whether you’re pushing to or using it to push to. Yeah, I think this is a very, very smart thing to point out.

Kyle Roof: Back in 2019, I was working on this project on this company that did marketing for companies like Boeing. It was like aviation market research was like an important term for them. Those terms all had like a search volume of 10, you know, for the month, but. Uh, when you did the search, like all the sites that were winning, it were like huge, and huge, um, marketing firms, because, you know, if you land one Boeing, you’re doing pretty well for, you know, for the year or…

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Kyle Roof: for the years. And so even though there was extremely low search volume, they’re massively important. Now they were ranking for nothing. Uh, and they also had like a DR of one, you know, or like if you’re looking at whatever metric you’re looking at, they were zero or one depending on like some metrics default to a one, you know, that’s, that’s the authority the site had. But as I went through it, they had three years of these amazing blog posts, like they had really put time and effort into these things. And then I realized that these things were ranking for terms on their own and doing quite well. So what I did is actually created virtual silos using their existing content and linking to their 10 target pages that had the different types of market research that they wanted to do or marketing research, excuse me. And in about a month and a half, uh, they had eight of their 10 terms on page one, just by leveraging their existing blog posts that were doing so well, and that it created that generate all this power that they didn’t even realize. And so don’t underestimate the power of the site. of your own site and what it can do for you. Like it’s very possible that you’ve got pages, you know, that have accumulated strength and you can basically niche edit your own site by adding in the links that you need and pointing them to some of your best pages. It’s not a bad practice like quarterly to go through and see if you act to find those power pages, go into search console and look at the ones that are like filter into your blog. The ones are getting the most impressions or you can put it into an SEM rush or a address and you can find the site, the pages that are performing well. on your site and then you can use those to then push up other pages that are very important to you.

Jesse Dolan: That’s awesome. If anybody didn’t catch that, rewind that, write it down. That’s an easy thing to put into your, like I said, quarterly, whatever it is, just do that on a regular basis because that stuff’s gonna change. Google’s gonna look at you different, there’s competitors. That’s not a set it and forget it thing. And yeah, easy. You already had that content out there on your website. This is just linking it together really at the end of the day.

Kyle Roof: Yeah, like, one of the things that I’ve realized that I really try to talk about a lot is you’ve already done this hard work, you’ve already done this amazing work, take advantage of it. And there are a lot of things within SEO where you can do that where you can basically do really good SEO without doing any extra SEO. It’s just making sure that you’re squeezing all the value out of the work that you’ve done.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, we always like to say, you know, the word optimization, right? That’s a very granular thing, right? It’s little levers, little buttons, right? You gotta look in all these different spots and the effort sometimes may not be big in the thing that you did, but what you’re leveraging was important. And yeah, this is good stuff. I hope everybody’s getting some good nuggets there, Kyle. All right, so we’re on the blog post here, right? Diving a little bit deep into this topic. What else, what else you see in here on Leap?

Kyle Roof: So the next thing I would do is I’m actually going to go to Google and I’m going to search for the brand name, Leap Cloud Solutions. And I want to see what that search looks like. And yeah, there we go. And that is awesome. That’s what you want to see is that knowledge panel. That’s huge. You know, that the Google understands that this is an entity, that they’re a real thing. That is awesome. When I saw that I was tickled. I was like, all right, that’s, that’s excellent. That comes from those signals we were talking about that they’re doing pretty well, uh, on the site. Like, um, for example, with their schema, but in their address in there, this tells me they’ve done a lot of like citation work, um, and things on the outside that to, for Google to understand that they are a real thing and to have a really solid knowledge panel right there is an excellent sign. Now, what I would do is I would take, I would go through and see what shows up on page one, the third party sites for your brand. And if you see something that you haven’t claimed, like you can go in there and they’re talking about your brand and you haven’t claimed that page, I would go in and do that. Cause I want to make sure that when somebody does a search for my brand, that I’m controlling the narrative as much as I can on all of these things. So if Google, for example, clutch free, uh, right there, so that’s a paid placement to get into clutch. Uh, they have lower level plans, but because that’s like ranking very high for my brand, I would go in and pay the money to clutch just to make sure that I’ve got, um, my, uh, my business description, my address, all that is correct here and it all looks good. So I would go through it. These are by sites. The next thing I would do is I’d start searching for my competitors. I do the same thing. I’d find if there are third party sites that they are all showing up on. Uh, and then I would claim those as well. One that I saw that might be for them to look into is called zoom info. I noticed that, uh, some of their competitors, and those are just what I got from the, the knowledge panel. So maybe they’re not competitors, but I just kind of clicked through and I noticed that several of their competitors had this zoom info. I’m not familiar with zoom info, but it doesn’t matter. I would go in and try to claim it because clearly Google seems to like this site for, for this particular niche. And I’d go in and make sure that I’ve got that. And I’m sure there are a few other sites, probably that their competitors are sharing in the same kind of way. I would go in and try to claim my profile on all those sites as well.

Jesse Dolan: And if, take like your Zoom info, you’re saying claim it, rewording it to everybody just to be clear, like go create your listing on Zoom info if there isn’t one right, or if there is one claim it so you can manage it. But yeah, even if your business isn’t on there, if your competitors are, there’s gotta be a way for you to get into that listing, that directory too, and take the energy to do that.

Kyle Roof: Exactly right. You know, if you’re making a local play, I think this is huge. Like, because they’re going to be, um, like geo-specific pages like this, and there’s also gonna be industry-specific pages like this that you can go in and claim. And you’d be surprised, like, people end up on those sites, you know, and they really, like, when they’re trying to figure out which service provider to go to or who they should trust, people end up at a lot of these third-party sites to see what’s there. And if you have this, like, barren-looking profile, compared to your competitors that have this beautiful profile, they’re likely that your potential client’s going to go to them. So whatever you see on Google for you, as well as for your competitors, I really want to go in there and try to optimize those things. Because one, it helps Google figure out who you are and what you’re doing. But also, users or visitors or potential clients do go to those pages. And I want to make sure that if there’s a chance for me to show up there, then they can see it. I want to make sure I’ve got the best profile possible.

Jesse Dolan: We like telling people to Kyle, add none of that is, those websites, those directories themselves are almost like a little search engine, right? Take Clutch or ZoomInfo, whatever.

Kyle Roof: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: People are using them to find things. And if you are SEOing and you’re setting up your profile, hopefully your business description, whatever it is you can input into that directory, right? Have that same SEO mindset and intention. So not only can you get whatever juice you’re getting in that portal, if users are using it to find services or find products, well you know put your best keywords in there in that same way you’d make your webpages, fill out out your profile that way too. in there, right? And yeah, get the most exposure you can, right? That’s the whole point here, so.

Kyle Roof: Exactly right. And then all of these things, when you, when you do it, they take a half a day, you know, to go to identify them and then to go and do them. And then that is honestly, you can set and forget it. Like I would check this maybe every six months to see if there’s like a new kind of parasite or a new third party site that’s showing up. Uh, and then, then you just optimize it for that. And then you’re good to go, but those create good links. You know, they are safe links, the pillow links, they’re providing kind of protection. around, and they also do the value of helping Google continue to understand who you are, that you’re a real entity. Easy SEO to do, but it also has value.

Jesse Dolan: And would you, I know we talked to Terry Samuels a lot, this is a situation I think, I’m curious what your mindset is, not trying to get you pitted against each other in anyway here, but these are great, these are great same as links, right? Like within schema, like these, some of these powerful listings on these third party sites. If you’re doing this, putting in the work here, also keep track of them and see if you wanna leverage those in your schema as well, so.

Kyle Roof: Yes. Well, when you think about what links I put into my same as, so Google understands that I am also that, the ones that Google has identified would be excellent. You know, the ones that Google is ranking for your brand or for your competitor’s brand, that means Google likes those pages. You know, that means Google’s crawling those pages and that’s an excellent one to put in as your same as. To tell people, we are this, this page that you like, this site that you like that has profiles, I’m that, you know, and that’s something that Google’s clearly crawling.

Jesse Dolan: There’s a book we all kind of pass around in the office here. Steven Krug, Don’t Make Me Think. And it’s really about users and user experience, right? But in the same thing here, we always like, this can apply to Google too. Like, does Google know that this is you? Sure, but you know what? It takes just a few seconds to put it in. You’re like your same as and just make damn sure, like this is all connected, without a doubt. Don’t make Google think. Or trust them to do it maybe, don’t trust Google to do it make sure you force it, right? Schema is a great way to do that.

Kyle Roof: That’s it. I don’t understand sometimes where people try to out clever Google and make it difficult. It’s like, why would you do that? Why would you make it hard for Google to figure out who you are, what you’re doing, crawl your site? You’re just shooting yourself in the foot. It’s like, you’re about to run a marathon and you just shot yourself in the knees. You know, like, I don’t understand why people do some of the things that they do.

Jesse Dolan: Give your ego a boost to do it that hard way but you don’t need to.

Kyle Roof: That’s probably true, right? I did it this way, but you made it harder for Google. And you ultimately made it hard for your website to do well. Not to say they can’t do well, but you’re making it tricky.

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Kyle Roof: So the last thing that I saw, again, as I’m just checking this stuff out, is I noticed that a lot of their competitors are doing partner sites, and it looks like they’re building kind of their own sort of PBNs, for lack of a better term, their own partner and sister sites, and it looks like they’re using it to gain traffic, win other keywords, also own the brand a little bit better too, because you’re now taking more spots on page one that you control. and then linking back to your target pages. Leap might be doing something similar. There’s like a leap.us and I didn’t really, if you scroll down, it’s towards the top on the branded results. That could be theirs as well. And so they might be doing something similar, which is good. This highlights one of those opportunities where you’re allowed to have sites that you control and you’re allowed to have sites that go after similar keywords, maybe for a slightly different audience. So in this case, it could be the Canadian version versus the US version as maybe what they’re doing. Or they have a separate site for partners that highlights the partners with their software or with what they’re doing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those are good things to do. If you have the ability, running two domains going after the same keywords is awesome because Google really doesn’t like to put one domain multiple times on page one. They used to do it a bunch. Now they’ve basically limited to the best you can see is two results usually. But even then for a lot of terms they’ve kind of wiped that out completely and they’re just gonna give you one result with one domain. But if you have multiple domains and it makes sense to do it, like you do have a slightly different audience or perspective or reason to do it. And if you have the budget and the resources, having two domains is pretty awesome. And I noticed it looks like they might be doing that, which I like, and their competitors definitely are doing that. And then… Once you’re also taking more real estate, then you can start to interlink, and these sites can push each other up as well. And that’s all completely within Google’s guidelines. That’s totally fine to do. It just takes a lot of time, money, and effort. And that’s why a lot of people don’t do that. They would just use, like, say, the partners or the sister sites. They would just put that as a folder on their main site. But it looks like what a lot of these competitors have done is they’ve just created separate sites for it, and it looks to be pretty effective.

Jesse Dolan: So if you’re gonna have those two different domains going after the same keyword, just to be clear, you’re saying, you can’t just take your content and make two domains. You have the same strategy, you have the same avatar, the same purpose, right? You need to be helpful or useful in some other way if you’re gonna have that second domain and go after it.

Kyle Roof: Right. That’s exactly right. You can’t, I guess, technically you could copy it, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that. You definitely want a different angle, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go after the same key with two different domains

Jesse Dolan: Right on.

Kyle Roof: Yeah, and you should, if you’re, if you’re able to do that totally. Because again, it gives you, let’s say you could get your money keyword and you could get two spots on page one. Now you’ve pushed, you know, at least two competitors out of the way. And when people go to it, if they click on your one or the other, doesn’t matter. You know, you can get the conversion on either one. And that’s fantastic. Uh, the best example, the best example I’ve seen of this is Wayfair, the furniture company.

Jesse Dolan: Okay.

Kyle Roof: They actually have five different brands. Uh, and the personas are like, They’re their regular one. They’ve got like their high end one. They’ve got the, the bargain basement, you know, bargain shopper one and kind of everything in between, but they’re all going after these same terms and it’s almost always the same furniture. Uh, and so like, if you were searched, like chase lounge, for example, uh, I did this years ago, they had three results on page one and two results on page two. So they’re taking up five spots out of the first 20 with basically the same furniture. But the copy was written differently to go after a different type of persona. And they even say that in the footer, these are all connected. They don’t want to make a secret of it. You would have to look for a little bit. I don’t think people would obviously see it. But once you realize it, you’re like, oh, they’re just pushing all of their things up and they’re just taking it away, real estate from their competitors by doing that. And it’s an excellent strategy if you have the ability.

Jesse Dolan: Right on. And especially if you’re doing something like your Boeing example earlier, if something’s 10 searches a month versus something like this, yeah, that’s going to make a big impact.

Kyle Roof: Yeah. That’t such a small number.

Jesse Dolan: I’d like to go back here, Kyle. Yeah, back to their blog post here. I’d like you not to put you on the spot. But as we’re looking at this, you’re talking about using basically interlinking, other content, things like that to maybe either power up this blog post or using this blog post to power up something else.

Kyle Roof: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Dolan: Now, if we take something like POP and the AI Writer, what if this blog post itself? Because it’s something we do a lot for clients is. Yeah, so you can optimize the content, repurpose it, link it like you’re talking, but what if this page, this blog post, I should say itself, maybe needed more guts? This one’s pretty good, right? Not to make an example of something that doesn’t need to be here, but just to play devil’s advocate. Can you, a little bit self-promotionally too, talk about maybe Pop, the AI writer, how somebody could go in and quickly, you know, throw some more content on a blog post like this too, in addition to the other tricks.

Kyle Roof: Going in quickly to control some more concepts as to addition to their. So as you know, one page on the website is one keyword, one main concept. And so I would assume that the main concept here is what services does an MSP provide. That would be my assumption that that’s what they’re trying to do. I would actually grab that and do a Google search and see if they’re ranking for it. I was looking at this yesterday. I don’t think they are for this particular term. But I feel like that can’t be a terribly difficult term to win. But what that tells me, I definitely could be wrong. But let me just do a Control-F on there and see if their domain comes up. LCS, right?

Jesse Dolan: Oh yeah, sorry.

Kyle Roof: Yeah, LCS. Where they at?

Jesse Dolan: See you then. No, not pulling up. Did you find it yesterday when

Kyle Roof: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: you were doing this? Or the other day?

Kyle Roof: So no, I think this one, I think they weren’t ranking for this one, as

Jesse Dolan: Okay.

Kyle Roof: I recall. But I would think that you could get some movement just in on page for this term, just as like, kind of a gut feeling, although, again, I could be very wrong. This would be like the money term for the entire industry and.

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Kyle Roof: Yeah, then yeah, it’s gonna be hard, but um. That’s the term you want to take and you want to put into a tool like pop because you want to make sure your accounts are right, you know that you’ve got your target term in there as many times as it’s variations and the contextual terms. Cause it’s entirely possible, especially like a long tail prayers like that. You don’t need to put it in a million times. So you just need in the title more than anything. And then after that, the variations of it, like how you might say it differently or how you would work it in naturally into a conversation, probably going to do enough to get it to rank, but, um, because they aren’t ranking, I would see if the counts are right. I would throw it into pop for example, and see if the counts are where they need to be. I have a feeling they aren’t. One thing that you look at, um, like those subheadings And I didn’t see what they are. I assume they’re H2s. I would hope that they’re H2s. But one of the issues like data and security, that’s not really a great, that’s an opportunity to rank for something or to get a secondary keyword on there that you might. And so it probably works for the section, but that’s an opportunity to actually make it more of a keyword that somebody might be searching for. Let’s say this was the money term, the most important. You may not win it. You know, you may not win that big term because you might be going up against sites that have been there for decades and sites that have a lot more budget and resource than you do. But just because you can’t win that main term, you can win so many secondary terms. And a lot of those are more transactional, you know, that there are people that are looking for something specific. They already know they want it. Now they’re looking for this specific thing. And so you can have very successful pages that are really just ranking for those secondary terms. And that’s where your H2s come in. And so I would make sure I would check out where my counts are. And then what I would do is I would start to optimize those sections, the H2 tags to get secondary keywords that I might be able to win quite quickly, especially if I’m trying to wait for the main term to rank if, if ever.

Jesse Dolan: Sure. Well, that’s what you’re saying too, waiting for that main term to rank, right? Like as you’re going through this, this is not a one-time thing. Maybe you’re deciding this is, I am or I’m not gonna rank for this. It’s keyword, right? Optimize this, go after it. Come back later, see if that helped. Bump your rankings up and keep after it, especially if it’s, yeah, a big money keyword you’re trying to go after. And if this is the page, you know, things like that. So that’s good stuff.

Kyle Roof: Exactly, exactly. And then I guess we’re like the AI writer would so Bob has a new, again, shameless promotion. Let’s say you needed 500 words, it’s the kind of thing you could get 500 words out of or like some, some inspiration. Any AI tool really shouldn’t be used as an I’m going to push a button, I’m going to get this content, I’m going to put it right on the site, you should you should never do that. Because AI writers are really just fancy spinners. You know, they’re fantastic. But it is at the end of day, just a spinner. It’s taking words that it already has. And it’s basically just reconfiguring them in the way that you’re asking to reconfigure. So when you get a content, regardless of where you get it from, you need to edit for tone, voice, brand and also facts because they’re pretty good at lying and making things up. Yeah, you ask it for it, it’s going to give it to you. It did not guarantee that it was going to be correct. So you want to make sure that you’re. kind of keeping an eye. I think in the agency recently, it was something about unions. And the AI came back and said unions were founded in 1971. And it’s like, I don’t think they were. I feel like it was a little earlier than that. But AI quite confidently stated that they were founded in 1971. So you need to check for the facts. But I think you could use AI in this situation. Let’s say you need another 500 words. You could kind of get inspiration with section. get inspiration on looking on there. And if you’re using pop, what we do with our AI writer is that it actually puts the pop terms in. So you can kind of see like, this is what optimized content could look like, but you’d still want to edit to make sure that it is correct. And also it sounds like a human wrote it. And you do need to add some of that unique value to it that you are adding to the conversation, that you aren’t just regurgitating stuff that already exists, that you are adding something new to it that would make this rankable. or rank worthy in the first place. So this is good content that I have added to this conversation, even if your inspiration or the first couple of steps did come from the AI to begin with.

Jesse Dolan: I like how you’re using the word, you know, use it for inspiration, you know, making sure you’re kind of being that editor in chief before you just straight publish it. AI, it’s amazing.

Kyle Roof: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: I mean, this is a great tool in toolbox. We’re silly if we don’t use it, but your advice I think is so spot on for everybody. You can’t just slap that thing up there. You know, you gotta make sure it fits.

Kyle Roof: Now, once Google realizes that that’s all you’re doing, that you’re just taking pure AI content and putting it on your site, why would they continue to crawl your site? Because they know that it’s just spun content. It’s not anything new if it’s just 100% AI. So you see like those graphs that people post right now on Facebook, like, well, I’m taking off, I’m doing amazing. They just don’t show the graph from three months later when Google realizes like, oh, it’s just pure AI. I’ve seen plenty of the other side of that.

Jesse Dolan: Fallen feels like flying until you hit the ground, so.

Kyle Roof: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the guy that’s fallen out of the building. Yeah, every floor so far so good.

Jesse Dolan: Right, right. Well, that was a thorough review for Leap. Is there anything else you wanted to impart on us, Kyle, that you felt was relevant for the website or examples for everybody?

Kyle Roof: No, that’s kind of, that’s just kind of how I go through it at the beginning. You know, it was just like, again, like I said, I just go right to the footer, see what, see what they’re playing with and start from there and then kind of weave my way through the site is pretty much exactly how I did it yesterday. As I was just kind of going through it and the things I started to look for and stuff like that. Um, lots of good going on the site. And I think they’re in a position where they can take that good and even do even better. Cause I don’t think it’s really ranking for a lot right now. I think the sites only been around, or at least according to like SEM rush for about a year in terms of like getting stuff going. So I think they’re at a point where they could probably step on the gas a little bit and, um, uh, take this excellent work that they’ve done and really capitalize on it.

Jesse Dolan: Nice. And especially like the things you’re pointing out because I mean, SEO, yeah, it’s complicated, right? There’s a ton of things to look at, but like you’re saying, here’s my basic things. I start here and I just start kind of working through something when I’m looking at it. And kind of inversely at the end of the day, SEO can be not that complicated in a sense of, what’s your foundational stuff on the page?

Kyle Roof: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: Making sure you’re checking those basic boxes, not getting too tricky, looking for some silver bullet, you know. trick that may work for a while. Yeah, and this is really good stuff. I appreciate you taking the time this morning to share this with us and to break this down here. This is a lot of good stuff. Anything else you wanna talk about, Kyle or…

Kyle Roof: Yeah, a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, man, anytime, anytime.

Kyle Roof: No. I’ll tell you what, this is the worst part of the sport season where there’s like no good sports going on.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Kyle Roof: This is kind of a sad time, but I’m already like looking, are you a football guy? I’m already looking towards the end of the NFL season. That’s all I’ve been thinking about in the last little bit is just…

Jesse Dolan: We’re up in Minnesota, the Minnesota Twins. No, the Minnesota Twins is our baseball team.

Kyle Roof: Yeah, there’s baseball, But, yeah.

Jesse Dolan: That’s all there is. And when your team isn’t that good, then it’s just even more the sports abyss, right? Waiting for football to start.

Kyle Roof: I’m an A’s fan and like they’re so bad They’re leaving Oakland.

Jesse Dolan: There you go. No, well, hey, the twins, we follow that same kind of money ball, small ball strategy as the A’s had made famous. So when it works, it works. But otherwise, it’s a long season, long season. So. Alright, Kyle, well, we can wrap it up. I appreciate you, like I said, coming on for everybody. wants to know more about Kyle, like I said, go back, check out episode 70 where we talked about, I think that’s a good primer for some of this too. You know, why does, or how does Google work? You know, it hides a lot of things in plain sight. Really diving into some of the background philosophies, I think that are within POP, why POP works. And yeah, kind of make sense a little bit more maybe as Kyle is sharing. But we’ll bump into down the road. I appreciate your time and yeah I think you dropped some great nuggets for everyone so thanks for hanging out man.

Kyle Roof: Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Jesse Dolan: All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that episode as much as I did. Thanks again to Kyle for coming on, sharing some time out of his day to teach us a few things about SEO, walk through that website and break it down. As we talked in the episode, if you’re not familiar with POP page optimizer pro, um, Kyle is the brain wizard behind that. We’re a huge fan of it here at Intrix and on the show, Local SEO Tactics. You can learn more and even get a little discount. If you go to our resources page, uh, go down in there, you’ll find a link for POP. Click on that and you’ll get over there. You can log in and get set up with pop for the first time using that link. Yes, it’s going to give us a little bit of something for the affiliate link, but more importantly, you’re going to get some benefits as well going through that to try it out with the new AI assisted stuff that they got going on in there. The watchdog they released a number of months ago. Pop is really getting to be a great tool. One of our favorites here. Check it out. Thanks for paying attention to this episode and tuning in. We’ll catch you all on the next one. Take care.