Buying Online Businesses - SEO Myths & Philosophies with Shopify SEO Director Kevin Indig
Primer: In this episode of Buying Online Businesses, host Jaryd Krause invites Shopify SEO Director Kevin Indig to bust some myths on SEO. Kevin shares with listeners his philosophy on SEO, his thoughts on content structure, and the impact of AI on SEO.
Background
SEO director at Shopify
Creator of the Growth Memo newsletter and the host of the Tech Bound Podcast
Before Shopify, he ran SEO and content at G2 and Atlassian
Myths About SEO
SEO is a reverse engineered discipline. Google does not want anybody to game their algorithm
Different boxes of myths:
Clear myths that have never been right
Outdated SEO tactics
A few years ago, there was a trend where people create infographics and had other people link to it. This does not work anymore
Emailing different sites and asking them to include your link in their articles no longer works
The whole area of SEO hyperlinks not mattering anymore is a myth
Google taking care of spammy/bad backlinks for you is a myth
Important to be critical of things you hear. Have to test things out and re-evaluate them yourself
Is Google Not Putting As Much Weight Into Backlinks As They Once Did?
Backlinks are still very valuable
Buying backlinks is against Google’s guidelines. If you are caught, Google will penalize you
Many companies pay for backlinks and it still works
If you buy backlinks, make sure that:
They appear as natural as possible
They are from relevant sites
“It's very easy to see when somebody has bought links. When you read a blog article, the link is kind of squeezed in, right? It's a link about topic X. And then all of a sudden, there's a sense of topic Y and it goes back to topic X.”
- Kevin Indig
Buying backlinks from a quality site still works
Getting backlinks too quickly is unnatural. Google will view it as a red flag
Assess your competitors and see what they are doing
What Can Help Get A Backlink?
Some sites (such as Shopify and Atlassian) have such strong brands that they do not get much organic links
They could still drive organic links with good content marketing
Collect statistics about your area/niche. Other bloggers/journalists might look for hard data for their articles
Provide unique data or data visualizations by combining different data pools together
SEO Principles
Everyone’s always asking for the latest tactics
However, the principles are more important:
1st principle: Build your own corpus of experience — Test things out and learn
Possible to do testing as a one person army. Does not have to be complex (e.g. making a change, seeing what happens, reverting the change, and see whether it goes back to baseline)
2nd principle: Adopt a Bayesian mindset — Building knowledge on top of the knowledge you already have
3rd principle: Execute quickly and execute well
A mistake that companies and people do is to roll out one large thing after 6 months instead of rolling out something every week
The pareto rule provides another perspective. Often, a few blog articles/landing pages bring in the most dollars
Content Structure
Have to understand the intent that people are expressing when they search for certain keywords
Does not make sense to optimize for one keyword. Blog articles/landing pages can rank for thousands of keywords
Optimize towards user intention and deciding the optimal structure from there
Examples:
If the intent is best business tips, it will be structured as a listicle
If it is about Why did the stock market go down?, it would consist of paragraphs with qualitative explanations
For certain user intent, Google just shows a video as that’s the best way to answer
Would He Suggest Having Different Types Of Formats?
His recommendation is to play around with it
2-3 years ago, long-form content outperformed short-form content
Now he sees short-form articles ranking for some juicy keywords (e.g. what is dropshipping, what is free cash flow, etc.)
Duplicate content/keyword cannibalization has completely changed
Google has 3 types of user intent:
Dominant intent
Common intent
Minor intent
A piece of content that addresses the 3 different types of user intent for a single keyword can rank with content for the same keyword
On AI Content
Skeptical and doubtful about AI content
There are some ways to create good enough AI content that gets ranked
If you are an ecommerce site with many categories, writing of product descriptions could be outsourced to AI
Seeing good long-form content written by AI
Tested AI content at Shopify. Still need an editor to make edits before it is publishable
Google will develop an understanding of things that AI can and cannot answer well:
For “shallow” questions, Google can answer the question themselves
Difficult for AI to comprehend questions that require forward thinking (e.g. will there be a recession?). They have all the information but AI does not have an understanding of how these factors would play together
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