Drive and Convert (Ep. 074): Debunking Common SEO Myths

Listen to this episode:

About This Episode:

SEO confuses a lot of people. In this week’s episode, Jon and Ryan tackle three big SEO myths that frequently come up when they’re talking to prospects and clients. 

They also discuss brand voice, compounding effects, domain authority, and site traffic. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why small brands and startups should still invest in SEO
2. Why SEO is like growing your own apple tree
3. How SEO is different from paid search
4. What the minimum budget for SEO is 
5. Why you still need SEO even when you have a SaaS platform
6. Why not all traffic is equal

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Spotify
• Castbox
• Castro
• Overcast
• Pocket Casts
• Stitcher
• Subscribe via RSS

Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
So Ryan, I’m always confused about SEO and I know that might a lot of people are.

Ryan:
That makes two of us.

Jon:
Well, this is going to be a very interesting episode then because I think you’re going to tell us today about three myths in SEO.
And ones that most commonly come up is you’re talking with prospects and clients in your day-to-day, I do think that SEO is way more expensive than it should be. I think that results on the work are always out four to six months, which is the way it should be with SEO. It’s a compounding effort. But I do think there’s a lot of myths out there and is a lot of black hat stuff that people promote. My gut can tell me what’s the best between those two and what I should and shouldn’t do from a moral standpoint maybe. But I still think there’s a lot of myths out there right?

Ryan:
There are. Maybe this ends up as quite a few part series maybe because I know there’s more than three myths.

Jon:
There are. I’m sure there’s hundreds. We could do a podcast just on this probably.

Ryan:
Probably.

Jon:
But I want to hear your top three.

Ryan:
Okay.

Jon:
So how did you choose three? We’ll talk about three. How’d you choose three today?

Ryan:
Well, it’s in the conversations, anything I repeat a lot of times I’m like, okay, this is obviously a pretty consistent conversation or thought process that’s happening among these businesses. And just the general bell curve, the majority of businesses I talk to end up being less than $5,000,000 online. So in that S and [inaudible 00:01:48] bucket. When I’m talking to the masses, some of the larger businesses or brands you and I work with, most of them, I can’t say that as a fact, but a lot of them have, through trial and error, figured out a lot of the myths and been like, okay, we do need to be investing in SEO doing these things because they’ve either hired somebody that knew how to do it or they were like, hey, we started having negative things happen and oh, we weren’t doing SEO.

Jon:
Those bigger brands, though, they have the money to do trial and error.

Ryan:
They do, yeah. You can run some SEO and it fails. You’re like, okay, well at least we had the other SEO going that was working. And I think a lot of brands should be doing trial and error pretty consistently but it’s just on a much smaller scale when you’re small and you may not be able to test much in the SEO world. Because as you said at the beginning, it is expensive. It’s one of the larger line items by itself. If you look at paid search as a whole, paid search is probably larger and it includes the spend. But when you’re breaking out the management fee, generally an agency’s getting paid a management fee for paid search and SEO and the SEO is usually larger.

Jon:
Well, I think there’s more effort hand-to-hand combat that goes into SEO, right? Where in my view, and again, this could just be a myth that I have, paid search is you set it up and then you’re spending money at Google. And yeah, you can tweak it, et cetera, but you’re basically just letting Google spend money at that point. Where with SEO, you need to continually be doing content, trying to go out and contact people to get back links. Every single thing you can do for SEO that I can think of off the top of my head that is not black hat is typically something that requires effort and time where that’s going to cost more money.

Ryan:
True. And I think a lot of the smaller businesses I’ve talked to that have just been successful businesses, I think, many of the owners had a background in SEO where they knew they could do a lot of their own work. So that large expense was their time, not actually a cash out of the business. So that could also just be, hey, there’s some value here because everybody likes to refer to it as the free clicks. Maybe that’s my myth sub point. There are no free clicks on the internet. They’re costing someone somewhere somehow to get traffic. Whether you paid for it six months ago or you paid for it right at the click, it costs money.

Jon:
All right, so what’s the first myth then?

Ryan:
The first one I come up across a lot, it’s kind of just a main point as well, that small brands don’t need to be investing in SEO until they’re bigger. And I can honestly see how brand owners get to this point or viewpoint because I’ve been there. If you look at all of your top non-brand keywords that are driving sales through Google Ads, you’re going to see Amazon, Walmart, Nordstrom and much larger competitors that dominate the top of the queries. You’re so far behind them as a brand new site, why try, at the end of the day?

Jon:
Yeah. But they’ve been there forever and that’s why they’re up there, right?

Ryan:
Exactly. So you’re not going to go do SEO today and then in six months overtake Amazon, Walmart, Target, Nordstrom, that are already at the top four. It’s not going to happen unless you get crazy lucky or black hat and then it goes away anyway. You also have to understand, though, that every 90 days on Google, 15% of the searches that are being done on Google haven’t been done before. And so there’s constantly new stuff.

Jon:
Wow. 15%?

Ryan:
15%. Now that stat is probably a couple years old. I don’t know how much has changed. But that’s been a pretty consistent still stat coming from Google for a while that-

Jon:
That’s crazy, yeah.

Ryan:
There’s a lot of new things. And a lot of that is going to be weird trends or you get some crazy TikTok thing. Nobody had probably ever looked at the whatever, the ice bucket challenge before that happens. You’re like all of a sudden ice bucket challenge. What do you mean? Oh, well there’s a few million searches for it and there never have been before.
To capture those though, you have to be doing something. So doing nothing means it’s going to be very hard to capture them when they come up. But there’s a piece of your site called domain authority, which is how Google and search engines see your site and say, how relevant is this and is it in a good neighborhood? The higher your domain name, the more exclusive your gated community essentially. And all of the back links going into that essentially give you more and more access to better and better communities, if you will.
And so SEO from a broad stroke standpoint includes content, the blogs and the content you’re putting on your site, which is on a collection or a category page. What’s the description you’re putting on there? What’s the title you’re putting at the top? All of that is SEO. And if you’re not paying somebody that’s an expert for that, that means the business owner. And if you don’t have a background in SEO, you are likely not the best person to be writing that content or choosing some of those keywords.

Jon:
Oh, this is the same thing I say all the time around reading a label from inside the jar. You know your products. You’re not going to be able to work in the phrases or words for somebody who is new to file, has no idea what the product is.

Ryan:
Yeah, and there’s some basic things maybe, but you might need a nuance within your words to have a chance to show for certain terms. Because you’re going to be starting more long tail rather than saying, I’ve come across some new sites, their category is men’s. I was like, well, I mean technically those are men’s shirts, but let’s maybe make it men’s fitted t-shirts because you’re much more likely to be able to spend money on that type of term and make it work. You’re not going to spend money on paid search on the word men’s. And this title category H one tag and content you’re putting on that page allows you to get a higher quality score. So it’s SEO technically by what the work is being done by, but it has a positive impact on your paid search campaigns, which is likely where you’re spending more of your time and energy.

Jon:
So would you recommend that a founder who maybe isn’t technical SEO but can write enough to… Would you recommend that to save some money and get things rolling, they take the first pass and then hand that off to a technical SEO person?

Ryan:
I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. And I think that it’s probably… This is a horrible broad statement, but I make a lot of those on this podcast. It’s probably easier for an SEO person to revamp something that you’ve already done and say, okay, you’ve got the title, the H tag, the description. I can see what you’re doing here. I’m just going to insert some keywords, make it flow a little better, make it more relevant to the paid search terms there. I see you’ve got a blog there. Step one, I don’t have to set up the blog as an SEO. You’ve already got it. Let’s just add one in there.
I will say this too. If you are a business owner or a marketing team and you are already in the habit of writing content or a blog and you bring an SEO agency or individual in to do some of that, you’re going to see what they’re doing and you’re going to be able to pick up some of that from them and be like, oh, I saw what they did with the keywords on that blog, that was a good idea. I’ll do that on my next one as well. And so you’ll be able to learn from that just by observing like, hey, they’re a quality SEO. I see what you did with the title, how you spaced it. Oh, I see how you used H tags within that document. I can do that as well when I put my own content out there.
So I think it’s valuable for a company to do their own content regardless of their size. Cause I think there’s a brand voice as well. And our team, for example, does a lot of SEO. We do a really good job. But one of the things that becomes difficult is really getting a external writer to understand brand voice and execute that. And so if you’ve got a really key brand you’re building and you want the voice a certain way, you’re probably going to want a content person. Maybe your social media person internally really understands that because they’re taking the pictures, they’re putting the content, responding to people. That person might write a better on-site blog from a brand voice perspective. And then you just run that through your SEO team to say, hey, I need to make sure this has got the right keyword density and it’s mocked up correctly to maximize the SEO juice we’re going to get from this blog. And we do that for quite a few clients as well.

Jon:
Okay, awesome. What’s the second myth that you’d like to chat about today?

Ryan:
In this one we kind of took [inaudible 00:09:50]. SEO is expensive and it’s far outside my budget. That can be true but I would say more likely it’s false, it is a myth. And I tell companies that you better not speak to just one SEO company. There’s going to be multiple ways to price it. There’s going to be multiple options within the space. There’s some things you will want as a brand hiring SEO company. You need to make sure there’s transparency. You need to make sure that there are a list of things that the agency is responsible for and timelines associated with that. There needs to be a lot of integrity and follow through from an SEO agency that if they can put that in front of you and then execute against that, that’s a very, generally very good agency.
But I’ll let everybody in a little bit under the hood for an agency real quick. In that almost all agency pricing boils down to an hourly rate you’re paying your employees and the markup that you need to cover overhead, owner pay or distributions and also be competitive. But it all boils down to hourly pay. Like SEO, they might charge you $2,000 a month for SEO, but they know that that’s going to be this many hours and this is their markup to make it work. They’re not just going to throw $2,000 out there and not pay attention to the hours going into that to make sure they’re profitable. And so yeah, you’re not getting unlimited work for $2,000. So just to understand that most agencies that are doing white hat SEO and have integrity and have a good reputation are not going to be gauging you and charging an astronomical rate because they’ll lose clients very quickly by somebody saying-

Jon:
Too much competition.

Ryan:
Yeah, I’ve paid you five grand. You did easily a thousand dollars of work. And I can see the hours from a business perspective.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Driving Convert a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering paper click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
Let me ask you this, what is the minimum budget you would put towards SEO? Just to get started, right? If you don’t have X, then don’t even bother starting with SEO.

Ryan:
I would say you should probably be investing at least $1,500 bucks a month. I don’t think you need to be going 10 grand and really getting aggressive initially. And I think there’s some value to building up over time and seeing results and then doing more. But you can start small. And I would have an SEO team focus offsite almost exclusively. A good SEO agency knows how to get back links, quality back links, effectively. And so they can go out and do that and it would take you as a business owner a much longer to figure that out. Whereas you as a business owner can at least get a blog up and target the same keywords, which we’ll talk about probably a little later. But those back links go back and increase your domain authority and over time that compounds. And so I tell business owners as you’re starting your business, SEO is a spend now, get something later, marketing. Four to six months, you’re going to see the results of good SEO in four to six months. Paid search, you are spending now, getting now. And as a business owner, you like that because you’re seeing fruit very quick and it’s exciting. You’re like, ah, I spent a hundred bucks and I made $150 in profit, life is great. SEO that’s not going to happen.

Jon:
Yeah, I’ve told people it’s like growing apples versus going to the store and buying them. You can go buy apples and you have apples and you can make an apple pie, do whatever you want to do with them. And that’s paying Google for traffic. You put money in, you get what you know you’re going to get back. But you could also grow your own apples and they’re free. And you could still have the same outcome of making apple pie. But you’re going to have to wait for that tree to mature and then it’s got a fruit and then you don’t know exactly how many apples you’re going to end up with. But it’s free.

Ryan:
You got to buy the tree.

Jon:
True.

Ryan:
And you got to spray for bugs or you get worms and things. So there is ongoing maintenance [inaudible 00:14:02]. Which is like SEO. There’s going to be some costs, but it’ll be much smaller. I might pay… Because we grow apples here and I’ve got, I don’t know, probably 15 apple and pear trees ballpark in it on property. And we bring somebody out in the spring that sprays this insecticide type organic thing that makes sure that worms don’t crawl in all my fruit. And that might cost me 200 bucks for all 15 trees. And so it’s like, yeah, that’s per tree somewhere around, let’s just say 10 bucks easy. That’s one week of apples at my house. And so I’m making money on it and my kids get to pick them and enjoy them and so there’s value there for me too. But I could sell them. I’ve got a lot of them. Instead they end up rotting and attracting bees and isn’t that great?

Jon:
There you go. Well, right. But I think you made a good point that there is some cost and some effort but that compounds over time in that you have the tree that matures, it gets bigger, it continues to fruit. Where ads you spend that money, you get it right back, but it’s gone.

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
You’re not getting that money back. There’s no compounding effort there.

Ryan:
No. And I think the compound is the key thing that most people will get out of this point, is that look at SEO as as investing because it’s going to have compound interest. If I was smart when I was just out of college 22 and started saving, I would be in a much better spot for retirement now than I am. Because of the power of compound interest.

Jon:
You and me and everyone else I know.

Ryan:
The number of people that I knew when I was 22, 0 of us were investing for our future. It was beer and going clubbing. What a waste.

Jon:
Yeah. Somebody once told me that first car you bought when you got out of college, and it wasn’t anything fancy, but it was like if you had put that $23,000 bucks, whatever it was for the car back then into the market, what would that be worth today? And we did the math and I was just like, holy. Was that car really worth that? No, no. I could have, I should have biked everywhere.

Ryan:
Yeah. My ego tells me, oh, it was definitely worth it at the time.

Jon:
Yeah. But I didn’t have to bike everywhere, so I had some utility, but yeah.

Ryan:
22 year old Ryan was an idiot.

Jon:
Well. We all are. But okay, so depending on who you ask, I’m still an idiot.
What’s your third one? Now we know that okay, it’s going to cost some money, that it’s compounding and that you really need to invest early. What’s your third one?

Ryan:
This one is, there might be some flack for this, but there’s a lot of people that assume that if I pay for a SaaS platform or they do the hosting, then I don’t need to worry about technical SEO or site speed or any of those things. Because the Shopify, the big commerces, the Squarespace is the square spaces of the world, they’re just going to take care of it. And that’s why people do it because [inaudible 00:16:48] sucked when you had to host it yourself and it broke, or it was swaggy. SaaS, you’re fine.
And there were probably a lot of people on SaaS platforms in September last year that had that Google Court update come through that got very surprised when their top rankings dropped pretty significantly. And the problem is you’ve got multiple options within those platforms from a theme perspective. Just because somebody can make a theme on Shopify that looks really cool and is exactly how you want your brand to be portrayed, doesn’t mean that it’s going to load quick or appropriately on all devices and that Google’s going to love it from an SEO standpoint because usually those skill sets are very different. Not all the time, but usually. And so you’ll have apps you can add into Shopify are big commerce that are going to slow the load down that Google’s going to recognize that and be like, oh, your site’s loading slow. And it doesn’t appear that way but Google’s seeing it and saying, God, this app won’t load for 30 seconds, therefore we’re dinging you.
And so that Google core update in ’21 did impact not a small number of companies that I’ve seen as far as their top three, top 10, rankings dropping over the next few months. Some of them were able to figure it out quick enough and get those rankings back but a lot of them didn’t.
And it can be a business owner issue too. If you put a massive five megapixel giant image, that’s one of your images on a product page, Google, it’s not going to load quick and Google’s going to be like, yeah, what the heck are you doing? You need to shrink your images. And then if your descriptions aren’t very good, they’re like the one right out of the digital camera instead of actually what the product is, that’s not going to be great.
And I think more and more, I think there’s going to be, the algorithms on the search engines are going to be recognizing sites that are helping those with disabilities. And that’s been a… In the past, you’ve helped set your site up for people with disabilities specifically to avoid the lawsuit that some random lawyer’s going to find your site and send you a cease and desist or send you a lawsuit saying they just want to settle for five grand type of thing. And that was the pain enough to get people to switch. But I think the bigger one is going to be Google and Bing can start seeing some of that data and say, oh, well, you’re not compatible from an ADA standpoint, so forget it. And it might already be in the algorithm but…

Jon:
Yeah, I think it is to some degree. They want alt images and alt tags, things like that, that are good for them, helpful for them. Because let’s be honest, a bot is essentially very similar to some disabilities. Meaning that a bot can’t see color, a bot can’t always make out what an image is, so it needs the alt text. So you needs hierarchy tags, things of that sort to help you know what’s a header and what’s normal text, et cetera. So all of that stuff, if you’re in a screen reader, you are using a screen reader, all of that stuff’s important. And I think inherently some of that stuff’s baked in from what I understand, but yeah, I could see it taking more precedent for sure.
But I think it is interesting. A lot of people will pay to install something that prevents them from getting a lawsuit versus just fixing their site. Just fix the site, have a better customer experience, you’ll make more money.

Ryan:
Yeah. And honestly, those plugins, I’ve done a lot of research on this ’cause we have some partners that help clients. Just by putting that on there, you’re probably more likely to get sued because they know they don’t work very well and they’re like, oh you know this is a risk. You got a problem and you’re more likely to settle.

Jon:
It’s interesting you say that. I actually had a friend who put that on and then a month later. And they were like, no, no, but I put this on. They’re like, yeah, no, it doesn’t solve the key issues.

Ryan:
Yeah, because a built with list tells them, hey, who installed this in the last month?

Jon:
Yep, exactly.

Ryan:
There’s my prospect list as a lawyer.

Jon:
That’s exactly it.

Ryan:
I hate that.

Jon:
Yeah. So if you’re on a platform like a Shopify, big commerce, et cetera, you still need to do your own technical SEO. Be concerned about site speed. There are ways and factors in your control.

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
Is that-

Ryan:
Just don’t assume that the platform, because they are fast, big commerce and Shopify, in particular, very fast and will load very quick. They’ve done a great, both those companies have done a great job on the backend to make their platforms fast and look really good to Google. You can screw it up though. And just be careful because you probably will if you’re not paying attention to those things.

Jon:
Yeah, for a while, everybody was like, the Shopify site speed greater in the admin panel is the world’s biggest lie. And it’s like, well, they’re trying to tell you that you’re doing some things incorrectly and it’s not their platform. But it comes across as to uneducated Shopify users that it’s Shopify that’s slow. And it’s like, well, probably not.

Ryan:
No. You’ve done some things that are dumb probably.

Jon:
Well, okay, so I think you have a bonus.

Ryan:
Yeah, yeah. We do have a minute left. I had one on here just in case we had some time left. But it’s one that I think a lot of people assume as a business that all I need is traffic and once I get traffic, I’m good. Or once I get enough traffic, I just go to Jon and it’ll start converting. And once you’re in the space, I know that all traffic is not equal.
In fact, I have funny, funny anecdote, I’ll get through it quick. I had a partner come to me and say, hey, the current agency they’re working with sent this over to them, so they don’t know if they want to talk and they did a case study on them, so they must be happy. I’m like, oh, let me look at the case study. They were running Google Ads, had a $5,000 budget. They said, oh, we did a great job for this company. We got them 7,200 or 7,400 visitors at an average CPC of $1.45. It’s like, okay, next line. Nothing. That was it. They got 7,200, 7,400, visitors at a $1.41. I’m like, that’s weird. There’s no quality of that. And then the next sentence… And I did the math by the way, and it comes to $10,000, $10,148 or something-

Jon:
Which is not-

Ryan:
It looks like they overspent by about five grand so that doesn’t make any sense. That would piss me off as a brand. And then the next one was, yeah, and then we got… Over four months, we got 6,300 visitors for a $1.10. I wrote back and I was like, I really don’t know what the case study’s saying, but just sending traffic to site. I was like, because they were looking for guarantees if they went came to us. I’m like, I guarantee them I can get them more traffic cheaper. That part’s easy. I could spend… I’ll get, I’ll put a display net ad out there at a penny, get them half a million visitors for $5,000, they will get zero new clients out of this. But they got a lot, they got half a million visitors.
So all traffic’s not equal.

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
And you get a lot of people that have looked at information or found something that says, oh, you have the blog and that’s part of SEO. Which SEO, yes, is a big piece of SEO. But the point of blogs is really to have content on the site that can be back linked to. Because what search engines often don’t want those back links going to a product, they want them going to content. So content there, it gives you keyword density on the site. Let’s Google see that you’re regularly updating the site with content about the keywords and then also can build brand awareness for the brand. But blogs don’t get read a lot. You don’t find a lot of people spending time on blog. I mean, the last time I read a blog, well, I guess when I’m cooking, I will find a cooking blog and I read a Pinterest art… Pinterest usually leads to some stupid article that I have to skip, push the menu, get me to the recipe because I don’t care that grandma in the summer would open the windows in the smells. I’m like, give me the recipe. So technically I’m reading a blog, but I really just skipped it and went to the recipe. But the blogs aren’t there for the people to read. They’re there just for technical SEO things.
And so in the cooking example, I would personally, if I was trying to build a blog that would generate business for me, I probably wouldn’t go create a cooking blog. There are so many cooking blogs out there that the saturation, unless I had some really crazy unique thing to really get excited about a blog, you’ve got to probably focus on something that doesn’t have a lot of content already. We’ve got a client that’s in the beard oil space and they started blogging about beards like 10 years ago when there wasn’t a lot of people blogging about it. So they built up a lot of authority on Google of here’s how you care for your beard and you have long hair, here’s how you handle the in between phases. And so that was a great move for them because they did it early on in the space. Just don’t expect people to read your blog or come onto your blog and then come buy things off that necessarily. It’s usually not [inaudible 00:25:21].

Jon:
I say this all the time when people put blog in their main navigation of their site. It’s like, don’t send people back up the funnel. Your blog is the very tippy top of your funnel. The goal is to drive traffic. And you want… Once somebody has gone from your blog to your site, stop sending them back to the blog. You’re just sending them up the funnel. Or don’t even… If they land on a product detail page or even on your homepage, don’t send them. That’s further down the funnel. Don’t send them back up to the blog. So I think if you’re looking at that funnel, the blog is the absolute top. And the whole goal of that is to get a showing in search results and to get people to click through and come to your site. But then you very quickly want to get them to a conversion point or a shopping journey. And a blog just isn’t that.

Ryan:
No. And you’ll use remarketing on that probably and fill a funnel and use that. But generally speaking, you’re going to find a lot of traffic on blogs and analytics and people get excited about traffic. And you’re like, the revenue number on the right side of that analytics page shows $0.

Jon:
Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan:
And then the inverse people are like, my traffic dropped. Oh, we had a blog that fell off rankings for some reason but your revenue went up because the important pages got more traffic. So who cares about the traffic? It’s an ego thing but I’d rather have more money in the bank than a bigger ego.

Jon:
There you go.
All right, Ryan. Well, this has been entertaining. Thank you for the hot takes on SEO. I do think we could do more of these. I’d love to hear more of these. I think maybe next episode I’ll do hot takes on CRO and we can bounce this back and forth a few times. It’d be fun.

Ryan:
Works for me. Let’s do it.

Jon:
All right, sir.

Ryan:
All right. Have a good one Jon.

Jon:
Thank you.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.