Ever wonder what SEO for The New York Times | Wirecutter looks like?

TRANSCRIPTION:

[Roy] Hey everybody! Welcome. Today we're talking to Jeff Louella, who's an SEO expert. Jeff's worked for a number of large agencies in the past decade-plus and by extension has also worked with quite a few Fortune 500 companies. Jeff, you're now at New York Times Wire Cutter, which a couple of people may have heard about. I don't know, you know, it's not a well-known brand or anything. So welcome Jeff, and thanks for joining me today. 

[Jeff] Oh, thank you. Yeah, New York Times a little bit is a nice size brand to work on. Millions of visits a day. It's great. 

[Roy] For sure, for sure and we'll talk a little bit more about that too, but give us a little insight into your background and kind of your experience with the whole world of SEO.

[Jeff] Yeah, sure. I started off back in the mid-nineties as a web designer. I kind of went to a community college and took an HTML class. Help build the school's website. From there, got hired right into the world of I guess design and development back then. If you were a designer, you were a developer too because there really weren't separate fields at that time. But once there came a good field for designers, people leaving design school to work on web design, I realized I'm not a very good designer. I could copy people’s designs, but I'm not very original; I had a whole bunch of experience doing HTML and CSS, back then there wasn't CSS; everything was table layouts. Also doing some backend using Java and things like that. Moved into that world for a while. Worked for a few different agencies out there. I was at an agency called Razor Fish as a software developer and the head of SEO came over to me one day and was like, Hey, how would you like to come over to the SEO team? After some discussions, I was like I don't want to deal with keywords, I'm more of a technical person. So that was kind of where I was born as a kind of technical engineer; they called it an SEO Engineer back then and not a technical SEO. Over the years moving to different agencies I've met up with you at an agency called Rosetta and was lucky to work with really big and awesome clients there. The team was like the biggest SEO team I've ever been on which was, there was a lot, it was amazing.

From there went to smaller agencies because I was like, I'm done with these big ones. Then realized sometimes smaller agencies, while you wear many hats, sometimes you wear too many hats. The agency I went to I was like the janitor/SEO; I would take the trash out every day out to the dumpster so we went a little too small at that point.

I happened to find a happy medium at another company we kind of shared, Search Discovery, where it was a nice size where I didn't have to take out the trash, but also small enough where you get to wear many hats.

[Roy] And work with very large companies that you wouldn't think for such a small agency.

[Jeff] That were some great clients there too; that was awesome kind of going to some of these clients' offices really made me jealous sometimes. Then Covid hit, you know, we had some downsizing and I luckily fell forward and started working for New York Times, Wire Cutter division, as a technical SEO. 

Now I'm moved over more into the product management role. We're still doing technical SEO up to about a week and a half ago where I'm still a product manager, but kind of shift over to another team where we are focusing more on experience. I'm still coming at things technically, still coming at them in a way, Google first, making sure that when Google hits our pages, everything is indexable and things like that but I also get to play a little bit more now with conversions and conversion rate and actually really focus on our readers and not necessarily focusing on Google first now. That's actually been a little bit of a nice switch even though it's only been a couple of weeks.

[Roy] Well, and that's always like a fine wire to walk, right? Like the balance between is this a usable website or is it completely just for Google's purposes? 

[Jeff] Yeah.

[Roy] There are trade-offs that you make with design and functionality. You know the people and companies want that really nice looking video in the background of their homepage but yeah, if it slows it to a halt, then Google's not going to index the page or the experience is bad. I think UX and SEO have always had kind of a dance going on.

[Jeff] Oh yeah, we definitely have and it was really nice being able to use those years of experience kind of working with all the other teams now and learning what I learned from some really great teams over there and just leaning a little bit on my 20-year-old design and experiences there but it's been great that way to just know that I'm kind of completing the life cycle now of just web design and development. I am still focusing on things like accessibility, which really kind of got me into SEO in the beginning because I was focusing on accessibility as a web developer. It really, really helped SEO back then and still does today. So it's one of those where we really like to focus on that. The ability right now, we’re doing pretty well but we like to be better and that's kind of where I'm in now.

[Roy] Sure. For sure. So I mean, SEO's dead though right?

[Jeff] Oh yeah. 

[Roy] I mean everybody's been talking about that for years. Like every few months it's like something comes out from Google and all of a sudden everybody's like, Hey, no, SEO's a dead industry. You can't impact Google. Google's going to do whatever. 

[Jeff] Yeah, it's so dead that it drives, you know, 60% of the traffic to my website.

[Roy] Right, right. 

[Jeff] And that's millions of visits a day but Google, it's one of those, they are tough to deal with at times. I am lucky right now that I work for a company that focuses heavily on editorial integrity and not really coming up. . . like we're not content-farmed by any means. 

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] Sometimes I wish we could be a little bit more of a content farm cause I want to hit so many different things that are out there but it really saves us when we have all these new updates coming out which there have been a lot recently from Google. 

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] I'm at a point in my career where I'm not worried. Maybe we'll see a little shift up and down but I see websites go out of business because some of these updates and it's just because they are competing against sites like Wire Cutter in the New York Times. Especially in the affiliate space where Wire Cutter plays there's a lot of junk out there and Google's trying to take it all down but every time they take something down, something new pops up.

[Roy] Yep. 

[Jeff] And it is a game. So people who say SEO is dead are mistaken. They'll always be mistaken. If you can search for something, there's always going to be a way to optimize that search and there's always going to be, I actually think there's more opportunity now because you have huge search companies like Amazon. You don't think of it as a search company, but I mean when was the last time you clicked through the navigation of Amazon to find anything that you wanted? You don't; everything is done through a search on that. YouTube, some of these huge companies out there. I mean YouTube is part of Google, but there are more ways to search are app stores and things like that. 

There are just way more things we can optimize. SEO I think is bigger than ever and it's one of those where you're always going to find a way to try to beat your competitor cause if you're number five or number six on a list, you can go up. So you're going to try to figure out ways of doing that and most of the time it is through content but with the larger websites you're on, there is a lot of technical debt that just piles up and over time will slow your site down, will make your site less accessible, will make it less crawlable. There are new technologies that come out that Google hasn't caught up with. There are a lot of new and old things that can actually hinder a website. There's going to need to be experts in that to be able to help that out. 

[Roy] Right. For sure. Yeah and to your point, like the recent updates, we've seen a lot of the content/affiliate sites that have just bottomed out their traffic. You're talking about very large sites that are seeing 50% drops in traffic because they have too many, we're assuming, it's because they have too many affiliate links on some of the content or too many ads. It's not a good user experience. 

[Jeff] Yep. 

[Roy] From a technical SEO perspective, what are some of the tools that you've traditionally turned to and that you still find useful? Other than obviously your own, I know that you've dabbled in podcasts. 

[Jeff] Yeah. In my toolbox, will always be Screaming Frog. Though I don't use it nearly as much as I used to and there are some reasons there but Screaming Frog is great for when we're doing site audits. When we're doing competitive audits, if you want to crawl all your competitor's sites you can just pop it into Screaming Frog. I've taken down websites with Screaming Frog, which was funny. In the agency world, I would always run screaming Frog at a high speed, and if I could take it down on like a 2013 MacBook error, imagine if there was an actual attack on your website.

[Roy] The denial service attack. 

[Jeff] Yeah, Yeah, exactly. I kind of like to push that a little and use some of that in my technical recommendations. Like, Hey, maybe you need to strengthen up your site a little bit. 

[Roy] Beef up your servers. 

[Jeff] Yeah but it's also great because you can have it set so to extract things like your title tags and meta descriptions and other things, but they give you, I think it's 10 slots to create your own custom extractions so you can pull things in like content blocks that you might have.

We tend to have on Wire Cutter little service notes or notes on the side like we've updated this then and that; I crawl all those so I know when those change. Screaming Frog is always one of the biggest ones in there, but recently we have been subscribed to a tool called Content King, which has got bought by Conductor. 

One reason I love Content King and there are other ones out there like Deep Crawl and Botify. The negative with Screaming Frog is that you have to run it from your location. Having it in a SAAS platform just means that they're always crawling. The one great thing that I find with Content King is that it's always crawling. It crawls our most important pages multiple times during the day. It looks for content and technical issues that we might say. So if something changes, blocks of content change, you can get alerts to put through it. You could set the level of those alerts. We set it up for any of our major reports or major crawls when it goes through; anything that pops up, robots, text files changed, or anything like that. It saved us a bunch of times knowing something changed that shouldn't have changed and being at such a big company, there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen so you never know when something's getting changed. 

[Roy] Oh, I'm sure. 

[Jeff]  Sometimes it’s not bad by any means, but there are other ones where maybe we didn't know. We have our content schedule and maybe other things change from there but knowing when there's a broken page or a 503 error, the quicker you know, the quicker you can fix it. If you're manually running reports every week or every two weeks just looking at audit-type of features, you might be down for two weeks and not know it.

Having a tool out there that's always checking as I said, Content King's been great for us. Deep Crawl is another; they're more technical focus but they're a great tool too. The New York Times in general, they have some tools they like to build that are, they are a company that loves to build tools, so we have some tools on our end there that crawl our site. They actually look at our traffic and tell us when we have traffic dips and things like that, that come up.

Those are the general tools that I use. There are hundreds out there, so sometimes if you're doing research, you know, there's always Semrush, Ahrefs, and Similarweb. We use a lot of those tools just for our content side of things and research and knowing, but they also have technical features now, so they can crawl your site at the same time and alert you too. Sometimes we have tools that are overlapped and then we're always going through like, do we need this tool anymore? 

[Roy] Right.

[Jeff] We just had a tool that looked at our core vitals every day but we now build that into our analytics reports using real-time data. We just canceled that service just because it was redundant. Things can get redundant pretty quick in, in the SEO tool world.

[Roy] For sure. Yeah, absolutely and they're expensive. If you start adding up the tools over time, you know, it adds up. From a cost perspective, they're super expensive.

[Jeff] Especially if you go to Rank Track and tracking your ranks and stuff like that. Some of those tools, being in the news industry, weekly tracking, sometimes daily tracking; like during our deal events and holiday events, doing cyber tracking every 15 minutes is optimal because you're playing with top stories, you're playing in those little areas. The more you can actually track that, the more you see when you drop off so that you can do some sort of content update or come out with some more content to fill that spot. If you waited a day, it's already over. 

[Roy] Yeah, that's a great point. I mean a lot of companies don't have the ability to change rankings that quickly because, you know, they're not as, as visible as the New York Times.

[Jeff] It's news. 

[Roy] Yeah, different than smaller companies.

[Jeff] Different. Same issues just at a faster pace. 

[Roy] Right. 

[Jeff] Especially on the news side, which I'm always curious about but kind of happy I'm not over there too, is that because news is any second something pops up. News to me is just crazy because it can happen anytime during the day. You have to be ready to optimize all the time and it's such a short window from when news is news and compared to being old. 

[Roy]  Yeah, for sure. We talked a little bit about the updates and stuff. What are some of the biggest challenges that you're regularly seeing now that could affect pretty much anybody? Like what should they be aware of that is really the big impacter right now?

[Jeff] Yeah. Recently too, I think there have been three or four major updates that have come out in the last 30 days I think. But one thing that Google's really been focusing on and it seems to be like all these updates are focused on, is just the helpful content update. Like is your content helpful to your readers or your people coming to your website? 

There's been a whole bunch; I'm in more of the affiliate space. There's been at least I think five this year like product updates, product review updates, and algorithm changes that are really focusing on so much AI content out there, so much like spam, such thin content. Like did you really review a product or did you really actually have this in your hand? Or are you just copying other people's content out there? 

[Roy]  Is it just an excuse for a link? 

[Jeff] Yeah, exactly. Google always has its core updates, which focus on a lot of things, especially the quality of the content definitely over the last six months. That's one reason in the beginning I said I don't worry as much because I know we have amazing editors on our team, but I know not everybody has that. Right? 

There are really people cutting corners and taking shortcuts in their content. There's a lot of great technology out there these days that uses like machine learning and AI to help you write your content. I think that's what some of the most recent updates have been trying to target; when you just give a tool a whole bunch of keywords and they write all the articles for you and spit it out. 

[Roy] Yeah. 

[Jeff] It's usually not great. Though I've seen some studies that showed some of that passed these recent updates, so I'd love to know what tools those were using so that I know how to combat against them. Having more content is usually better, not always, so long as it's targeted to what you need. It just seems like there are a ton of content farms and there's always been content farms, like low level, cheap content but now it's, I think as an SEO, you don't need to farm that out anymore. You can actually farm that out the software. 

It's going to only get better. We've seen how many deep fake videos like Tom Cruise deep fakes. If you can do it with video and voice, content's not far behind. 

[Roy]  Yeah, for sure.

[Jeff] All the misinformation that's going out there, especially in the news side of things. E-commerce, Google showing products right in Google listings and the SERPS themselves are not just 10 blue links. Hasn't been for a while but it's like you now need to have video content. You need to now have really great images that are optimized properly. You really need to have a lot of those, like whatever you see on a search results page.

If you have a local store, now you need to be in local search results and because they're just so broken up, any e-commerce, Google is now showing you tons, especially during holiday times. They might show up to like 20 products right on that page. No one's clicking into websites anymore. They're clicking straight from Google to buy it now. As an SEO person, you're like I need that traffic because I need to justify my job, and sometimes getting it up on Google means you're winning because, at the end of the day, money is what matters. You may be winning with people buying your products, but it might not look like it's coming from organic search. Maybe it's coming from paid search or just coming directly to your site from something like that.

[Roy]  Yeah, so on that, what are you guys using or what do you prefer to use for tracking and analysis and the kind of data, like the impact that you're having on these programs? I know that from our perspective, coming from an analytics background, Google Analytics 4 has going to been wreaking havoc with the industry and Google's move into that. People that depend on that it's changing marketing attribution. They're using the data-driven model, which is an AI model, which is a lot different than last click. So what do you use in your every day? How do you measure and monitor?

[Jeff]  Yeah. GA is part of my daily routine though the New York Times has also built their own analytics platform and that platform is getting better and more powerful. We store everything in a big query database. We're able to query from that using tools. We were using a tool called Chartio. I think they kind of stopped making Chartio. So we've switched over to a tool called Mode, but Data Studio also hooks into that and we're able to kind of create reports based off those two analytics platforms. Sometimes we put them side to side to see how different they are and they are fairly close. To the point where we rely less on Google Analytics these days. 

I still love the interface of Google Analytics and digging in and doing things like that but we are in the middle of figuring out if it is worth us re-tagging our whole site and redoing the way we do analytics to move to GA4 or just sticking with our homegrown analytics tool?

Not many other companies have that decision to make. You're going to GA four because working with like Adobe Analytics or any other big ones out there, Google is really good at pushing people off of things that they don't want them on. You know, GA360 or the normal GA going up to GA4.

I haven't used GA for a ton, so it'll be interesting. I really feel for a lot of people that go through that. In SEO, some of the bigger things are our analytics, but the other end of that is rankings. We have a whole bunch of different ranking tools. The main one we use is Advanced Web Rankings because it's cheap. I don't really love it, but it's cheap and we can put tons and tons of keywords in there to track. We've also used a couple of other tools in there.

We're about to have something called Make-a-Week, which we kind of build our own tools. We have a week just to kind of go crazy and do what we want. So I am looking at building in like a news top story tracker. We have a little team that we're going to try to knock out just because, as I mentioned during holidays, tracking every 15 minutes is vital to see where we're at. 

[Roy]  Yep. 

[Jeff]  Because we do product reviews, that's when people are searching the most. Cyber week is coming up, Prime days, like any of those. Labor Day, holidays and stuff. We're always trying to compete in the top stories and news for anyone who's searching like best buy deals or best toasters or anything that has the best in front of it and it's something to do with reviews or even gift terms.

[Roy]  Right. 

[Jeff]  You know, best gifts for 13-year-old teenagers in your house or something. We're trying to land on all those pages and a lot of those will be in the news cycle during that time and they go so quick. We might only be up there for an hour, so how can we track what kind of impact we had during that hour?

We might have another post come up right after that. No tracking tool that I know on the market really tracks at that quick of a level. It's usually daily, you can get them to be hourly, but they're still not focused totally on top stories. Then sometimes we need to be that granular in the way we track our data. 

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. I mean, even major platforms like Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics, especially during the holiday season, they don't want to tell you that, but there are significant data delays and lag between reporting and that type of stuff. I mean I've experienced it on Adobe Analytics where it'll be a day behind during the peak season. 

[Jeff] Especially if you're using your free tool from Google Search Console that they have. That could be three days, four days behind and some people just rely on that for their traffic. It's a great tool don't get me wrong there, but if you are searching for quicker data, GA's probably the quickest you'll get, but some of those are always delayed. You might be five or six hours delayed on that. We do have a tool called Chart Beat that we use that gives you that real-time analytics. So during those holidays, we can see our content move. I think it updates every 30 seconds or something so you can see where things are at. Chart Beat's really great for that on the fly; it's kind of like what I wished Google's analytics, real-time traffic looked like instead of just being like one page with a number.

Chart Beat definitely gives you like, are they coming in through amp? Are they mobile or desktop? Where are we seeing our spikes and where are we seeing things drop off? Which is always great to see and it's fun to watch cuz it's kind of like a dashboard and you get to see things moving around in it. It's coming from old school analytics where things might have been delayed a couple of days and doing monthly reports, to see things move every 15, 30 seconds is kind of insane to see.

[Roy] Yeah, that's a lot. It could be addictive to kinda watch them simplify the analytics. 

[Jeff] Exactly.

[Roy] With the ranking stuff, I know one of the things we run into with clients is helping them understand that what they're seeing when they conduct a search is not what the tools are seeing. We see that with executives, for instance. We tell them, hey, you know, you're ranking regularly for these keywords or for these landing pages. Then they're like, well, I just did a search and I don't see it. 

Do you still run into that with executive teams? I mean, maybe not as much at the New York Times, but with some of the other people.

[Jeff]  Right, but we still see it, right? People have their terms they search for and depending on what it is. Google is very good at giving you results that you were probably looking for because they want that click-through on there. There could be times that I'm searching for something and I see it and you don't. It's just because I searched for that 20 times already. Even if I'm in incognito mode, my IP is still attached to that search and things like that. 

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff]  Part of rankings, I tend to run my rankings in LA and New York just to kind of get the coastal separations there. I'm based in Atlanta, Georgia, so my personal search looks different than most of my team up in New York. Especially the more localized terms, right? If I'm searching for a pizza shop or anything like that, it's definitely going to give you local size terms. Surprisingly you would think like best vacuum or a term like that would not fluctuate across the states but they can.

[Roy] For sure.

[Jeff] We tend to use our one source but we also use, as I said, SEM Rush, Hrefs, and AWR, Advanced Web Rankings it's called.

[Roy] Right.

[Jeff] I kind of mill them together as an average score. I avoid using search console for my rankings because I don't trust them and they give you average. If you're number one and you have one at number 30, they're going to say, you rank 15 for something and I'm like, well, no, I do rank number one. That's where I try to take my top rankings on all those tools and blend them together. They're usually very close; so if like I'm number one in one, I'm usually no further than number two in another one, especially on the first page. But as soon as you get to those second-page rankings they can fluctuate wildly but being in the news world you have your like five or six news; like CNN and Washington Post. You have your competitors that are always there and it is kind of a game of inches at that point. Moving up a couple can really be a big boost. 

[Roy] Yeah, for sure, and CNN, they know you're in Atlanta,\ so they're probably trying to sabotage it.

[Jeff] Exactly. It's surprising these big news organizations since New York Times bought Wire Cutter, CNN created something called Reviewed or Underscored and then USA Today has Reviewed. There newspapers are seeing that there is a model to this and being able to spread out some of their traffic around them. 

Who competitors were a couple of years ago has totally changed and you have a lot of the big guns in there now that have great editorial staff that can jump on trends. New iPhone comes out, they're on it. Live. At Apple's campus as it's going on. You're seeing a lot of that now where it used to be a lot more specialty blogs or you had people like CNET that were more electronic-based, right? Not necessarily getting into like toasters and stuff, but now they're over in that world too. It is spreading out, the competition is getting way more fierce in that space. 

[Roy] And they have the budgets to actually go buy the products. To actually test them in a lab environment where it's not just theorizing how good they are.

[Jeff] Yeah and that's part of the expertise scores at Google. At Google, there's an EAT score that people talk about. It's not an official number, but it's expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. A lot of these news sites like New York Times, CNN, and others have that built into them already because they have such great staff.

There are a lot of people, a lot of websites out there that just are taking Google's reviews and saying, hey, they'd never seen the product, they never tested it. Make sure that you have the content, the supported imagery that this is actually the product in my hands, and a video of you testing it. All that stuff is very important these days in the affiliate space. 

[Roy] Yeah and  I've never tested it, but I know that there have been rumblings that Google will take it as a signal if you're using stock photography or photography that's readily available. If it's not your photography, not your video, that's a signal that they're using.

[Jeff] Yeah and they're able to search all that, right? They know if you're using Google images and just copying and stealing something out from them.

[Roy] What are some of the other trends that you're seeing? Stepping back even just a little bit from when you were still in the dark side of the agency world, what are, what are some of the biggest challenges you think that companies are dealing with right now that you've seen that they could or that they should be focusing on? That they may not be. 

[Jeff] From the company side, the agency side of things, as you probably will know too, it's finding people is really hard these days. I think a lot of SEOs have gone solo or started their own little conglomerate of like here's three of my SEO friends and we are, maybe not a full fledge agency, but they're like a team of freelancers. I see that in the agency, people that I know on the agency level and I think it's everywhere because we have the same problem at a large company too, which is finding the right people. As I said, there's a lot that’s moved off so it's like there are fewer SEOs out there it seems. When you do find the person that you're looking for, one, you're going to be paying more, which is great for the SEO itself, but from the agency's side, that could be a little tougher. At the same time as an SEO, you're going to be expected more from that agency, right?

If you getting hired at a company, budgets could be tough coming in the next year or so. We are somewhat in a recession. I'm not going to call it a full recession yet, I'm not an economic expert but I know there are people being used.

[Roy] Money.

[Jeff] Exactly. Yeah, and you're not able to hire 30 SEOs now. You might need to wear more hats. I look at it as a great way to learn more things. I kind of got ultra-specialized in a technical SEO role by choice. That was my like little niche. Companies might not be willing to hire that niche anymore. They want someone who might be more well-rounded and looking for someone who might know a little bit about user experience or might know something, a little bit, about accessibility. Again, your specialty will still be SEO, but I always laugh cuz SEOs definitely put their nose in every part of the business. If we could sit next to the CEO and tell them how to spend stuff too; like we want more budget. You need to know almost how to manage people and know how to manage clients because they're going through some of those budget constraints too.

[Roy] Definitely. 

[Jeff] There's a lot more than just knowing your SEO, I think these days that to become a really great employee for a company and SEO. To move the needle there's just so much more competition out there. There's a lot more noise. There are a lot more areas. Again, does TikTok help?

That's where a lot of people are spending their time. Kind of a funny search, I was at a liquor store the other day looking for some tequila and I was like, let me try this. I went on TikTok and typed in best tequilas. A whole bunch of review people popped up on there. I clicked the first one, he went through the top five. It was right in front of me. I picked it up. I didn't use Google for that search. 

There are more ways now that we might find the things that we want and the content we want and it's not just on Google. Google still reigns supreme, don't get me wrong.

[Roy] Sure, sure. 

[Jeff] I think you're going to have the ability to grow in other areas because Google is just one area where you can get your customers from. As an SEO, knowing those other areas and how you can work with each other and everyone is on the same team, High tide flutes, all boats

[Roy] Right

[Jeff] One thing at Wire Cutter, we are trying out TikTok, we are trying out everything just to see where we can get or we can reach more readers at all times. We've recently switched over to a subscription model like there are other ways to make money, Right? Subscription's one of them. 

Now being in a publisher, that makes more sense than if you were just a commerce company you're not going to have a subscription of course, or any other industry. Finding different ways that we can optimize the business itself and make money is another big thing.

[Roy] For sure. Do you feel like in the smaller agency world, the boutique agency just like us, one of the things that's impacted us is that people have a sour taste in their mouth when you mention SEO. 

[Jeff] Oh, yeah. 

[Roy] And I think it could be one of the reasons why people aren't going into it as much because there are so many companies out there saying that they're SEO experts and they don't know what the hell they're talking about and they're actually giving you bad information or they're charging and they're not actually doing anything. They say they're doing SEO for your site, you're getting a monthly bill, and they're doing some keyword reporting. Like they're not writing content, they're not changing anything on the site. It's kind of become a black mark on the industry a little bit.

[Jeff] Right.

[Roy] I think frankly, it could be impacting the number of people that want to even get involved in it. 

[Jeff] Yeah. I would agree there. I think black-hat SEOs have always been a thing, right? I've been lucky in my career where I've always had to have, at least, I would've gone down that hole if I didn't have clients that would've fired me instantly by going down some of those holes. But I totally get that where people have been burned, especially small businesses. There are a couple of companies I've gotten into some Twitter wars with. CEOs of some of those small companies that charge your local mom-and-pop shop, a thousand dollars a month, give them two blog posts and they can't do anything to their website, they can't do anything. It's a really hard market to go into. I feel bad for small boutique business owners cuz again, there you're wearing a billion hats, and being in SEO is not one thing that you’re most familiar with especially if you're running a local store or a local shop. I do agree that could just leave a bad taste in an agency's mouth but actually, as someone who's young getting into an industry, it's not a glamorous position. A lot of times if you are an artist or an author and you love the write, writing for search engines might not be in the constraint of what you really want to do. 

Being on the technical side I want to try all this new software that's come out. Back in the day, we had the big thing with Ajax. Everybody was doing everything with Ajax and Google couldn't read it.

[Roy] Yeah. 

[Jeff] Those technologies now are commonplace and Google is getting better at them, but there's always that new technology pushing the limit that as a developer you want to try to use out, but Google still needs to catch up. I keep calling out Google, but there are other search engines out there that are definitely further behind Google. Being able to have them read websites and understand them might be a lot harder than you think. 

[Roy] Yeah. I mean we're working with a client right now; they built their own website from scratch. It's an e-commerce website, which I don't recommend building from scratch. 

[Jeff] Yeah. 

[Roy] And Google can't read their links. It's completely not indexable and it's kind of a big problem. 

[Jeff] You know, and it happens everywhere. A couple of years before I joined Wire Cutter, we had the same thing. We upgraded to React and our links were not visible. We saw a big giant dip before I was here.

I think I would've blocked that maybe before it went live but you never know. You're fighting your battles and that's actually from the SEO side is what I, moving to the in-house from the agency what I've learned is I used to write up giant reports of everything, strategies, and everything we need to do for the next six months because I have a six-month contract.

I guess I realize, being so self-centered, never knowing what that company's actually capable of implementing. What is actually on their backlogs already? Being on that side now, I have eight months' worth of work. If we brought in another agency to get something fixed up, I might not be able to get to that because I already have a backlog. There's also order to that backlog where changing something small for SEO might not be on the list compared to something large that's going to help our readers overall; there's that scale. 

[Roy]  Yeah.

[Jeff] As a business owner that's hiring an SEO company, having those conversations like, what can we actually accomplish? You're going to send me a million things, what can we actually get accomplished? There are SEO companies also that, yeah, they're just sending you a report, and here add these words to this page. There are tons of SEO companies that just do backlinks, and I think that's some of the negative feedback people get because that's how many times do I or you probably get too, the LinkedIn people like, hey! 

I get all the time for businesses I'm not even in. Like they want to help my agency grow emails and I'm like, I don't work for an agency. Have you looked at my LinkedIn profile? I'll get you four new clients every month and I'm like, I don't get clients like that. 

[Roy] I think that's the trend right now because I get probably 10 of those emails a day. Like it's amazing 

[Jeff] I used to accept everybody on LinkedIn. It was like my free for all because I figured, hey, a larger network, great for that. Now I have rules, like if there's no picture, then you're definitely not getting accepted. 

[Roy] Oh, for sure, for sure. 

[Jeff] If you don't have any of your experience or any recommendations from people like you're not getting accepted. 

[Roy] Yeah. If you're a business coach, I don't accept you 

[Jeff] Exactly, but still, you go through all those lists and half of them first thing they do is they DM you and try to sell you something. I think that that hurts the industry overall because SEOs are very crafty and we can come up with different ways of marketing to you. The LinkedIn and all those profiles, you're just getting hammered, people selling you links, people trying to sell your business.

[Roy] Right, right. 

[Jeff] To the point where it seems the whole industry is sketchy.

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. It comes across that way definitely because one, it's not as glamorous as social media because everybody talks about TikTok and everybody talks about short-form YouTube videos and that kind of stuff. It's just not as sexy as tinkering with content and trying to figure out why those links aren't getting picked up at Google and looking at data. 

[Jeff] As someone young coming into an industry that is real. You probably aren't on Google as much as you think you are. Most of them spend their time, if I look at my kids' screen time, it's like YouTube number one. They play their video games so in-game advertising is big, but hopefully not prevalent to them as much. I actually subscribe to YouTube premium. I was tired of hearing my kids listen to commercials 80% of the time.

[Roy] Sure.

[Jeff] To watch a 30-second video, you're watching two minutes of commercials. For, you know, $15 a month, I cut that off on the whole family and now they're not being marketed to. As a marketer, I love to use ad-block. I don't know. Do as I say, not as I do kind of approach.

[Roy] Yeah. I'm right there with you. I purposely will never, ever click on a banner ad. I mean, I just don't like display advertising typically for my clients. I just have an attitude about it and I will never click on them. 

[Jeff] I do click on competitor's paid search all the time though.

[Roy] Well, for sure. Yeah, of course. 

[Jeff] Make them pay for my click. 

[Roy] That's right. Especially in certain industries where, you know, they're paying $20 or $30 for and stuff like that. 

[Jeff] Oh, exactly. 

[Roy] Yeah, for sure, absolutely. What do you think is, what's next, right? You've got the finger on the pulse of kind of where you see Google moving and what you see happening in the industry. What are you looking toward or planning for or concerned about? 

[Jeff] Yeah, as I mentioned as a negative, all the AI content and AI stuff that's out there. It's going to get good enough, I think, where it's going to be hard to distinguish, like good and bad. I don't think it's all negative. I think it can definitely help with the content side, whether it's doing a whole bunch of analysis for you. Hey, let's look at the top 10 people for a keyword I want to rank for. What is everything they have? Give me an outline and give me content blocks possibly that I could use and that other companies are using and how do I make that my own? 

I definitely think everything should go through a human before it ever goes website, but I think it's going to get good enough out there where you're just going to see companies, and you're already kind of seeing it, but they're just going to be able to spit out thousands of pages of content a day and it's going to be really hard to distinguish what's real.

The whole misinformation thing, right? That we've been going through for the last five or six years. That's all driven by humans but now if that could be driven by AI, it can get even crazier because they'll be able to hook that into bidding type of wars on social media. To be able to get you the wrong information at the right time, just to get you to get to their website, I think that is going to be a battle for some time to come. 

I'm not saying that; I think there are ways to use it for good. Again, as long as it's human edited and not just fully run, I think you can use it for just the research phase of things. I think you're going to see a lot of tools bring that in. 

Google's always changing. I'm not going to say they don't like SEOs because I think they do, because the more anyone focuses on your company, good or bad, I think is one that's going to be something I think Google's going to really like. At the end of the day, the scamming part and spam, they're always going to be battling. You're going to have tons of updates. You're going to have them diversifying their search results even more. Right now we have some videos, most of them are on YouTube, but with all this short-form video content like reels and TikToks and stuff like that. How do you get those into search results?

[Roy] Yeah. 

[Jeff] Again when I'm searching for an answer, this is some of the battles internally I have, we have like Wikipedia-length pages of everything we've reviewed and that's great for SEO and the content that's in there. But as a searcher, sometimes I just need that 30-second clip of why do I need this and what does it look like.

[Roy] Yeah, exactly.

[Jeff] How-to content that is fix everything. I think during Covid, how long was the line at Home Depot? We had lines to get into Home Depot, right? It was everyone who was fixing up their home and because we were all at home at the time. The ability to rank for like how to fix my toilet and things like that but also now associate that great content with here's where you can buy it and this is how you're going to make money off of it. You're going to see just, I think it's really hard, but everyone says it's a year for search or a voice search. I do see it coming in there. I don't know if it's ever going to be the year for voice search, but I think being able to optimize for that right now we don't really have any data. 

It's really hard to optimize if we can't have the data to read it. I think that's why it never really, it's catching on. Our kids talk to, again, we yell at Siri or Alexa all the time. Trying to figure out where are our readers or people that are looking for our content. Where are they and how can we find them? 

I think kind of just the same with like cable companies. Everything went into like Comcast. Now it's all splitting out and going in again to Netflix and all the different platforms. 

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] Hulu and stuff out there for that type of content. That's the same, I feel is happening on the web. It's always been splitting, but it's not Facebook anymore, right? I mean, it is still Facebook but I think we see that as a sinking ship sometimes. 

What is the next big thing where everyone's at? Sometimes I feel like Gary V just trying to, like, who would I invest in next? In all the big things out there to know where to spend my time?

Because there are too many places and not enough people and not enough analytics to go around on a lot of those.

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. No, I think that's a great point. I talk about this all the time where there are so many different places for people to go that you'll see people that are YouTube famous, that have millions and millions of followers, and I've never heard of them.

[Jeff] Mm-hmm. 

[Roy] Right? Like never heard of them. 

[Jeff] Yes. 

[Roy] That wasn't the case 15 years ago when if somebody was famous it was because you saw him on TV and the majority of people culturally would probably know who that person is and that's just not the case anymore. You can have people that are multi-multimillionaires with 10, or 20 million followers on, on one of the channels. There are just so many different ways to get to these people and to get to the content that there's no consolidated way. So, 

[Jeff] Yeah, right now I look lucky. I have kids that I follow what they do and understand a lot of those names there but as they get older, they're not going to know the youngers. There's so much information out there these days. It's so many different people, that I've recently taken up - one thing you might know about me is I have tons of hobbies - and my latest one is I'm learning disc golf, right?

[Roy] Yeah. For sure. 

[Jeff] I've been following a lot of disc golf this year and disc golf really blew up during Covid because you can just spend like $30, get three discs and courses are free and they're outside and they never got shut down during Covid so it blew up, but knowing who the number one disc golf player in the world is no one else knows. Right. 

[Roy] Yeah, that's very niche. 

[Jeff] Exactly. Who knows, but that person makes 10 million a year playing disc off and has the following. 

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] But there's a million of them now, right? You know, in TikTok the people were like Charli D'Amelio, I don't even know. I just know the name. Just with all the dancing and things like that. Where there was a trend or everyone just walking around the store doing all their dances but they have a hundred million followers.

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff] You know any of your cable news is not getting a hundred million people every day watching their stuff.

[Roy] Mm-hmm. 

[Jeff] It's like the way the influence has changed over the last couple of years and where's that going? Right. I love to say VR, I know Meta put all their money into Oculus. I love the Oculus, I love VR, but it's one of those where going out and walking a trail to me is just way more rewarding. Not a trail in the Metaverse.

[Roy] Right. Where you’re going to run into a wall. 

[Jeff] Exactly. Those are fun videos to watch too. 

[Roy] Yeah, For sure. All right, well, anything else that you see or that we should touch on? 

[Jeff] No, not that I can think of off the top of my head. There just, again, there's so much out there that it's growing that I feel that we could probably spend two hours talking of each individual one of them.

[Roy] Sure. 

[Jeff] In the Google space, just keep an eye out for everything that Google is; all the updates, they tell you what they're looking for. If you're looking at ranking in Google, there's a reason why they might not tell you what's in their update or exactly what's in the algorithm, but they're naming their updates now. It's not like the SEO industry naming them something like Panda or Florida. They're, they're actually naming them: helpful content update. 

[Roy] Yep.

[Jeff] The reason why you're not ranking is cuz your content's not helpful, you know? Or something like that. 

[Roy] Yeah.

[Jeff]  It's really been great to see them kind of open up and become a little more transparent, even though they're not transparent at all, but at least they're giving us a warning like there's going to update coming. Before it used to be like a panic Monday, you come into work and all your rankings are down and you freak out.

[Roy] I have told people too, to keep an eye on the search console because they have a report now that shows how many videos are being indexed on your site. It's probably important, you know? 

[Jeff] Yeah. 

[Roy] If they show and have a report for how content shifts on your site because it's annoying and it causes missed clicks. Probably important from a technical perspective that you pay attention to shifting content, you know? 

[Jeff] Yeah. Things like coed vitals, do they help SEO? I mean, if you're really bad and you get good, yes, they'll definitely help. But we're in a spot where we're just on the line. So some days we're good, some days we're not. 

We're trying to get it to where we're always good but I have some issues where it's like, is it going to help me with my rankings? No. Is it going to help me with more traffic? Not right now. 

Where we are trying to focus, we're trying to remove Amp, but we want to make sure we can cuz Amp, at least to my side of the business, is a huge chunk and I am sure it's even bigger on the news side because that's where all the top stories are at.

Google says that you don't need it anymore as long as you hit your core web vitals and you follow some things. It is really tough when they pushed us all that way, everyone jumped on it. Especially in the publishing world and now you say that you can take it off. It is a significant chunk of traffic that hits our Amp pages.

We are working to run some tests after this holiday season and early on in the year to just remove it totally. There have been some big news organizations that have removed it, so that is one of that I would say too, is corporate vitals are important, but they're not going to make you rank number one. But if you are in an industry like publishing and media, it is way more important because you want to get into those top stories. 

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. Well, great. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. I appreciate it. 

[Jeff] It's always good to catch up. 

[Roy] As you get more involved in the usability aspect of your new role. We'll have to touch base again and see how that's impacting the business and what your involvement is there. 

[Jeff] Exactly. It's still tough to not think of everything in the Google first realm on it. Right?

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. 

[Jeff] First meeting I'm having, I'm like, well, Google would look at it this way and I gotta get out that way of thinking, even though Google does say focus on the user. So focus on our readers first and it should make Google happy. 

[Roy] Yeah, for sure. Well, again, thank you very much and we appreciate your time. 

[Jeff] All right. Thank you.

[Roy] As always, I hope this was helpful for you. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below and we'll try to get back to you.

And of course, like this, if it was helpful and subscribe and hopefully we'll see you again here soon.