A while ago, a client called me and said, Why aren't we ranking on the first page for this keyword. We weren't managing their SEO at the time, we were doing other elements of their digital marketing. But we took over their SEO, and took them from 200 Organic visits a month, to over 10,000 visits a month. Here's how we did it. Welcome to another episode of Coffee with cush. Today we go market basics. We're going to be talking about SEO. So let's just start with what is SEO, I've been doing SEO for 20 odd years now. And for all intents and purposes, I'm going to be talking about Google. For the majority of that time, there really hasn't been a competitor to Google, in fact, now is really when competitors are starting to appear, see AI and tick tock and you'll understand. But generally speaking, SEOs objective or Google's objective has never really changed. It is to deliver the best possible result to that user, given their search term, and the user. So there are only really two variabilities. The first one is the user. And the second one is the search term. So let's talk really quickly about the user. I as a user, if I'm searching something in Google, I'm here based in Dubai, and going to get a different result to you. If you're based in wherever New York London doesn't matter. Then the second element is the search term. So for any given search term, there are 1000s Millions, potentially billions of results. So how does Google decide which results appear on the first page? And then in those primary positions? One, two, and three? Well, it mimics real life. It cares about authority. So what's authority? Well, authority is really around who has the most credence around a given topic. So let's put it into real life and take an example. Let's say that you are billionaires, cookies, billionaire cookies in Dubai. And if you've never tried them, you should try them that are amazing. So let's say that, you know, a friend comes to me as as what can I get some really great cookies? And he asks me, where can I get get great cookies and Dubai? And I say, oh, you should go to billionaire cookies. Now, do I have authority? When it comes to cookies? I'm gonna go with Yes. Right. So I know cookies, for obvious reasons. Yeah. Now, what if he also asked at the same time, our next door neighbor, who is a super fit yoga addict, and wouldn't touch a carb in a million years. Now, she may also say billionaire cookies, but her authority on that specific topic of food is lower than male authority. Okay. So if we turn this now into how Google perceives websites, let's say that someone searches in Google cookies in Dubai. Now, the first three positions are going to be basically those websites or those businesses that have got the most authority. So whom to turn out how rather does Google determine authority? Well, it looks at other websites that are linking to those websites. So let's say that, the BBC, so the BBC is obviously a really high ranking high authority website, as is CNN, Amazon, etc. If those websites leak to billionaire cookies, then Google says, Okay, well, given that the BBC thinks that billionaire cookies are the best cookies in Dubai, they probably are. And billionaire cookies will start to rank higher. Now, of course, it's really difficult to get the BBC or CNN or any of those websites to link to your website. That's really tough. But the good news is that you can almost mimic the results by having lots and lots of smaller websites with good authority scores. Also linking back now there's lots of dark ways of doing this. We don't touch any of those. Probably a separate episode will be around blackhat seo, we only do White House, and we'll talk about the process of what we did for that client, too. get them from 200 to 10,000 visits a month organically. But essentially, it all starts around authority, can you get the authority score of your website up? Authority is lots of variables as well. So the older your domain name, potentially the high or authority, the more targeted potentially at the higher authority, the more website or the more other websites linking to you potentially the higher authority, the more content they have, etc, etc. So, SEO is a critical part of every business, not even just online businesses. I remember when we, when I first started in SEO, I was
[email protected], or a subsidiary of lastminute.com. And an SEO was almost a third of our revenue at the time, the value of every customer that came through SEO was significantly higher than other customers who came from paid advertising. Why? Because if you were searching for, let's say, car rental in Dubai, and you came to our website, we essentially acquired you as a customer for free. Now, we may also be running Google ads, or other types of advertising for car rental in Dubai. But if you click on that ad, then we paid for that click right. So essentially, what you've got is the variance between free customers and paid customers. Free customers obviously deliver a higher profit for every booking that they make, and potentially have a longer lifetime value as well, because they're going to constantly engage with your brand. So that's obviously true for E commerce businesses, but it's also true for non ecommerce businesses in the b2b space. Let's say that you do mining equipment, okay? Well, if you have potential partners, or potential suppliers, and they're searching for your brand on Google, and they can't find you, in their mind, your authority is lower. Conversely, we have a client that works in quite a niche part of the travel industry called Travel representation, essentially, they they represent other businesses around the world in the Middle East region. And if you are anywhere in the world, and you search travel representation company, Middle East, or travel representation company, Dubai, or travel representation company, Saudi Arabia, their website will always be in the top few results. That's because we do their SEO to make sure that they're always ranking well. For for that niche, okay. And then if you're, let's say that you're the Business Development Director for the Middle East of Hilton Hotels, and you search, you're looking for a travel representation company, and you set travel representation companies in the Middle East, that has our client. And by the way, the majority of their business comes this way. Alright, so SEO is super important. It's super important for businesses. And it's super important for growth, it's super important as well for the valuation of your company. If you're looking to exit your business at any point, then knowing that, you know, you are ranking well for your for your main keywords is is super valuable for potential buyers or potential investors. So how do you do it? Well, let's go back to our client that we took from 200 to 10,000 visits a month. Firstly, there's no shortcuts. This doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen in a week. It doesn't happen in a month, it takes time. And it takes a lot of effort. Now, there are many people or individuals or companies who will say, Oh, we'll get you a million backlinks. I promise you. That's the easiest way to get your your site blacklisted. It is disastrous approach and never do it. Okay. There are two elements to SEO, there's white hat SEO, which is essentially just doing the right thing to help Google make the right decision for the rankings, which is obviously what we do. And there's blackhat seo, where you can do hacks and tricks, and you may get results for a very short period of time, but the long term impact is disastrous. So never take those approaches. So how do we do it? We start with a website audit. Okay. So there are two basic elements to SEO. It's called on page and off page on page is the website itself, the technical elements, sometimes called technical SEO,
some elements are really easy, some are quite difficult to do. The first things that are easy, you know, is just making sure that all of your content is structured, well, easy to read, tagged properly, things like that, that the more difficult things are things like PageSpeed and of all of the technical elements of the modern PageSpeed is is the most important. So you know PageSpeed is a really important element and there's some other elements to it. Do particularly like mobile first making sure that your, your website is loading properly at the right speed for mobile devices, because mobile first is is a reality. Now, I remember when it wasn't a reality, I remember when we were trying to understand how to become, how to just serve mobile users back in the days of what and what remember what I ate and myself. But that was a challenge, trying to understand how to actually deliver content over such slow connections was crazy. And then very quickly, you know, things moved from being desktop first and mobile first. And so really, mobile first is a critical element of SEO right now. Once you've done like the on page stuff, and normally, you'll have an in house developer or you'll have a partner who's doing that, and you can guide them as to what it is that you want. But essentially, most competent developers most competent website development agencies will be able to understand if you just say to him, Listen, we need to make sure that our site is SEO optimized, they'll understand and they'll be able to deliver those technical results. And once that's done, there is some updating, but generally speaking, that's it that's done, the much, much harder part is off page. Off page SEO is really around getting those backlinks, right. So a backlink is a link from one set website to your website. Now you notice links. Normally, if you're reading a blog post, there's some text and that text is the link. That text is called that anchor text, anchor text. Okay? So what you really want is other websites to link to your website for the anchor text of the keyword that you're trying to rank for. So in the case of billionaire cookies, they want people to write best cookies in Dubai, and then those words link to billionaire cookies. Does that make sense? I'm pretty sure that makes sense. Right? So one of the main elements, one of the main ways of doing this is just lots of content. And that's after we've done the initial audit of our client, we analyze that when they had an in house development team, we sent them a list of things to do, they did all of that. And that was really helpful, then what we embarked on is content and outreach, lots and lots of content. So we would create lists of keywords. Now those keywords, we would normally start with this particular client, that authority score wasn't particularly high, it wasn't zero, but it wasn't particularly high. So it was really tough for them to rank for that keyword they had originally been asking for, because it was a really competitive keyword. So what we did was we started to look at keywords around that keyword. Okay. And oftentimes that will be questions. And you can the lots of tools, you can search to find questions around a specific keyword. And you can see the volume of searches. And normally those keywords, which are questions have a lower competitive competition score. So it's easier. A competition score goes from one super easy to rank four to 100 super difficult to rank for. So one might be why is it is Musa doing a podcast on cushy digital on a Saturday into Barry? Because nobody searches for that right? And the 10? Sorry, a 100 might be Christmas gifts. That's going to be a super high super competitive keyword. So what we're looking for are keyword Keyword Difficulty scores that match the domain or authority, not in terms of number, but there's like a balance between the two. Yeah. So it's very difficult for, you know, a site that has a domain authority of, let's say 15 to rank for a 99 keyword 99 Keyword Difficulty keyword. So we'd be looking for things around the 3040 3040 mark, really, questions tend to have a lower keyword difficulty. So we sort of created keyword lots of more questions, a lot word questions as well, somewhat location based things. And once we got all of those keywords for every single keyword, we wrote a blog, specifically for that keyword. So we would take keyword, we'd write the entire blog, we would structure that blog. So there is a structure when it comes to SEO to when you're writing content, where the keyword goes how many times it's repeated, making sure that images are time are titled and alt text with the keyword. There are lots of little variables if you're using WordPress, you can use SEO Yoast that will help. It's a free plugin. So as the videos will help just guide you as to what little elements you need to do. Eventually, it becomes innate, you make sure that metadata is right you make sure that the blog title is correct all of those things. And then we will publish There's that content. Now, a word on volume, the volume of content. So we're fortunate, we happen to have a large team of content creators and a large SEO team. So we were able for that client to do a blog post a day, that's 30 ish blog posts every month. That's a lot. It's a, it's a lot of content. Okay. Now, there is a limit to how much you can do. If you're a brand new website, and you're chucking out that much content, you may get flagged by Google as is this potentially spammy. All right. On the flip side, other companies will come in and they'll create 1000s of blog posts in a month using AI. That's a that is potentially disastrous, you could absolutely get flagged on your website for creating spammy content. So there is a balance there. But we find that we never really come across any issues all the way up to 50 blog posts a month, typically, even for newer websites, we won't come across many issues. So that's obviously a lot of work, a lot of grunt work. But once we've done that, and we've created that content that has been released every day, that content then of course, gets distributed across social channels. So every post will go out across every channel. We have a separate team, which are the outreach team. So we use SEMrush, which is a great tool. And in our in our Guru license of SEMrush, we can do backlink outreach. So backlink outreach essentially means what we do is we take that keyword that we've written a blog for, we pop it into SEMrush, it tells us all of the sites that are ranking and talking about this specific topic, then within SEMrush, we contact those website administrators. Most of the time SEMrush can decipher an email for you sometimes you have to go and search out yourself. And we say we noticed that you wrote about product or topic X. We also have a blog about topic X, wouldn't it be great if you lead to our topic? Now, we'll do that for 1000s, that will do outreach to 1000s of websites. And honestly speaking, the conversion rate is really, really low 1%, maybe 1.3%. But every link is valuable. And that's why we do that outreach, it's so important to do that outreach. Sometimes the clients will also engage in guest blog posts, and we will write blog posts for other websites and then link back to our website. That way, we're always gaining some authority. Yeah, none of those are the BBC that's like the Holy Grail you want, like CNN to write an article and tag you and it's like, boom, everything's great. And by the way, for one of our clients, we were able to do that. But it was to do with a specific event that they had learned launched. But generally speaking, for most people, that's not a realistic option. And so grunt work effort, is what you really need. So that's how we do it. And it took months, right, but it's a gradually improving process, we went from 200 visitors a month to 300, to 800, to 1000, to 1500, to 2000. And on and on and on. Until at the moment, they're getting more than 10,000 visits a month, purely from organic search. Now, that translates to, in this particular case, millions of dirhams of revenue. All right. So it's a really, really important thing to do. It takes time, it takes patience. And you have to just do the right thing. Google's algorithm is a game. The game has rules. You can't break the rules, or there's consequences. But if you play within the rules, you can win at the game. All right. So that's really the main message when it comes to SEO for smaller businesses. Anything else that I've missed before I get to q&a? So we've got people who have sent us some questions specifically, on as small business SEO. If you've got any questions for a future podcast, or any topics you want us to cover, you can email us contact at cush dot digital contact at crushed up digital, and we will try and cover it off in a future episode. And we'll tag you when the episodes get released. So let's look at some of these questions that we've got.
All right, so the first one is from Amir or Ahmed Amir, who's the marketing manager at you know, I'm not going to say company names in case their bosses are listening, but let's just call it a tech, a tech startup. So he asks, How do we effectively optimize our web site for SEO when competing against larger, more established tech companies? Great question. If you are competing in Firstly, a competitive market, and you're a small player, and you're trying to rank for that massive keyword, I mean, you should try but it's not going to happen very quickly. The best thing to do is to look around the topic, right? So lets you take any You take your industry, and then you talk. And then you find the topics that people are talking about around that industry, right. And you take those keywords and the topics that we were talking about around that topic, and you find the the keywords that have low to moderate difficulty score. And that's where you write content. So you write all of that content for those low to moderate keywords. Now, over time, what you can start to do as you start to rank more, you can start to choose more, slightly more difficult keywords, right. And you'll find that if you do that, if you go through that process and choose slightly more difficult keywords, six, eight months, nine months later, you'll start to rank for those keywords too. So it's it's a continuously evolving process. Thank you, Chairman for that question. Next is from Fatima, who's a content strategist at let's call it a well known gym chain. What are the best practices for balancing keyword rich content with engaging reader friendly material in our industry? Okay, look, those two things that are not mutually exclusive, they are in fact, exactly the same thing. So keyword rich, and friendly user engaging, let's switch it around. It has to be friendly and user engaging. That's the most important thing. There is no value in writing content that is just generic BS. Yeah, you really have to engage the audience, and they have to want to read the content that's way more important than anything else, then you start to integrate your keywords. And it can be difficult, particularly with questions, right. So you may have quite a long question. Let's say that, let's say that that question was a keyword. So that question was, what are the best practices for balancing keyword rich content with engaging reader friendly material in our industry, okay. So in that case, that's going to be a challenge to get that whole keyword in the content. But the way to do it, is to use it in the h2 and h3 tags. So people are more likely to skip over the titles if they're reading the content in depth. So that's one way of doing it. Let's take a couple more. So, Yasmin, who is the CEO of a very like, basically startup ecommerce business, and she's based in Saudi Arabia, so and she asks, Can you suggest some cost effective SEO strategies for E commerce sites that have limited budgets and want to increase organic traffic? Firstly, that's a great way to start the fact that you've framed the question as I'm limited on budget, and I want to increase organic traffic is really important for a startup, you got to start early. Okay? The same thing as before in your space, which is, basically they said, Sell bespoke handmade candles. And so in her space, the easiest way to do that is to list out all of the gifting occasions that exist, right, and then make some up. So you got 1000s of gifting occasions, Mother's Day, mom's birthday, sister's birthday, nieces, birthday, nephews, birthday, uncle's birthday, etc, etc, etc. And you pick one of those, and then you and you create keywords, or you you search that volume of keywords for like variances of those gifting occasions. So you may have something like one of the best handmade gifts for an uncle's birthday. And that will have a really low keyword volume, but equally will have a really low keyword difficulty. And you create content around there. You can't just talk about your brand, though, you got to talk about other brands linked to other brands, but make sure that your brand is front center and in there. And even if they don't buy on that occasion on that visit, it's there in the subconscious, they're going to come back to you. Laura, who is a digital marketing manager at an NGO, in the context of nonprofits, how can SEO be used to increase awareness and support without significant advertising? Budgets? Same Same principle, right? Firstly, how does the question is, how does it increase awareness? I think that, you know, SEO is one of the most valuable tools for driving awareness. If you think about the buying cycle, where awareness is like the beginning, SEO is so valuable for that because you're essentially able to position your brand in front of lots of people for free. I mean, sort of for free, over time, the number of people who are engaging with your brand increases, and you're able to talk about a variety of topics around your industry. So it's super, super valuable, and particularly for for driving awareness. And when it comes to awareness, you know, you've got lots of advertising options or lots of paid ad options and depending on what your objectives are and how quickly you want to add Restos objectives, you could you could use those but generally speaking, SEO, I think is a super high value high very cost effective way of, of achieving great brand awareness. All right. Last one. Salad who is a is a freelance web developer, what are the most critical technical SEO elements that web developers should prioritize when building or updating websites for clients PageSpeed, then page speed, then PageSpeed. PageSpeed is critical. There are lots of technical markers in the algorithms, lots of them, and they change all the time, right. But PageSpeed has always been and will always be a primary marker for any website. Okay, so making sure that your page loads efficiently on mobile devices, in particular mobile devices, because PageSpeed is much more difficult to achieve on mobile devices from the website. So that's where I would focus, like 70% of my energy in terms of technical SEO, or I would focus on ad focus on PageSpeed. So there are simple things that you can do. And there are simple things that you can do to to improve your page speed in terms of images and videos and content on the site. And then there are much more complex things to do as well. Alright, so that's covered everything that we wanted to talk about in terms of SEO for for small businesses, and how to get started in SEO for your business. We're gonna be doing more podcasts coming up with coffee with cush. And if you've got any topics you can email us at contact at cush dot digital. If you want to be a guest on the podcast, you can also contact us and if you're obviously if you're looking for a digital marketing agency that makes an impact. We are coffee with cash. And if you're looking for a digital marketing agency that makes an impact, we are cash digital
