Podcast With Mark Williams Cook

Google Exploit Secrets Revealed: SEO Game-Changer 2025 with Mark Williams Cook

Show Notes

Discover groundbreaking insights into Google's ranking system as SEO expert Mark Williams Cook reveals game-changing exploit secrets that could reshape your 2025 strategy. Following his viral Search Norwich presentation, Mark shares exclusive details about Google's site quality scoring, CTR predictions, and algorithmic patterns that most marketers overlook.

Learn how Google actually evaluates your website, including the critical 0.4 threshold score needed for rich snippets and featured content. Understand why conventional SEO metrics might be missing the mark, and how to leverage People Also Ask data for superior content strategy.

Mark breaks down practical strategies for improving your site's algorithmic standing, from video content integration to expert-driven content development. Whether you're running an agency or managing your own SEO, these insights will help you adapt to Google's evolving landscape.

Perfect for SEO professionals, digital marketers, and business owners looking to stay ahead of the curve. Gain actionable insights into Google's hidden ranking factors and learn how to position your site for success in 2025 and beyond.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:39 - SEO Journey and Background

06:56 - Treating SEO as a Game

16:40 - Programming Influence on SEO Strategies

21:44 - Understanding Google Exploits and Insights

27:14 - Impact of Exploits on SEO

28:38 - Predicted Click-Through Rate (CTR)

33:45 - Site Quality Score Explained

35:17 - Finding Loopholes in SEO Insights

37:28 - What is Consensus Score?

42:27 - Building a Content Strategy for Consensus Rankings

45:54 - Site Quality Score (Duplicate Removed)

49:50 - Google's Estimated CTR Calculation

55:10 - Optimizing for Click-Through Rate

56:20 - Underutilized Data Sources for SEO

01:03:00 - Actionable Steps for Marketers

01:05:30 - Low-Hanging Fruits in SEO Strategy

01:07:30 - AlsoAsked and Intent Mapping in SEO

01:10:06 - Recommended Resources for SEO Professionals

01:11:40 - Rapid Fire Questions

01:14:28 - Connecting with Mark and AlsoAsked

01:15:23 - Outro

Transcript

Intro

0:00 Welcome to The ingen Insider show I'm your host navnit Kell and today we have a very special guest joining us Mark

0:06 Williams go our rowned SE expert and a digital marketing strategist Mark is the founder of condor agency and has made

0:13 significant contribution to the SEO Community through his Innovative approach and insight

0:18 [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

0:25 [Music]

0:30 welcome to the show mark thank you very much n very pleased to be here very pleased to meet you so

0:37 before we dive into the juicy staff could you share a little about your journey in digital marketing and SEO and

SEO Journey and Background

0:43 what led you to start also asked and deep dipe into Google exploit analysis

0:48 sure uh so I've been working in SEO around about 20 or so years now and I'd

0:55 say 16 17 of those years have been agency side so most most of my

1:01 professional careers been agency side I actually got into SEO like a lot of people did around that time which was by

1:09 complete accident so I was making websites from a very young age like 112

1:16 I think I was making my first website and it was a lot easier back then it was literally just HTML and drag it up on

1:23 FTP you know no continuous integration and containers and stuff so um and the

1:29 short version is basically one of the sites I made uh community site had some

1:37 kind of Amazon affiliate stuff on and it started generating like some really decent Revenue um and I had no idea

1:45 why so I was selling at the the time through an Amazon affiliate basically

1:50 one DVD player a day or two a day and my friend helped me install at the time

1:56 something called aw stats and we found out that all the traffic was coming from search engines so that was my kind of

2:04 moment of H that's really interesting yeah are you search engines I wonder how they rank websites um and I started

2:11 learning in kind of forums and I actually built up my own like little portfolio of affiliate sites and before

2:18 I got my first agency job it kind of helped me I think get my first agency job and kept them running for sort of

2:26 side things most of my career there were some points where I was earning more from my own sites than I was getting

2:31 paid in my job um yeah and that that eventually led me you know I enjoyed

2:37 working at agencies and again to make it a short version um we started in a

2:45 running CER because we wanted a slightly different agency environment to work in

2:51 because agencies can be really tough places to work very focused on revenue and

2:57 squeezing the most out of the time of the people there so we've done a few things kind of differently for how we'd

3:02 want to be an agency like we have things like a profit share for everyone that works here um we cap the size of the

3:08 company and the amount of clients and such um and from from this doing our

3:14 work so how do we come AC how did we decide to make alsoo asked was I think

3:19 how a lot of this kind of project is made which is

3:25 through necessity so we've been using the kind of data that also ask gives which is the people also ask data from

3:32 Google for many many years and I actually did a talk at a marketing

3:37 conference um quite a few years ago now and I showed them how we were using this

3:43 people Oro ask data and at the time we just had like a command lined python

3:49 tool we had written that we were using to do it and I assumed most people were

3:54 also doing that but I had a huge amount of people come up to me being like Oh can we have the script and stuff and I

3:59 was like yeah sure and gave it out but then the issue was people were contacting me for like support on how to

4:06 use Python and this didn't work and debug this and I realized okay it's a useful tool but there's a barrier to

4:13 entry there certainly like a random say person who does content writing and doesn't have any technical background is

4:19 going to struggle to get a python environment running and all this which is why then we were like okay let's

4:24 build a web version um and initially we did an alpha and just put it up for free

4:30 to see if people liked it and it got absolutely hammered we were doing like

4:36 millions of searches a month um which unfortunately was then incurring lots and lots of cost um to the point where

4:43 we had to close it um I mean the last month that we ran the alpha it was projected to cost us like about £10,000

4:51 in uh like proxy fees um it's a lot more efficient now than it was thankfully but

4:57 it got to the point where we had to say look if it's you can still use it for free in a limited capacity but if you

5:03 want to continue using it like we have to charge something because it's not economical to run it so then we um

5:11 worked out kind of a a a paid model which started very cheap because we wanted it to be accessible and then that

5:18 actually money that we got from people that supported us meant we could go on to develop more features and it kind of

5:24 grew into um what it was today and it was actually today was a little

5:31 milestone for us so we uh today we were the headline sponsor for Brighton SEO

5:36 which is like the biggest SEO conference in the world so it's it's a long way from two of us kind of building also us

5:43 to to get into that stage so how long how big is your team now at alas oh now

5:49 it's massive it's three I thought mess I

5:55 mean we could without going sort of too much into the dep the running a sass

6:00 company I mean there's def we could definitely do more with a bigger team um

6:08 but we've been bootstrapped the whole time um we are currently actually taking on another full-time developer to speed

6:15 up kind of feature deployment um because we're spending a long time like on support Stu at the moment um but we

6:22 don't want to take investment money for what we've got and we want to keep small

6:27 because um you know we speak a lot to our customers like I it's me normally if

6:32 you go on live chat for also asked it's just normally me chatting to so I and I love doing that because I hear in the

6:38 front line feedback customers have about what they would like to see and what

6:43 problems they're having and what they like and then I can feed that directly into the the product um development

6:51 then okay uh and of course you mentioned

Treating SEO as a Game

6:57 SEO of course last talk you mentioned SE uh treating SE like a video game could

7:03 you elaborate on this unique perspective and how it shaped your approach in Su yeah so uh this is in reference to

7:11 this uh to the talk I did at search nage um right which to to take one step back

7:18 was talking about uh conceptual models of SEO which is trying to essentially

7:24 build in your head an idea of how um a complex system like a a search engine

7:30 and it is an incredibly complex system is going to work and video games is one way I kind of

7:37 explored this I mean the the probably the most helpful thing I did I think at the beginning of that talk was I did

7:43 this example where I just drop a tennis ball right and I ask people to imagine how high it's going to bounce because my

7:50 my point to this is you know there's some known but um not I would say

7:58 generally known um calculations you can do with the coefficient of restitution to work out

8:05 how high a Ball's going to bounce right and almost nobody if you pick them randomly off the street will be able to

8:11 tell you how to calculate that but almost everyone will be able to guess how high it's going to bounce right and

8:17 this was my point that they have this conceptual model in their head and it's a way to make SEO more accessible um in

8:24 terms of you know Google has these incredibly complex algorithms um and my overall Ming point was you don't

8:31 necessarily need to know um how every individual piece Works to understand

8:38 what the output is going to be and the example I gave to explore this was video games um so I've throughout my whole

8:45 life played a lot of video games and some people said I've completely wasting my time other people joined in with me

8:52 um but I honestly feel that some of the most valuable professional skills

8:59 including including SEO have um been formed or influenced by that um because

9:07 the way I view at least the type of games I like to play are their optimization

9:13 challenges okay and by that I mean uh the example I gave in the talk was a

9:18 game released in 1996 called theme park which is like a a simulation game where

9:24 you're running a little business um to to make money from the theme park and that that's your optimization goal right

9:30 to make money and much like Google there

9:36 are different levers you can pull to affect that outcome and what I found particularly fascinating about this game

9:42 was there's there's various KnockOn effects and undocumented features as

9:47 there are with Google so to to give some clear examples for this if anyone's s wondering what on Earth I'm talking

9:53 about um a documented example for something to do with SEO from Google is

10:00 say a title tag there is clear documented advice on how to use title

10:06 tags um and just like in the kind of Manual of the video game for video uh

10:13 for theme park there is documented advice for instance you can change the ticket price for entry of your Park and

10:19 you'll make more money if you put the ticket price up up until a certain point you know if you made it ,000 PS to get

10:25 in nobody's going to come same with page titles Google tells you to make them descriptive of the page and think about

10:31 keywords but you can't just put 500 words in your tie guess you can but it's

10:37 it's not going to work right you're not going to rank for all those things right um and they're fairly obvious documented

10:42 things but the fascinating thing to me about SEO and why I'm still doing it after so long is it's this ever changing

10:48 evolving puzzle um so the example that I think is quite fun that I gave in theme

10:54 park is you can have these little shops and you can sell chips and Fries to people and you can change the amount of

11:00 salt in them um and if you put lots of salt in the fries people get very thirsty which makes them want to buy

11:05 drinks and then you can put drink stores next to them and you can pump the price up of the drinks and people still buy

11:10 them right because they're really thirsty so you your optimization goal is it it's better met because people are

11:17 spending more money and that's not documented in the manual anywhere and it's this interesting chain of reactions

11:23 um and I was saying there's loads of undocumented things like the majority of things really I'd say about how Google

11:29 works are undocumented and require collaboration in the community and um data points and

11:37 studies and experiments and tweaking to find out um again the most basic example

11:43 to to give one I think is like anchor text so Google never really was like

11:48 super clear that the words in the anchor text were that important to your ranking

11:54 and it was discovered by the community and actually the I think the funniest examples where we had a spat for a few

12:01 years of what was called Google bombing which was you could get any page to rank for anything by building enough links

12:08 with the correct anchor text and the kind of Capstone example of that was getting the uh I believe it was the

12:15 George W bush biography page to rank number one for miserable failure and

12:20 Google obviously had to patch that as well and then again without stressing this point too long the other really

12:27 interesting similarity between SEO and video games for me was um so I play

12:33 online competitive games right and in that sphere there is a concept of what's

12:41 called The Meta not to be confused with the company that owns Facebook but the meta refers to the optimal way to play

12:49 the game the optimal strategy or the optimal things to do and what happens in online gaming is when the meta is

12:57 discovered people gravitate towards playing that way because people generally want to win but the kind of

13:05 metric for the games company is they want people to have fun right that's their optimization metric right more fun

13:12 we make more money so I guess it's they make more money but they do that by by kind of measuring fun right but if

13:18 everyone plays in the same way the game becomes Less Fun and certainly it makes

13:23 it less fun for not PE for people not playing in the optimal way so what they do is generally they'll update the their

13:30 algorithm they'll update how the game works to break the meta exactly the same as we discovered Google bombing works

13:36 you can just change this anchor text to what you like Google's like okay well we we want to preserve what we consider at

13:43 least what Google considers to be a good surup a good result so we're GNA have to change the rules slightly and there's

13:49 this that I see that all the time in SEO there's this chasing of what's the what

13:54 should we be doing in SEO what really makes an impact and we got we kind of sway like a ship from one thing will be

14:02 effective and then everyone swarms around it and then we see this big change and I think the most obvious

14:08 example we've probably had In Like A decade is the helpful content kind of update where we had um before the

14:16 helpful content update we had a whole second Renaissance in Niche blogging guest blogging and this was this was

14:23 driven I think by all of the algorithm updates Google had done previously with things like BS so using their

14:29 bidirectional encodings to understand queries better and how important specific words were um and they' made

14:36 some specific changes around domain diversity so they weren't just surfacing the same big sites and the end result

14:43 was people found actually if you started with like really Niche zero volume stuff

14:49 you could pretty much get brand new sites to rank so of course then people were like how do we optimize that we do

14:55 it in bulk and we had this whole um flood of of AI you know can't think of a

15:02 polite word for it stuff and Google ranked it right um

15:07 right so Google had to obviously kill this and I think again without unless you want to explore it I think one of

15:13 the main problems was the the way by the nature of how AI text is generated made

15:21 it harder for some of the older uh statistical detection of

15:26 spamming content to work um and some of the old paintings I went into in the talk I think don't work as well as they

15:34 used to with AI content so Google put in a big wedge which was essentially

15:41 although I don't I don't think it's an accurate description but it's a it's a it's a fair one to say like brand as

15:47 this wedge um and that's become the new meta right so I I pointed out in the talk I haven't checked it recently but

15:52 just before I did that talk LinkedIn was ranking for like 90 odd thousand uh

15:58 loans terms and these are all AI generated spam but they rank because

16:04 they're hosted on this domain that is having its Authority abused even though now Google knows that's a problem

16:10 because they are specifically manually enforcing site reputation abuse so that

16:16 was a very long story and I guess a very uh speedrun through what I covered in

16:22 the in the talk but the way that I've grown up thinking

16:28 about how how to win act video games and optimize video games has served me very

16:33 well in my approach to SEO um and I would recommend anyone plays more video

Programming Influence on SEO Strategies

16:41 games well I stopped video games long time back I think I should start that right now uh how has

16:51 your background in programming influences your Su

16:57 strategies um so that's interesting so I think I'll be first I want to be super

17:02 clear in that I consider myself always like an amateur uh programmer and

17:08 amateur coder so I've never profession like I've never professionally had a

17:14 role that solely a developer um and I've never say gone to University and studied

17:21 uh like computer science or programming so I'm all selftaught

17:26 um so it's certainly when I was starting SEO and building my own sites um I did

17:34 kind of a lot of what now would definitely be just called spam um they call it programmatic SEO now um but um

17:43 the the programming side of things was was really really helpful for me because

17:49 um firstly it did allow me to experiment and automate um you know where it so I

17:54 used to we it used to be called kind of like Dynamic Pages what Pro programmatic SEO is called now where you know do

18:01 things like scrape information from the web that is maybe hard to find build a

18:07 database from that and then build a script that would automatically build Pages for me so those kind of skills

18:14 allowed you to you know generate websites that would take other people

18:19 days and weeks and weeks of work and especially you know we are outranking big companies because they've got the

18:26 extra kind of bureaucracy if they have to a meeting about it first and then it has to be put into a pipeline whereas

18:32 you know you're sat there eating a cereal in your pants and youve already finished and you're taking the dock for a walk um so there was that side um from

18:41 a from a um sort of more legitimate SEO point of view in agency world I mean

18:48 that's that was how things like also asked were born right so it allowed us to do these shadow IT projects because

18:55 again when I started SEO screaming frog didn't exist we had Zen um Zeno's link

19:00 slop but many of the tools that we take for granted now didn't exist so we were

19:06 doing our own crawling um to check for like broken links and um competitive

19:12 research and scraping the Surs um you know all before we had these SAS

19:17 platform so early on um it was massive more recently I would say um it's been

19:23 super helpful in in knowing what is possible as well um so I still use um to

19:31 today for instance we're using uh like python along with AI libraries to do

19:37 things like 301 redirect mapping so we're using like uh Vector comparison so

19:44 the uh Facebook um similarity search for vectors to uh make vectoring beddings of

19:50 pages and compare how similar they are and again that that would be days of work so we've done sites with tens of

19:57 thousands of your and managed to produce you know perfect 301 redirect maps in hours by doing them

20:06 and then manually checking the ones that it wasn't too sure about I think that Advantage is less than ever because I am

20:15 using now myself chat GPT and perplexity to speed up my coding

20:21 um and we're in the early stages of this at the moment so it's really helpful if

20:28 I just want to have a simple script to do a job it nine times out of 10 it can just do it um

20:35 certainly helps debugging code I haven't managed to get it to do anything like

20:40 too complicated yet um in terms of when you start writing code where you've got

20:48 kind of multiple functions that you need to pre-plan how they're going to interact and what libraries and modules

20:55 you're going to use and not use then AI tend to go a little bit off the rails um

21:01 but again this is relatively early time so if anyone isn't a coder you know now

21:08 is such a good time to start playing with these tools because they can tell

21:14 you not only they not only can they write the code for you but you can literally be like how do I get this to

21:20 run on my Windows machine and it gives you guidance on what you need to download and if you need to install

21:25 anything um you know I wrote my first extension last year which I've never

21:31 done before and I had zero research and I was just asking chat gbt along the way

21:36 you know what's a manifest file and where do I need to put that and it told me and it got it up and running all

21:42 right so now let's jump into the juicy stuff for which we are here uh

Understanding Google Exploits and Insights

21:48 demystifying Google exploits and data Insight so let's Deep dive into Google

21:54 exploits Mark the term Google exploit might sound bit intimidating to some of

22:00 our listeners now uh can you demystify what it really means specifically how

22:05 does understanding these mechanisms differ from Simply following SEO best

22:12 practices that's a good question it's a very very good question

22:18 um so buy Google exploit I mean the

22:25 definition kind of that is um we saw some you know data some

22:34 parameters that ideally Google doesn't particularly want you to see

22:40 um this isn't like the source code of the algorithm or anything like that um

22:48 and it's different to there was a Google what was called content Warehouse leak

22:55 which essentially listed um some variables that Google uh uses

23:03 potentially in some of their systems although we don't know exactly what

23:10 specifically what was so interesting about what we discovered was

23:16 the variable names also had values attached to them so it wasn't just oh

23:22 there is a thing called site quality we could see this site has this particular score and because they're

23:30 surfaced by um by Google it's a fair assumption I think to say that they are

23:36 used somehow in ranking or post ranking and to be clear the the difference there

23:42 is ranking as as far as I understand it is this kind of long process that happens

23:49 where Google decides um you might guess which URLs it's going to rank for a particular query post ranking is the

23:57 thing that happen happens relatively quickly after that where we have things

24:03 like feature generation so Maps um featured Snippets um and maybe even some

24:11 tweaking some reranking of the results um that happened and the exploit that we had was

24:20 showing us what values Google was surfacing on the front end so this is

24:27 what they I I think what they were mainly using post ranking doesn't mean

24:32 that those F those numbers weren't used during ranking if anything it means

24:37 those those numbers do exist in ranking it's just that they are also useful to reference post ranking so if they want

24:44 to rerank results or or decide what to show and what not to show so in terms of

24:51 how does that change versus best practice advice um

24:58 is a good question because it doesn't I wouldn't say anything goes against best

25:04 practice advice right and the example I actually I think I kind of covered this in the talk I gave which is that if you

25:12 boil Google's SEO advice right down to a kernel you know it would probably end up

25:18 something you know like build helpful content for users right and you can't

25:24 fault that because it's not wrong right you should absolutely build helpful

25:30 content for users however I think it is disingenuous to say that's all that is

25:37 within the Google algorithm because I mean the point I made is quite bluntly Google exists to make an ungodly amount

25:44 of money right and that definitely has an impact on the type of results we see

25:51 um you know the the most obvious example is Google has all kinds of features and

25:58 tricks to essentially keep us on their search result page and the reason they want to keep us on the search result

26:05 page is that's where they can make the most money right even if they send you to a website that has Google AdSense

26:12 their ad platform running they're still getting a smaller cut of the money than if they are the person that serves that

26:19 ad um and of course there is a there is a very double-edged argument

26:26 that they will give which is well we have data shows our users prefer to you know stay on the page I think all of

26:34 that philosophical debate is moot now because Google has been found to be a

26:39 monopoly and has been found by a judge to be abusing their power to do all these things so you know I think it's

26:46 kind of a waste of breath trying to argue that they are so I think going into SEO you need to accept that's the

26:53 case and outline of any SEO strategy for me

26:58 is always you need a business model that isn't prevent getting in the way of Google making money because if you get

27:05 in the way of Google making money and you're relying on them to generate your traffic you know at some point Google's

27:11 going to come and take your lunch so with that as the kind of playing field

Impact of Exploits on SEO

27:18 how does information for an exploit change how you do SEO it helps

27:24 you see from a factual basis the things Google are looking at um and you can you

27:33 have a new of new set of what I would call axioms so axium are things that we know to be true right because a lot of

27:40 SEO work is you're build you have a few axioms like Google uses page rank right

27:47 and we know links are important right they're like our aums and then we start

27:52 building on ever increasing levels of abstraction like well I think you know I

27:58 I think links from um you know doov sites are more important because they're

28:04 doov or I think the sites links from related sites are really more important

28:10 which all makes logical sense and they're supporting material but the further up this chain we go the more

28:17 kind of we going into guessing territory so when we get data from things like the

28:23 warehouse leak from the exploit it allows us to be like ah well we know our

28:28 kind of our guess where we were three points High here is actually true so we

28:34 can we know anything that stems from this is actually worth more so to give you a concrete um example and the most

Predicted Click-Through Rate (CTR)

28:42 interesting one for me has always been and something I'm really interested in is around clickthrough rates okay and

28:49 this is one of the most confusing examples for seos and it's a brilliant demonstration on why SEO testing is very

28:57 difficult ult to do okay so Google has for a long a long time said we don't use

29:04 uh clickthrough rate in ranking in our ranking algorithm right and it doesn't

29:09 matter how many you know what kind of clickr rate your site gets people okay fine and then people go away and people

29:16 test things as they do and there's a few of these Ram fishkin did one um that was

29:22 that was quite well covered but there's been several where people do clickthrough rate manipulation studies where they'll pay a whole bunch people

29:28 able to click on this result in position seven and lo and behold two days later

29:34 it's in position three and so everyone Wags their finger and says hey Google you know you're lying to us because we can reproduce

29:41 this and we can test this and Google's sort is quiet about it you know

29:48 and what kind of came out of this for me in looking at the data was what I

29:53 believe is happening is in this instance um um we saw from the exploit there was

30:01 lots of data around predicted clickthrough rates so what Google

30:07 thought people were going to click on based on the query which makes a lot of sense right because they want to show

30:13 you things for a query which they think you're going to click on and actually it makes even more sense when you consider

30:19 with Google ads paid ads for many many years like even when I was doing Google ads like 15 years ago they calculate a

30:26 thing called quality score which affects your uh used to affect not so much now

30:32 i' say your cosper click and one of the factors of that was your predicted

30:37 click-through rate how how good they thought the ad was so it makes perfect sense they would apply that same model

30:43 to organic so what they're actually doing then with that prediction is saying for this query

30:50 we know people like this kind of website or this kind of content and there's various you know boring mathematical

30:57 ways they can rep present that to get this clickthrough rate and they use that as part of

31:03 ranking now what that means is it doesn't matter if someone clicks on your

31:08 site a 100 times it's not really going to affect your predicted clickthrough rate because the model is aggregate data

31:15 it's so big it's not really going to have an impact so that statement that Google made of you know we don't use

31:21 click-through rate on individual sites directly in ranking is true you know so then the question is well why do we see

31:28 the rankings change right um and then this has got to do with I think is kind

31:34 of sneaky but the wording around uh post ranking so the thing that happens after

31:39 ranking and again another Axiom another um bit of grounding we had was during

31:47 the doj Department of Justice trial where Google showed us loads of documents from like the mid 2010s like

31:54 2016 um and the name specific names of different systems they were using and

32:00 they gave examples of when what I believe they're doing is

32:06 when the click-through rate of the Ser wildly contradicts what their model says

32:12 or it or it changes very quickly so they have that rank brain thing going on that's tracking surf interactions they

32:20 know something has changed in intent right so the example that they gave in the doj trial was uh we have aert for

32:27 nice pictures and we have the ranking and then there's a terrorist attack in nce France which is spelled the same and

32:32 everyone's clicking on something different they're clicking on the country so we decide actually we need to

32:38 pop that to number one because it's what everyone's clicking on and I think that's the same thing we see with CTR

32:44 manipulation so suddenly site seven get you know it's ranking number seven gets clicked on so that front end kind of

32:51 system goes oh oh dear I think the prediction is wrong something has changed I don't need to know what but

32:57 everyone's clicking on their so I'm going to pop it up to number three or whatever because in all of those clickthrough rate studies when the

33:04 manipulation stops the rankings go back to how they were ranked in the ranking

33:10 system so for me this is like confirmation and you know even with the

33:16 Google content leak hearing all of the different systems that they use um and

33:22 understanding that you know there is a that there is a Google B crawler but the Google crawler isn't doing anything with

33:29 JavaScript that's done you know later in it with uh their rendering service all

33:34 of these things are really helpful to understand how you should approach SEO

33:40 from a technical point of view and what you need to be focusing on so the the

Site Quality Score Explained

33:45 last second example I'll give of that um was when we uncovered the site quality

33:51 score we've discovered there was a very specific score that if you fell below

33:56 this you wouldn't get um some rich results like people also ask

34:02 results um which means if you know you part of your SEO

34:09 strategy is oh we're going to try and get these rich results to get clicks and you're there optimizing your kind of on

34:15 page and you're like oh but I read this guy this is how we get features snippers you don't realize you're not

34:21 even in the race to get features nipits because you haven't qualified and that was one thing that became obvious

34:27 looking at this data was there was like these multiple levels um that Google seems to put you through it's like if

34:33 you want to be in this race you have to come in the top 10 in the last race and then so on and so on so again it altered

34:40 strategy is where it's like okay well we're not getting featur Snippets and it may actually be because we've got no

34:45 brand and nobody links to us the content is fine so making understanding that

34:52 there is a prerequisite order to things as well um and

34:58 like many good SEO people have said for many years it's not just about focusing on one particular you know tactic if you

35:05 want to be a good marathon runner you need to apart from train you need to have a good diet as well right right you

35:11 can't just go out running and then eat burgers all day right right right okay now uh so is

Finding Loopholes in SEO Insights

35:20 exploiting these insights about finding loopholes or is it more about understanding Google behaviors to create

35:26 better content and experiences yeah again

35:32 so one of the I mean I just answer the question yeah answer the question directly which

35:37 is yeah it's definitely not about finding loopholes um I can tell you

35:43 there's nothing there was lots of really really interesting things in there but

35:48 there's nothing that let you kind of like hack how Google is working um you know that's that's the point of this

35:55 system even if someone could understand exactly how all these things worked I

36:01 think it would be unlikely you'd just be able to then rank for anything you like because you still need all of

36:07 those the way you're scoring in a lot of these um situations is by doing the work

36:13 by writing the good content by getting people clicking on it and engaging with it and not bouncing off elsewhere and

36:19 people deciding to link to it and being on a site that has been around and has been getting coverage for a long time so

36:26 no it's you know it's it's all about learning how

36:33 to deploy your kind of SEO resources in the most effective way for your for your

36:40 specific instance that there isn't a one-size fits all SEO you know that was one thing again that was highlighted

36:47 with the exploit which was the clear classification of things like ym y l your money your life queries Google has

36:55 told us that they focus on different sets of their ranking factors when it comes to these kind of queries so what

37:02 applies to you know a gambling website may not apply to a website that sells

37:09 dog leads you know so no it's not about exploit it's about having that Advantage

37:17 by that understanding because that's what SEO is right the O is optimization it's not doing anything secret it's

37:24 doing a hundred things slightly better than all of your competitors okay now you you also mentioned that

What is Consensus Score?

37:31 Google uses a consensus score for rankings uh could you elaborate on what contributed this score and is it

37:38 strictly about corroborating content with authoritative sources or are there other levels like uh user Behavior

37:45 signals so I think I just want to be careful here

37:51 in there's factually what we found which was that Google appeared

37:57 to be measuring consensus on at least some

38:05 pages by counting the amount of um bits

38:10 of paragraphs of content that agree disagree or a neutral to the consensus

38:15 and it seems from that collection of those three things they calculate a overall consensus

38:21 score okay um there were also classifiers for queries that logically I

38:28 think would be related such as uh a Boolean for is debunking query so is

38:34 something a debunking query that's factually what we had Google has released publicly

38:41 information about how they tackle misinformation and disinformation and they specifically mention the concept of

38:49 consensus in that documentation how they use consensus and in what situations

38:55 they use consensus Google has also specifically said previously at least

39:02 like you know we can't algorithmically determine what is

39:07 correct and incorrect you know they they have to rely on consensus I believe so

39:14 from that my my personal opinion and professional kind of conclusions from

39:19 this is and this is partly just trying to think logically about again what

39:25 Google is trying to achieve as a search Eng on what good results would look like in that consensus would be consensus

39:32 which is agreeing with the general agreed opinion would be important in

39:38 cases specifically like ym which is where they mention it in their documentation so if you were telling

39:44 someone how to treat cancer for instance you know horrible topic but you would

39:50 hope that Google would provide results that have genuine scientific evidence

39:56 that might actually help people right rather than you know whatever made up at

40:03 home cure someone thinks they have so in those cases um I think you have from an SEO

40:11 point of view from a practicality point of you if you're in those areas like we work um in like drug rehab is one of the

40:18 areas we work in which is a y and wild topic if we're publishing information about those things I think it's

40:24 worthwhile considering if you have in content that

40:29 is contrary to the consensus I would maybe separate it so the page that I

40:35 want to rank for something sensitive like that is is providing authorative

40:41 factually based reference CIT content by an

40:47 expert if I want to talk about alternative you know things I would just

40:52 make a separate place for that um I think it's a really interesting

40:57 conversation when you come to things like politics right because there is no

41:03 objectively correct answer there may be consensus but does con you know in

41:09 politics you know does consensus matter so much I would argue no like that's

41:15 kind of the point in politics right so but that doesn't mean that a

41:21 consensus score can't be used I think it actually means it can be used so it can

41:27 guarantee some diversity in the results um so that might mean for a

41:33 topic where there isn't an objectively correct answer an algorithm May intentionally say okay well we'll make

41:40 sure we have some things that agree with the consensus we'll have we'll make sure we have some things that disagree and

41:45 we'll make sure we have some Middle ofthe Line stuff and then maybe on top of that we'll see how people react to

41:52 those things and if anyone uses the feedback tools on Google for you know this is a this is a bad result kind of

41:58 thing um so I do think there are important topics like politics where

42:05 subjectivity is you know Reigns and you and that's how you would how you would

42:11 use consensus or so I'm not saying to succeed a SEO you must publish content that goes with the consensus I'm saying

42:18 there's some areas where that may well be the case logically I don't think that would apply across the

42:24 board okay now uh so what's your advice for agencies or marketers who want to

Building a Content Strategy for Consensus Rankings

42:31 build a robust content strategy that aligns with these consens based rankings so I was having this conversation today

42:38 with a client that engaged with us and wanted us for their Niche to provide

42:46 them content end to end so they said we want you to research the content write it and upload it to the site and I said

42:52 that's not actually something we do um we can help with content strategy we can

42:58 help you with keyword research with gap analysis finding out what your uh

43:05 customers actually want to read what competitors do we can brief it but we won't write it and they were kind of

43:11 like why and my answer was well there's no one in my team who is like a genuine

43:17 expert in what you do right so we could do that but we would be getting all of

43:24 our information from maybe Googling stuff and if we can find someone to like

43:29 interview or something we could write it that way now in my opinion that's just a very slow and inefficient way to do what

43:35 chat GPT is going to do right which is just research things online and you know

43:41 do kind of retrieval augmented generation approach my advice to them was yes you

43:48 should do all those things to get you up to the briefing stage then you should be

43:53 talking to someone who is an actual expert and and as a as a tip for people

43:59 that run agencies one of the ways we've been doing this now is actually to have

44:04 video interviews with product Service Experts a bit like how we're doing now

44:10 um and I'll have my content brief and I will essentially similar to how you're doing to me kind of feed them questions

44:16 and even if we go off script I will explore that and then once we've got that video even if we're not going to

44:22 use the video content for social media or even the website we transcribe bit and then as a first run we can get an AI

44:30 to make an article from that because we haven't generated the content from an

44:35 llm um or what exists online so we haven't done rag we still have hopefully

44:42 that experts unique Insight their unique take which then obviously needs to it does need to go through an editor and

44:47 make sure tone of voice and everything is correct with um and it is all factually correct but I found that

44:55 having a human conversation with someone and we can actually get a lot more useful information out of them rather

45:00 than if I send them an email being like can you answer these 10 questions about this thing and also write about this

45:05 topic they tend to be very robotic in that they just answer the questions and they spend a lot of time thinking about

45:11 how they're writing because they're probably not professional writers right they've just been asked to write something whereas every most people at

45:18 least can will find it easier just to have a conversation so that would be my advice in terms of if you're needing

45:25 consensus is don't um you know you need consensus but you also need um a reason

45:34 for for a certain engine to rank you because if you were just writing what exists as the consensus why would Google

45:40 ever want to rank your content instead of generating an a itself this would defy the first rule that we spoke about

45:47 earlier which is they want to keep you on the Ser so you're not giving them a reason to send them away right now you

Site Quality Score (Duplicate Removed)

45:54 also talk about quality score which of course we associated with the Google ads but it's intriguing to know it's also

46:00 something applicable for the organic results as well now how do you think it

46:05 influences a site's eligibility for Rich results or other Google features I mean

46:11 you mentioned some of them but if you can elaborate on those yeah so so to be

46:16 super clear and differentiate between the two the um the parameter that we found was

46:24 called site quality and the Google Google ads score is called quality score

46:30 so quality score and site quality are different they sound very similar but they're calculated differently now um

46:38 with site quality I ran a whole bunch of tests with uh my experiment correlation

46:44 tests with different metrics from uh tools like HS to try and see if I could

46:50 get an inside track on how Google was calculating this so like is it related to the amount of links or number of

46:55 links is it anything to do with the L graph um and I couldn't find anything to do with like HF data which is what led

47:03 me down the path of trying to find the painton now there is the painton called

47:10 um site quality um it's quite an old paintting

47:16 now I presented that in the talk because I think it's the best piece of the best

47:21 Axiom if you like of information I have where this is correct this is a painon

47:27 the important thing about paints is that they're not necessarily used at all just because the

47:35 paint exist doesn't mean it's used and secondly it may have changed somewhat or it may have changed drastically since

47:41 that filing so I would knowing what Google is using now in terms of kind of

47:47 AI and hearing about that I would be surprised if site quality is being used

47:54 as described in the painting so I think the broader Strokes of what it describes

47:59 which to put it very you know uh to maybe do it Injustice is roughly some

48:06 kind of like brand navigational score for how much people are looking for for you

48:12 specifically which I think is interesting With The Changes we've seen um that was the kind of score that we

48:19 think it's generating and in terms of Rich results that are generated post rankings so

48:27 featured Snippets um and the example I'm always interested in which is people also ask results um anything where a

48:35 site is basically determined to be good enough to be highlighted um on you know the Google

48:42 page in a kind of special manner is what they at least appear to be using this

48:48 score for now they could be using it for other things as well that I haven't found or aren't weren't visible to me um

48:56 but there was this uh the cut off was 0.4 so it's a score that goes from 0 to one um I believe it's um like a

49:05 logarithmic score in that getting from one to two is much easier than getting

49:12 to like six to seven for instance the difference um and I believe that because

49:18 we had around 800,000 sites to score for them the domains and the distribution

49:24 was kind of this uh normal distribution curve where most people fell into that

49:30 kind of middle score of 0.5 0.6 0.7 and then it really started dropping off and

49:37 there were very few sites that were like 0.9 um and when we were specifically

49:42 scraping uh different features there was nothing below 0.4 which is how we

49:48 determined okay that is the cut off so again that's super interesting that says

Google's Estimated CTR Calculation

49:54 to me that um and it makes it makes it makes so much sense when you explain it like if we're

50:00 going to if Google's going to gamble on putting your content you know featured

50:07 on that se search result they want to be sure that you are you are you know a

50:13 thing you are a brand you are a real website you're not just some site

50:18 written by a random that appeared a week ago um so I just think it's quite a we rarely talk about well it rarely

50:26 talks about just in terms of content quality because you're like yes it's quality content helpful content it's

50:31 also who is delivering it um the other analogy I sometimes use with clients is

50:37 when it comes to like trust and Authority everyone's got friends who uh maybe like exaggerate a lot um and

50:45 they've got friends maybe who are just very literal and always tell the truth and if someone tells you like a a hardto

50:51 believe story you know and you can you can hear the same story of two different people and walk away thinking I don't

50:59 think that's true or you can walk away thinking wow Alex said that it definitely happened just like that so

51:05 and it makes sense Google applies that model in the same way you know just because your content looks good it also

51:13 needs to be delivered from the right platform to make the whole package believable and for Google to risk

51:18 repeating it as a featured uh snippet or something right now Are there specific

51:25 indicators like backing profile content structure or ux that significantly impact or improve this quality

51:33 score so is site quality uh I couldn't I couldn't see anything that would be

51:40 easily measurable no because I tried to tie it back to uh like link graphs um I

51:47 think trying to I mean is it is it related to like

51:52 content quality I wouldn't even know how to go about measuring that I mean that's

51:57 like a Google size task right it's like okay tell me what you mean by site quality

52:03 first and then we're going to get into an hourong discussion on how we Define you know content quality so the short

52:10 answer is no I had these scores I think my feeling is from looking at the painting a lot of the influences and

52:18 this is the point a lot of the influences of this are external like this is like page rank in the the reason

52:27 page rank was so important in terms of search engines is because it wasn't under the Direct Control at least you

52:33 know for a while um of site owners because when they were using meta keywords everyone was like cool I'll

52:38 just put all the keywords in and it's why people like alista struggled right when Google were like okay we're going

52:44 to democratize this a bit and it's what other people say about you or how they

52:49 link to you is important I think this is a similar vein to site quality in that

52:54 it's how many people are searching specific specifically for you and it's how many people are specifically clicking on you in the search result

53:01 they're not things you impact with you know how many keywords you've got in your content or how well written it is

53:07 or what images you use or how fast your site is and that's the point okay now now Google calculating

53:15 estimate uh estimated CTR for each queries and URLs of course something

53:21 which we knew is something Googled integrated now can you shed light on how these itions might shape rankings and

53:28 how Brands can adjust their strategies to meet Google expectations so I think

53:33 your predicted CTR will have a minimal impact on how how well you rank um all

53:40 these things obviously work together compound each other you know there's a lot that goes into ranking

53:46 um 100% you should be doing some kind of AB testing on things like page

53:53 titles arguably metad descriptions I'm not a big fan of them because Google changes them all the time and it's kind

53:59 of cley dependent but I think page title is particularly important there's loads of very affordable platforms like seot

54:06 testing.com very quick and easy set up a test um it's another good use case for llms

54:13 there's been some great work uh using things like BT um and GSC data to fine-tune models

54:20 to actually suggest what might be a better page title for you so I've seen some very smart people automating this

54:27 process by having feedback loops of analyzing their GSC data for click-through rates um automatically

54:34 adjusting their page title setting up ab test and when they have a statistically significant winner going like putting that as the

54:42 kind of candidate uh page title so I think that's worth doing because it's an

54:47 easy thing in terms of if you have a 2% clickthrough rate and you can get 2.5%

54:52 even if you don't change your ranking you've just got 25 % more traffic for that keyword right so that's massive

55:01 right um and I think that's seo seo to me is getting more traffic from search engines doesn't necessarily mean you

55:07 have to move upper ranking you just want more traffic so um for me that was that's now more important I think than

Optimizing for Click-Through Rate

55:13 it did used to be um so I'm I'm not saying it's going to change the world of

55:20 SEO but for me I've certainly said okay for every single client we've got I want

55:26 to have a system where for their popular Pages where they're not ranking number one perhaps we are constantly working on

55:35 iterative Improvement um and I you know I mentioned earlier about the SEO testing stuff that's something we use

55:40 heavily now especially on big sites you know if you make a change to a single category and then a month later you

55:47 found okay there's 6% uplift and all the control groups are the same or down and then you

55:53 can just deploy that sitewide and it's a very easy argument to make them because that's the other obviously difficulty

56:00 right about SEO which is forecasting and trying to justify why changes being made

56:05 and then if you make a sitewide change there's the argument of well could that have happened anyway or are more people

56:11 just searching so split testing for me ahead of time just knocks all those

56:17 arguments on the head um and makes it easy okay now uh what are uh some

Underutilized Data Sources for SEO

56:23 underutilized data sources or analytical method that believe agency should start leveraging

56:31 today I'm always going to say people also ask data because I think it's still the most underutilized you know I bang

56:37 this drum for so long um and I I'll tell you why

56:43 it's for I think going into the future that we're going into which is that

56:49 people use more words in even typed search queries than ever before right

56:55 when I was using alter Vista it's like one or two or three words tops you'd use because the search engine was basic now

57:02 people's search queries are wildly specific right this means to me unless

57:07 you're using tools that are very intelligently grouping together um you know groups of these searches that

57:14 things like search volume are less important than ever because if you give me a five quer five word query I can

57:23 probably rewrite that query 20 30 different ways and it will mean the same

57:28 thing so unless you're going to get me the search volume accurately for all of them and add them up you know it's it's

57:34 kind of a bit of a a moot point to me so and Google you know is good at deciding

57:40 well all these queries kind of mean the same thing so I'm just ranking this page you know there's loads of examples now where you see Pages ranking for terms

57:47 and the terms aren't even verbatim on the page it's that Google just understands that right um so the reason

57:55 I like people also data is firstly we know from the doj documents Google uses

58:01 their people or ask boox as a induction feedback loop to understand queries better so they're like because query the

58:09 the intent lots of people talk about query intent Now intent is not objective

58:14 meaning you take the same query and two different people might want two different things from that

58:21 query it might be completely different because lots of words have multiple meanings right right right completely

58:27 different subjects um and firstly that's the data that people also ask paa data

58:35 immediately surfaces you put in a query and sometimes I do that with clients and

58:40 they and they look at one of the branches of the tree and they say oh well no that's not anything to do with

58:45 us and I'm like yeah but it's important you know that a percentage of the people

58:50 searching yeah aren't looking for even your industry because how What proportion of

58:57 this search term that you've brought to us with 5,000 searches a month is actually then looking for what you do

59:04 you know is it 8020 or is it 2080 so F firstly there's that um secondly the way

59:12 in which um keywords and intent is is is mapped and understood so a really good

59:18 example is if you put in say something about um say you have a query like is my

59:25 dog po pooned right so your dog ate chocolate or something and you ask

59:30 keyword tools like what's related to this and they'll give you semantically related terms or Google suggest will be

59:36 like my dog is my dog and it will give you all the suggestions and then it will give you lots of similar

59:43 searches what you get in people also ask data is queries that maybe don't even

59:51 contain any of those keywords but they're like the next most likely thing to Google which will be things like um

59:57 how what can a vet do for poisoning how much does a vet cost for poisoning because that search is probably being

1:00:04 done in distress because someone's like you know their dog's been sick and then they're on Google like oh uh what do I

1:00:10 need to do and how much is it going to cost and should I take them to the vet so they're not like semantically related

1:00:17 in that way of these but they are related in that these searches happen in close proximity that's the data you get

1:00:23 from paas which can then form the actual intent of what you should be writing

1:00:28 about um you know you don't want to be writing about maybe like pet insurance

1:00:34 at this point because they either have pet insurance or they don't it's not the time to sell them pet insurance right um

1:00:40 and lastly the other fascinating thing to me is there is no keyword data source that is updated as quickly as PA data if

1:00:49 something happens in the news if there's an election called there's some kind of emergency you do the Google search the p

1:00:56 a a data is already showing what people are searching for and in SEO sometimes

1:01:01 being first to publish is massively important because there's no competition and you get all of that traffic so the

1:01:08 like when the last version of GPT was released I was using this as a demonstration during training in every

1:01:15 keyword research tour it' been out like three days said oh there's zero search volume for GPT 40 and it was obviously

1:01:22 not true because it's all over headline news and you put it into Google or into also us and immediately you've got um

1:01:29 how is chat gbd4 better than chat gbd3 how much does chat gbd4 cost so we know

1:01:35 what the intent is already um so I think in terms of you know how many agencies

1:01:41 and how many companies are monitoring paas around topics for when they change

1:01:47 to be the first to publish because intent doesn't intent kind of naturally

1:01:53 drifts um another great example was around Co um so we've got a feature on also us that does uh like a timeline

1:02:01 which shows you how intense shifts over days months weeks years and if you look

1:02:06 back three years ago for searches around covid it's all these searches where people are asking things like what are

1:02:12 the symptoms for covid and how long does it last and all this and now the searches are basically like do I still

1:02:19 need to stay indoors you know what's the law like people it shows people's now apathy and they just need to know are

1:02:26 they allowed to get on a plane and can they go to work um they don't really care about the symptoms anymore or anything like that so if you had content

1:02:35 that was ranking for something before it's and you haven't updated it it's probably not relevant to actually when

1:02:41 someone searches for the same query what they're looking for now and I just meet so few practitioners that are monitoring

1:02:47 that people look at keywords once they write the content and then they go cool we've done it we've done that page on to

1:02:54 the next thing right right or onto the back links yeah yeah exactly exactly

Actionable Steps for Marketers

1:03:00 right right now if you could boil all this down into three actionable steps what should agencies or marketers focus

1:03:07 on immediately to make the most of these Google exploit insights I'd Bang the Drum and say um

1:03:16 PA well yeah paas I wasn't goingon to say that but yeah we'll get them first so PA data for me for those reasons is

1:03:22 something I would definitely be on top of um I would um think about how you can use your

1:03:30 marketing to um overlap with your SEO so I'll give you an example because there's

1:03:36 been lots of advice going around which is just build a brand right which is great but it's kind of hard to build a

1:03:42 brand it's like a big job so my small bit of advice would be if you're doing say adverts rather than say visit also

1:03:48 ask.com I would say just search also asked or I know we rank number one for

1:03:54 people also ask tools so search for that because what you're then doing is you're generating that demand in the search

1:04:01 engine and you're demonstrating that people are picking you and you're um

1:04:06 increasing your brand searches so I think anything you can see there's things outside of SEO you can do that

1:04:13 demonstrate to search engines that you know you are the person you are the brand for this topic um and lastly I

1:04:21 would say um using well it's kind of like what not to do so I'll try and frame it in what to

1:04:28 do which is you know use actual experts and use video so

1:04:35 video like video growth is massive now for SEO um it overlaps with everything

1:04:41 that came up with the exploit in terms of you know stuff we haven't touched on like things about engagement and

1:04:46 click-through rate um and it's hard for AI to copy the biggest problem I see at

1:04:52 the moment in my opinion in SEO is the hype and misuse of AI um to the point

1:04:59 where it's already creating like a like a little bit of backlash you know it'ser

1:05:04 AI slop is kind of the term it's just everywhere so don't do that you know

1:05:10 Focus actually on on the quality getting the right people doing it in the best format possible and working downwards

1:05:17 rather than upwards by that I mean it's easier to make a podcast and text from a video than it is writing an article and

1:05:24 then trying to make a video right right yes they are is there a lwh

Low-Hanging Fruits in SEO Strategy

1:05:30 hanging fruit you see most businesses Overlook in terms of using Google's algorithmic Tendencies to their

1:05:37 advantage when I know you talked about Su testing with the title but are there any other low hanging Foods that's an

1:05:43 interesting question because I guess it it depends it depends on the ability of

1:05:49 the the company I think the most common thing I see is like a it's like a user experience technical thing which is most

1:05:57 companies that smes we engage with have some kind of blog and by blog I would

1:06:03 Define that as they have a a chronological way in which they post

1:06:09 articles however the Articles they poting a lot of the time are Evergreen in that they people they'll be as

1:06:16 relevant in six months time as they are on the day they're published however because of the structure of their site

1:06:23 once they've published another 20 articles only way a user can find that is to go to their blog and then click on

1:06:29 page two page three page four until they find the thing they're looking for which

1:06:34 is nuts when you when you say to when I say to a client okay this is a really great you know guide you've written here

1:06:42 um can you show me from the homepage how someone's meant to find that and then they're kind of like oh and from an SEO

1:06:49 point of view from a page rank point of view from a how search engines look at it that your that document is not going

1:06:57 to be considered very important if it's like three clicks deep compared to if it's linked to from a main menu so the

1:07:05 low hanging FR would be if you have valuable content on your site make sure it is easily and prominently linked to

1:07:11 and findable for users right and then good SEO things will happen um there's

1:07:16 no point investing all this time effort and money in researching writing content to bury it on page nine you know in your

1:07:23 blog right all right now we we just running out of time so I'll just be a little fast so

AlsoAsked and Intent Mapping in SEO

1:07:31 now uh let's talk about your work with also asked in intent mapping how do these tool contribute to a more

1:07:36 effective Su strategy can so I think In fairness we've covered a lot of that already um

1:07:42 so I'd say specifically I guess I've given all the reasons why to use PA data I'd say the reason that also asked is

1:07:50 helpful is the only way to get this data is either manually which takes

1:07:56 absolutely ages um there are some um Google Chrome extensions that will do it

1:08:02 for free for you that would scrape them and you know I'm not pretending they don't exist go and use them if that if that's your your thing the reason why

1:08:09 you's also asked is um it allows you to do these queries for any uh quer uh any

1:08:17 country in any language without using like a VPN or anything and this year we're launching you can do it from any

1:08:23 specific City because we're seeing city um personalized yeah paas um not only

1:08:32 that it generates the uh map that shows how the queries relate to each other

1:08:37 which you is very they're super popular both in proposals and for giving to content writers sometimes you just give

1:08:43 them the images and it helps them decide how to write and structure their content um we do a full data export that shows

1:08:49 the actual answers that are ranking so you can plug this into like an llm if you want to do sentiment analysis some

1:08:56 people are using it to uh to see the questions people are asking about their brand so I used revolute as an example

1:09:04 which is the Challenger online bank and if you do that and get the paa data you can see all the questions are about how

1:09:10 much money is it safe to put in revolute is revolute legit so you can immediately see on their homepage you need to

1:09:17 reassure people that you know what the safeguards are uh and lastly we're the

1:09:22 only tool I'm aware of in the world that offers a um API both sync and async

1:09:30 which means you can get the results immediately or if you've built your own app you can send off a query for like a

1:09:35 thousand results and it will cook away and it will send you a little ping when it's done so you can integrate your data

1:09:42 in any tool so we're in um Daniel folic Carter's SEO stack tool um it's a whole

1:09:48 Suite of tools and he connects to our API for that um so literally if you're doing programmatic SEO if you're dealing

1:09:55 with massive sites if you've got your own tooling to help generate content briefs you can connect it all up it's

1:10:01 super cheap and it works in real time which I don't think anyone else does wow now besides also as are there any tools

Recommended Resources for SEO Professionals

1:10:08 or resources you would recommend for marketers and Su professionals to stay on the top of their game oh so many um I

1:10:16 think a good uh good starting point is always uh learning seo. which is ala

1:10:22 soless has lovingly put together a massive list of um resources that's such

1:10:27 a good place to start um in terms of stack of kind of tools that I use regularly um I think you mentioned

1:10:34 screaming frog um already sitebulb is audit software I use all the time um I

1:10:39 use in links U for like entity analysis internal linking uh keyword insights uh

1:10:45 for clustering SEO testing um and unfortunately I do also pay for HF s

1:10:53 rush cyrix and ranking death by, and cuts they're all good in their own

1:10:59 individual ways you don't necessarily need all of them we just happen to have clients on on different ones but um yeah

1:11:04 learning SEO is a great place I've also got a newsletter called core updates um

1:11:10 so you can find it if you Google core updates I think or core updates newsletter will be number one I think

1:11:15 just for core updates we're still on the first page but that's every Monday I just send literally bullet points of

1:11:23 this week's SEO news that's actually important and actionable it's not a long newsletter it's like one sentence about

1:11:29 something that's changed with a link if you want to click on it um and I put a fewo tips in there every week as well

1:11:34 and that's that's free um so yeah everyone's free to to sign up to that if they want okay okay now we come to the

Rapid Fire Questions

1:11:42 last section of our U talk which is the rapid fire questions so I'm going to ask

1:11:49 you questions and you just say first thing which comes in your mind let me know oh de right SEO tool not also asked

1:11:58 recommend sorry an SEO tool not also asked SEO tool which and not also asked oh uh sitebulb Cloud easily okay one

1:12:05 suum you would love to De debunk forever uh that's Google analytics

1:12:11 bounce rate is used in rankings okay if you weren't in SEO what

1:12:16 would you be doing I'd go back to being a scuba diving instructor I think uh you

1:12:23 really were yes I was yeah for a couple of years yeah wow okay uh your proudest

1:12:29 moment in your career you have to give me AE moment think about that so I I think actually it was probably uh last

1:12:38 last year or the year before was um we at Kanda so at the agency we well

1:12:47 two years ago we launched our initiative where every year we support a local charity so the last two years we

1:12:53 supported the Hamlet um and Brave Futures we've donated at the beginning of the year

1:12:58 £10,000 um and we've got the staff involved throughout the year to help those Charities and at the end of the

1:13:04 year we had our staff feedback sort of on how happy people were with various parts and that's been the highest it's

1:13:11 ever been so it kind of wasn't a specific moment but that year for me was

1:13:18 the proudest in terms of we've felt we' built a place where people liked being

1:13:24 they wanted to work and we were being able to actively make meaningful contributions to Charities that were

1:13:31 local to us that were important to us so that was made me happier than all the kind of rankings I could get I also saw

1:13:38 in the video you you donated your um Google Bounty price yeah so that was for

1:13:44 the same charity last year so we I think we ended up raising them about £25,000 PS last year which is great which is

1:13:51 great right one piece of advice you wish you had received earlier in your care

1:13:56 get a mentor probably because I never did that um and I didn't listen enough

1:14:02 let's talking more listening same here I agree with you

1:14:07 yes okay Mark this has been such an enlightening conversation and of course

1:14:13 so many things I learned here about paa I mean I honestly didn't know they update so fast I'll be honest now and U

1:14:22 lots of other stuff as well of course and thank you so much for sharing your insights experience and practical advice

Connecting with Mark and AlsoAsked

1:14:28 with us before we wrap up can you let our listeners know how they can connect with you and explore all asked yeah

1:14:34 certainly so I'm um most professionally active on LinkedIn um if you just search

1:14:40 Mark Williams cook I think I'm the only Mark Williams cook on the internet um so I'm very easy to find um if you um want

1:14:48 to connect with me kind of just my dayto day I'm on Blue Sky now um and my handle on there is Mark Williams cook

1:14:56 um so again very easy to find on there that's just more ramblings than professional advice but those are the

1:15:02 two places um also asked is just at also ask.com um it's a free tool as well it's

1:15:07 free it's premium so you can just go there um give it a go and if you want to

1:15:14 have a chat with me just open the live chat and I'll probably respond pretty quickly most of the time um but

1:15:21 yeah okay and thank you again uh for for coming to my show it was been a pleasure

Outro

1:15:27 thank you for having me same here and to all our listeners thank you for tuning in to another episode of the agency

1:15:33 Insider show don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast platform and stay tuned for more exciting

1:15:39 conversations with industry leaders until next time cheers