If Getting Backlinks Is Easy, You're Doing It Wrong

Jeffro (00:01.123)
Welcome back to digital dominance. Today I’m joined by Nick Musica, an SEO expert and WordPress web designer with nearly two decades of hands on experience. Nick has helped countless small businesses optimize their online presence. And he’s here to break down the three essential pillars of SEO that can make or break your website rankings. Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick Musica (00:20.913)
Thanks, Jeff Road. Happy to be here. Good morning.

Jeffro (00:23.449)
Thanks, yeah, and I just realized, I said música, it like harken back to when I learned Spanish. I don’t know if it’s musica or not, but you tell me.

Nick Musica (00:31.461)
Yeah, it’s Musica, but you pronounce it any way you want. All good.

Jeffro (00:34.414)
All right. Well, thank you for the grace there. But I’m excited to get into some of the brass tacks of SEO with you today. Now, I mentioned in the intro that we’re going to talk about the three essential pillars of SEO, but I’ve heard different definitions for those three pillars. Some people say the three pillars are technical, on-page and off-page. Others say that the three pillars are authority, relevance and experience. So what is your definition of the three pillars?

Nick Musica (01:01.541)
Yeah, I go with technical on page and off page. Yeah. Because, yeah. Yeah. I mean, because, because you can properly categorize elements that roll up to each one of those. other ones we could, we could talk about, we can categorize, but we’re going to debate about them probably for the next 25 minutes.

Jeffro (01:04.661)
Okay, that makes sense to me. Those are the main aspects.

Jeffro (01:20.822)
Yeah, that makes sense. So let’s walk through your process when you’re doing SEO for a website. What do you do first, especially as we’re talking about these pillars? How do you approach each of those?

Nick Musica (01:22.459)
Right.

Nick Musica (01:33.637)
Yeah, yeah. So we do a lot of foundational work with folks. Folks come to us not having done SEO typically. Some folks come to us having done SEO maybe not in an ideal way. And some folks are looking to grow, right? And for any one of those scenarios, we’re taking a look at the technical first, which is the first pillar, right? We’re taking a look to see, can this site be crawled?

And indexed, which means can little Google bot, you know, when a little soldier of Google, can it come out to your website? Can it go through each and every link? Can it understand what’s on the pages? Can it understand your files, be it PDFs, videos, images, whatever it is. And then can it bring it back to its database in the sky and make sense of it. And if it can’t do that, then it doesn’t matter. We have, if you have a hundred great pages of content on your website.

Or the best videos in the hallway world. No one’s going to find it. Right. So let’s make sure the technical is up to snuff. And again, it’s can Google access it and can it bring it back and understand it. So we’re looking at whatever the scenarios when we first get started with someone, we always take a look at that. And, and here’s how the conversation typically sounds. You’re good. Now let’s talk about your content and your links. And that’s typically not how rolls out.

Jeffro (02:32.397)
Exactly.

Nick Musica (03:01.799)
it’s typically, let’s talk about your technical because there are some things that need to be buttoned up. And then when we do that, then we talk about the content and the links because for every dollar we spend on content, we want to get a dollar back in return. If our technical is less than ideal, we’re going to get 60 cents is the arbitrary number that I use versus the dollar, but we want, we want full value.

Nick Musica (03:47.335)
Okay.

Jeffro (00:01.251)
Okay, so technical SEO is the first thing you do. That makes sense. Because obviously you got to be able to get indexed by Google before anything else matters.

Nick Musica (00:09.283)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And some folks, I mean, I see it on LinkedIn. I see it in the SEO community of folks just going technical is overrated. And I think you just don’t know how to do technical, right? You just don’t. I mean, even if it’s a one page website, and this is a little extreme, this perspective, but if you have the wrong controls in place, even your one page website has zero chance of ranking. If you screwed up your robots TXT, which is a control that tells Google stay here.

Come to this website or don’t come to this website. If you screwed up your canonical tag for some reason, that can also tell Google to go away. There’s very simple controls that need to be checked before we say, let’s talk about something different. I have a client who I’ve been working with for years who came to me and she said, my old SEO guy kept on telling me to produce more blog posts. OK, well, let me take a look.

There’s nothing wrong with your blog posts. I mean, maybe we need more. Let’s have that conversation. But your technical is banged up. And so without having much in the way of new blog posts, and I have the monthly report pulled up over here year over year. We’re looking at, we went in October of 23, there were 85,000 visits to the site. In October, it’s pretty good. Not so bad. And then in October of 24,

Jeffro (01:30.221)
That’s not bad, yeah.

Nick Musica (01:38.191)
434,000. So even better, right? And I would say like 90 % is technical. especially the bigger the website, the more technical of an eye you want to look at it. That’s where the scaling really comes from. Assuming your content is good, assuming your links are good, you’re to get a big bang for your buck from the technical.

Jeffro (01:38.222)
That’s huge. Yeah.

Jeffro (01:57.079)
What are some of the issues you see on the technical from someone who tried it before that didn’t really know what they were doing?

Nick Musica (02:03.297)
Yeah. So I would say one is there’s an assumption that it’s actually even being done. Right. Like don’t worry about my technical. I have a technical department that’s actually doing it. You don’t. You have a technical department that’s full of doing other things. Like if they’re not being paid explicitly to keep your site healthy from an SEO perspective, they are not doing it. They’re working on your email. They’re working on your hosting, which is not the same thing as SEO. They’re working to make sure that all these things are working over here.

Jeffro (02:09.838)
Fair, yep.

Nick Musica (02:32.383)
That’s what they’re getting paid for. That’s what they’re getting their bonuses on. They’re not getting paid for SEO. So one, you need folks who are actually tasked with it. Because SEO is, here’s the broad definition of SEO. Anyone who’s touching the website is SEOing. So everyone needs to know what their role is, including the technical folks. And so assuming we’re actually doing the technical, a lot of folks don’t understand how all the elements come together. So.

Jeffro (02:47.66)
Ha

Mm-hmm.

Nick Musica (03:01.827)
We want to start ideally with a very simple structure. There’s the home page. There’s category pages. There is we have a guest here. have subcategory and destination pages, everything underneath. And Google should be able to go to the home page and then go down to the category pages and just keep on crawling. And that’s your primary information architecture. It’s your primary technical architecture. And then we have controls in the background. Robots TXT.

We have canonical tags. They all should be speaking the same language. When we start to mix up the language and Google conflicting direction, we just put the decision-making in Google’s hands. And when we do that, we lose. Because someone else is going to do it better than us. They’re going to tell Google exactly what to do. And at some point we’re going to go, how come we’re not number one anymore? And how do we get to number six?

Now we’re on page two, right? So you just need to make sure that all the elements in your technical are speaking the language that Google needs in a consistent manner. And that’s going to be the chances of your best result.

Jeffro (04:14.614)
Because it’s not like, I made a site map, now I’m done with technical, let’s move on to blog post. Okay, that’s part of it, but there’s obviously a lot more to it than that.

Nick Musica (04:22.891)
Absolutely, absolutely.

Jeffro (04:25.174)
So what about as we move into the on page and we start looking at things like, I mean, I guess you can tell me which bucket you put these in, but like the title tag and the H1 tag, is that considered part of the on page optimization for you?

Nick Musica (04:42.769)
For me it is, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Jeffro (04:43.946)
Yeah. Okay. And are those still the most important places for keywords in your opinion when you’re telling Google what the site’s about?

Nick Musica (04:52.335)
Yes, because Google’s looking at the title tag which is hidden, but that’s what shows in the search. That’s what gets someone to in the search end results page. So when someone does a query for XYZ and your page shows up, your title tag is showing, your meta description is showing, or they get rewritten by Google for different reasons. But they are very, very important to give Google a sense of what this page is about. And then your first bit of copy on your page is…

the first bit of unique copy on the page is going to be very important. Sometimes that’s actually a breadcrumb, right? We have home, blog, and then article title sometimes. So we have a sense that Google has a first indication of what this page is about. But then we have the H1, which is the page title, the visible page title, which sometimes is one-to-one with the title tag. Sometimes it’s variation. But yeah, very important.

Jeffro (05:46.857)
Yeah, whenever I do an audit, I see it so many times the title tag just says home, nickmusica.com, right? And that’s the first thing I say. I’m like, guys, you’re missing a huge keyword opportunity here. And that’s such an easy fix.

Nick Musica (05:53.923)
Man.

Nick Musica (05:59.883)
Yeah, a guy just reached out to me, I think it was yesterday. And I just did a little quick crawl of the site. We use Screaming Frog and I just wanted to see what’s going on here. Because the traffic’s going up. I’m using a third party tool to track the trend. So the absolute numbers in third party tools, please don’t believe them. They are 100 % absolutely wrong. But from a trending perspective, is it going up or is it going down?

So I’m looking at, I’m looking at the up and I’m like, this is like, this is cool. Like, what can I give this guy? What can I offer this guy? And then I do a crawl the website. There are no title tags on this website. They’re absent. Which, which means I would assume they were there. I would, I need to assume because like we have some amount of good going on here. So they went missing, right? Is my assumption. We’ll figure out what’s actually true. But if they went missing and no one has caught it yet, that means no one is looking at.

Jeffro (06:35.714)
wow.

Nick Musica (06:55.287)
technical. In this case, it’s a technical catch, right? It’s an on-page implementation, but it’s not going to be found by a writer, chances are, because they’re looking at what you can see in the browser. It’s going to be a technical catch because it’s going to be found via a crawl, a technical tool.

Jeffro (07:11.711)
makes sense. And there’s all sorts of little things like that, that if you don’t know how to look for it, you’re just never going to know, right? And so that’s why you need the team to pay attention to it for you.

Nick Musica (07:18.61)
That’s right. Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

Jeffro (07:21.749)
So what are some, let’s talk a little bit more about the on page, in terms of creating content and doing internal linking and headings for H2, H3 with keywords and all of that. What’s your approach there?

Nick Musica (07:27.129)
Yeah.

Nick Musica (07:36.439)
Yeah, I would go with all those things are important. And I heard the best definition of from an SEO about what SEO is how to get the biggest bang for the buck years ago at a conference. you know, sort of like day two or three, the conferences is ending. and he said, you know, based on everything I heard here today, I’m pretty sure I’m pretty sure that if you just do the basics really, really well,

That’s going to get you further than most of the other garbage that’s out there. And that stuck with me. was probably 10 years ago. And so my come from is doing the basics really, really well. And I also understand from talking to other folks that my basics, they’re not the same as your basics, right? The way I think about duplicate content, and that’s a basic for me, is not how someone else thinks of duplicate content. They may not even know what it means.

You have to be thinking about the right basics in order to get that result. And what you’re talking about, that structure of H1, H2, H3. Yeah, I want that structured well. Sometimes you’ll get into cases where, if we were to change the H1, here’s what it means for everything else. Okay, well, let’s defer that. We don’t want to recreate the website wheel. Let’s do what we can right now. Let’s see how far we can get, but let’s not…

Let’s not knock it off the list. Like we want to hedge our bets. We want to do everything to the best of our ability.

Jeffro (09:02.76)
Yeah, and that makes sense. What about in today’s world? We’ve all got Chatch GPT and different AI content writing tools. Is there a good way to, you know, kind of marry these together where you actually maintain decent SEO structure with these AI tools?

Nick Musica (09:21.581)
You know, there was back in the day before there was like Surfer SEO and ClearScope, which basically are tools that go out to Google. They’ll grab the top 10 listings. They’ll distill it down into a template essentially. And then you can write to the template, right? Before those tools came into play, I was doing that manually. And then those tools came into play and then everyone start to use those tools, which made

a lot of content sound pretty much the same, right? And then we got AI. And what AI did was go out, crawled the pages that were created with those tools, and then give you a variation on the variation, right? And make it sound super vanilla, right? Like, let’s take out any personalization that I could actually give to it as a subject matter expert. And like, let’s just, let’s

round off the corners, right? It’s like the best blended wine, right? They all sort of taste the same, right? Because it’s like a blend, right? But if you were to buy a wine from a very specific neighborhood in Napa, whether you like it or not, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. But it has its own flavor, right? Versus all the blends, you know, they’re sort of all the same. And that’s what we pretty much have with the evolution of the content tools and with AI.

to the degree that Google has issued a very, very harsh correction over the past couple of years called the helpful content update. And I don’t know if you saw this, this was amazing. And amazing in a bad way. October 30th, there was an article published on Search Engine Journal. And it was about a meeting up in Mountain View. Google invited publishers, small publishers.

These were the folks who bought the things. They bought the stand up paddle boards. They use the stand up paddle boards. They took pictures of the stand up paddle boards. They had videos of it. They wrote the content about it. They did what Google said to do. However, they ranked really well. And then ChatGPT and everyone else and Surfer and ClearScope and all those tools found all those sites, took those templates.

Nick Musica (11:47.363)
which, which looks like this, know, 10 things you need to know about buying the best paddleboard one, two, three, four, five, seven, nine, 10. And then FAQs at the bottom, that template has been done to death. And so what happened was Google made a very harsh correction and a lot of good sites got caught up in the algorithm because it simply looked like that template or it looked like watered down content. So affiliate models like that, they’re, they’re done right now. Small push.

Publishers, they’re done. If you have a good product, if you’re, if you’re a service, if you’re local, these are the folks who can benefit from SEO today. But affiliates, small publishers, no, even big publishers like Forbes, they’re getting kicked in the pants right about now because they have sold off portions of their website for best product. Click here. Best product, best CBD gummies.

They’ve been ranking for years for that query. Do you think that page is bought and paid for? 100%. I know firsthand it is. I know who bought it. So that, that methodology has been produced tons of times. And so how can we, as folks with legitimate businesses, for lack of better word, product services, we can use those tools, but here’s the thing. And by use chat, GBT, here’s what I mean. And similar tools, Claude, whatever it is.

Never use it to produce your content. Don’t do it. It’s not a product. It’s not a productivity tool. It’s not a production tool. You don’t do that. If you have nothing to say, don’t say anything. If you have something to say, then you should say it. Those tools can actually help you sort of like respond, give you something to react to. so there can be super helpful for productivity, but they are not the end all be all production tool. Absolutely not. If you’re doing that, you’re setting yourself up for success. And here’s the thing. No one has ever come to me for a content contract.

and said, Nick, give me the cheapest content you possibly can deliver. They’ve never done that, but I could tell you this, starting in November, 2022, I lost a lot of content, SOWs contracts, because people implicitly or explicitly said, I want the cheapest content I can produce. And so they did that. And now we are where we are.

Jeffro (13:45.137)
Ha ha ha.

Jeffro (14:04.818)
Yep, so I mean, it’s kind of, on the one hand, it’s frustrating, right? Because it feels like, man, now I got to spend time writing good stuff. But wasn’t that the point all along, right? I think that’s what we should have been doing. And the sites that have been doing that are the ones that have kind of stayed high in the rankings because they’re actually helping people. And that’s what Google has been paying better attention to, right?

Nick Musica (14:17.549)
Okay.

Nick Musica (14:25.571)
Yes. Totally. I mean, it would be like if you or I were at a dinner party, right? Like fast forward to this weekend. And I start going, I want to tell you all the things that Jeffro said when we were chatting this past week. They’re going to go, maybe I should have invited Jeffro. Right? Right. And so like, if you have a voice, you should really use it. You should use it. We need more unique perspectives out there.

Jeffro (14:43.463)
Yeah.

Nick Musica (14:53.827)
We need more good products. We need more good. There’s so much average out there. We don’t need more of it.

Jeffro (15:01.563)
Yeah, agreed. And I like how you described how to use AI too. It’s not just something to spit out, copy, paste, put it on the site. Like it’s great for brainstorming. Cause if you sometimes stand at a blank page and you’re like, don’t really know what to start talking about. Like you can ask it to give you ideas. Like, Hey, what are some of the frustrations that my target audience XYZ has? Okay. yeah. I can write about that. Cause that does come up with my clients when I was meeting them. Okay. Now you got someone to work with, but yeah, don’t just rely on it to

Nick Musica (15:21.103)
Totally,

Nick Musica (15:28.077)
Yeah,

Jeffro (15:29.636)
regurgitate what’s already out there, because it’s not going to work. You might be like, wrote a blog post today, but did you really, you know?

Nick Musica (15:38.051)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffro (15:40.325)
All right, so let’s move on to off page stuff now. I mean, there’s so many different ways to approach the different kinds of link building. I mean, there’s press releases. Is that still an effective way to get back links? Is it best to do guest posting? I’m sure you can talk to your approach there.

Nick Musica (15:58.105)
Yeah. Yeah. So let’s break down a couple of those things. So, so press releases. So back in the day, folks would drop a press release on PR Newswire or what? mean, there was a ton of services and, they thought that was a good in and of itself. What I just described, they thought that was a good SEO tactic. And then 10 years later or whatever, whatever it was, Matt cuts comes out who used to be the, the, the, the face of Google for SEOs.

He comes out and says, those links never counted for SEO. They never did. So you could have dropped press releases every day of the week on the wires. But the real benefit was pre-Google. That benefit of pre-Google was still the benefit, which means you drop it in the wire, not because of the link from the wire. You drop it in the wire for anyone else who’s picking it up. And so…

Right. And then they pick it up and then ABC or whoever picks it up, they say something about it. They have a link to you. And so that’s really the benefit of PR. And so don’t use it to, just, my God, just spray and pray. Like don’t, don’t do that. If you’re, if you’re doing that, you don’t have much to say. Right. You’re just trying to gain the system, but if you have a good product, people, people know that there’s just been good. People are starved for good. Do you remember, do you remember the Olympics? The guy from Turkey?

Who was shooting, he shows up there with his regular glasses on, pair of jeans, right? I think he came in second. I think he right? He got the, he didn’t even get the gold, right? And he was the talk of the town. People saw the real thing and they’re like, we want that versus all the other garbage that’s out there, right? So that’s the benefit of PR. When we talk about blogs, if you have something good, again, if you have a good product, you have something to say, people are starved for it.

just give it to them. Make sure you’re giving it to the high quality blogs. And here’s the thing people get confused about, because Google comes in and goes, well, trying to manipulate search results with links is bad. is. And also bad with copy and editing. So if you get bad, the worst thing you can do is have bad copy and bad links. I mean, you can bully the algorithm for some period of time. It’s going to crash at some point. Right?

Nick Musica (18:19.011)
good links, if you have good copy and they have good links, it may be a slow build, but that’s the best type of build to have. You’re building a brand, you’re supporting your company with a marketing tactic, in this case called SEO. So if you’re gonna do it, take the time, do it right, do it slow, a little bit is better than nothing. And then when it’s time for growth mode, like kick it up a notch, get going.

Jeffro (18:42.287)
So when you’re doing your link building for clients, are you simply registering as a contributor on these sites that let you post your own content, or are you actually reaching out to blogs and say, hey, you know what? think this service would really fit here. Maybe you can add this link, or both. OK.

Nick Musica (18:57.775)
It’s, it’s, it’s the latter. Yes. It’s, it’s more of the latter. Yeah. We, we, we have content in the audience that we think are a good fit for you and yours. Here’s what we’re thinking. what do think? Let’s have that conversation. Sounds like a match, versus I take everyone give me $500, right? Spammy website. It’s like, so easy to get on there. Like it should be hard. Link building is hard. And if it’s easy, that’s, that’s, that’s the wrong signal.

You don’t want that.

Jeffro (19:27.833)
Right, because you’re going to have another situation eventually where Google’s like, hey, let’s change the algorithm because we’ve got all these people spamming these links that don’t mean anything and they’ll just chop it off, right? That branch will go away and you’ll be back where you started.

Nick Musica (19:36.803)
Yeah, that’s right.

Nick Musica (19:40.825)
Great way to phrase it. Yeah.

Jeffro (19:43.022)
So what about when you’re putting together these content pages and such? There’s often a balance between catering to the algorithm, structuring things a certain way, sneakening your keywords, but you also don’t want to ruin the user experience so that the visitors stay engaged and they don’t read this and feel like, these guys like talking to a robot. So how do you approach that?

Nick Musica (19:53.123)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Musica (20:06.947)
Yeah. So there’s always three audiences for your content. There’s, there’s Google who’s going to crawl and index it and ideally rank it. There’s the users who are going to read it. And then there’s the business who’s going to make money from it. So we’re, we’re, we’re always balancing those items. the, the guidance I give to writers as we start working together is if it sounds like a third grader wrote it. Where it’s a bad page. I mean, you, should read it and not even notice the keywords in many cases.

The best example I have of this is when I was working at e-surance and we had a bunch of talented folks over there and they called John, who was a fantastic writer. called John over and said, John, can we talk about your page? And I don’t think John really wanted to talk about the page. Like John knew he was a good writer, right? And he’s like, who’s this SEO guy? Like, what is he going to give me? And I started walking through the page and I said, John, think the biggest thing, your copy is awesome.

You want to read it. reads well, it’s stored well, it’s structured well with the, know, but you have lists where you have, we didn’t need lists. You have paragraphs, you need paragraphs, you have headings where you have headings. I get structured wonderfully. You can look at it and you can almost understand a lot of the pages by the format of it. Like it’s beautiful, but let’s talk about what, what we’re selling here. He’s like, what do mean, Nick? Well, it’s obvious we’re selling insurance. Like, where do you think you work? Well, there’s not a product called insurance.

There’s a category called insurance, right? We don’t sell insurance. We sell car insurance. We sell home insurance. We sell renters insurance. So when we’re talking about you better have the right coverage for insurance. If you get into an accident, I don’t know what that means. You better have the right. We can say coverage because we’re going to say car insurance coverage when you get into an auto accident. Now I have the context. I know what type of accident it is. I know what type of insurance I need.

And so for him, it was super easy. We went through the page and we played the what kind game, what kind of insurance, what kind of accident, right? You just add qualifiers and now your page is magically about something because you have a page on a website in this enormous internet, right? This thing called the enormous internet. If you don’t give your page and your website context, it’s never going to be found in the, in the, on the web. So we need to use the right words in the right places to do that.

Jeffro (22:33.475)
I mean, that’s a helpful way to look at it because on the surface, like, yes, this is a great piece of content. It makes sense. I read it. I understand it. It’s all here. But it’s going to get lost in the void because we weren’t specific enough with, you can call them long tail keywords if you want, but giving that context is what you’re doing. That’s the whole point of the keywords. As long as you’re not spamming it, it’s actually helping the person, the reader, and the Google crawling bots to figure out what it’s about.

Nick Musica (23:00.121)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Jeffro (23:04.162)
So what about your thoughts on things like Lighthouse? It’s built into Chrome. People can use it to run a scan. Do you really put any stock in the results from that aside from maybe it catching glaring technical issues?

Nick Musica (23:18.743)
If the page is awful, awful slow, I mean, we to, we want to take a look at it. and, here’s, and here’s a couple of things for consideration. One, you know, about 30 to 40 % of those sites online are WordPress. The benefit of WordPress is it can do all these things. The negative of WordPress is it can do all these things and it has Java strip coming over here and CSS coming over here, right. And all the plugins.

And so what you don’t want to do is, and it would be very difficult to do it, is start to strip out a bunch of files and take away the benefit of WordPress. I was just talking to a client yesterday that said it’s in WordPress. We can’t even publish a page with the help of dev. Okay. Well, I mean that they sort of went to the extreme, right? Cause WordPress should be easy for users. But if it’s, if it’s just like, if you take a look at a webpage on mobile and it’s just.

Jeffro (24:06.807)
Exactly.

Nick Musica (24:14.339)
white blank, white blank, white blank, white blank, how it shows up in Lighthouse, right? It’s, should probably do something about that. The other thing is performance page speeds specifically is one of 200 signals ish. What, or whatever the magic number is today from Google. What they don’t really talk about is in the broader context of performance is how is my website, how are my website performance numbers, page speed numbers.

How are they in comparison to my competitors? Because we’re vying for the top five spots, let’s just say. So if my site is slower than Amazon, I don’t care. I don’t care. I’m not competing with Amazon, right? But if my site is slower than the nearest competitor by a long, by double digits, I may want to care about that. It’s something I may want to look into.

Jeffro (25:09.718)
Yeah, that makes sense. Speaking of WordPress, do you have a preferred WordPress SEO plugin to help with keeping track of your title tags and everything?

Nick Musica (25:19.457)
You know, I, I’ve never, I use Yoast because it’s a wonderful updating tool, right? I don’t use it for the colors. I just had a client a couple of weeks ago. They came off of, they came off of Phosis, which is a CMS that, yeah, right. Yeah, me too. yeah, yeah, yeah. that is going away. It’s, it’s losing support and, and, and they’re like, well, what about the, what about the colors? I was like, don’t worry about the colors.

Jeffro (25:23.905)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (25:36.513)
I don’t know that one.

Nick Musica (25:49.561)
Just don’t worry about them. But they’re yellow, sometimes they’re red. Just really don’t worry about them. They’re not relevant.

Jeffro (25:56.353)
Yeah, and for the people who haven’t used Yoast, the colors, it’s like a stoplight. It scans and says, hey, I think you’re doing a good job, you get green. If I think you are doing a bad job, you get red.

Nick Musica (26:06.061)
Yeah. Yeah. So you, you could put in, you can put in, if we had a page about car insurance, you can put in car insurance, car insurance, car insurance 500 times. And then in your keyword section and Yoast put in car insurance and it’s going to go green. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So like, don’t like, let’s, let’s understand how to write a good page. And then if those tools can help us create, but, personally, I never used them.

Jeffro (26:17.569)
to say green. Yay.

Jeffro (26:30.868)
Got it. Good to know. Well, I appreciate you joining me today, Nick. I think it’s great talking to the details of what matters when it comes to SEO. And I know if you’re listening to this and you’re not a technical person, some of this might have gone over your head, which is okay. Send this to the technical person on your team. Have them listen to it, especially if it’s your webmaster or whatever. And now maybe you’ve got some questions to ask if you’re interviewing someone who’s going to do SEO on your site, or maybe you haven’t been happy with your SEO team. Now you can go back with some of this stuff and kind of push them a little bit on it.

especially when it comes to the technical side of things. Don’t let them give you wishy-washy answers because this matters, right? This is the future of your business and you getting found on the internet and everything’s moving in that direction. So take this seriously. Don’t let it just slip by and ignore it. And if you guys aren’t sure where you stand, I do recommend getting an audit done to find some opportunities for improvement. There’s always stuff there that can be improved. If you guys want to get in touch with Nick, his info will be in the show notes. And I do have one last question for you, Nick, before we close out here. Do you have a favorite

SEO research tool. I know you’ve mentioned a couple, but what’s your favorite go-to?

Nick Musica (27:34.937)
My favorite SEO research tool? I mean, my favorite research tool is Screaming Frog, if we want to include that as a research tool. Yeah. I open that thing up every day. Every day.

Jeffro (27:42.666)
All right.

Jeffro (27:53.29)
Nice. Well, and there’s so many out there, so it’s just like, it can be overwhelming to know where to start, but that’s really awesome. Thanks again for being here, Nick. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. If you thought this was valuable, please leave a review for the show on Apple or Spotify. After that, get out there and work on your SEO. Take care and we’ll see you next time.