What You Need To Know About SEO in 2023 w. Daniel Costa

James Lawrence: I'm here today with Daniel Costa. Dan, welcome to the Pod. 

Daniel Costa: Thanks for having me, James. 

James Lawrence: So Dan is currently the Head of SEO at Rocket, which essentially means that Dan, you own the product at Rocket. So determining our approach to SEO, the philosophy, how we approach it, what we do, what we don't do. You manage the SEO team at Rocket, and I guess ultimately you're accountable for the results that we drive for our clients. You also do a bit of hands on work on some of our key accounts driving SEO strategy. Through your career, you've worked on lots and lots of campaigns, I guess, for bigger brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, Footlocker, Jim's cleaning group, Soul Origin, Snap Printing. Dan, welcome to the Pod. We're here to chat all things SEO.

Daniel Costa: That was a lot of responsibilities you've just listed it. You've reminded me of how important SEO can be for a business, for sure. 

James Lawrence: So you can't spend your time on podcast. You should be out there working. 

Daniel Costa: Yeah, I know, right? But that's cool.

James Lawrence: So I think, we're chatting about it, but before we started to record and I think for me, it's an interesting time to be discussing SEO. Like when I do webinars, I've got a few slides on SEO and I think a lot of marketers in Australia don't truly understand how important it is, the stats that we have and these are public industry wide stats, that organic visits on average just across America, Australia, UK drive about 53% of traffic to websites. Direct is generally about 20%. So you've got almost 75% of traffic every day. Being pushed to websites like commercial websites from direct or from organic. Then if you lump paid search and paid social together, it's 20%. So that's bringing you up to the 90%. And then a very, very small fraction of traffic comes from organic social. So the absolute majority of traffic going to business websites comes from organic. It's definitely what we see across our basket of clients. Like very rarely are we seeing clients who have, you know, a very small percentage of their traffic coming from organic. It does jump around depending on how old a business is and what other marketing channels they're running. Google drives 97% of searches in Australia - Bing very small here. Yeah, but it feels to me that often the energy, the activity, the focus, the budget for marketing a website will be kind of the other way around, where 80% of efforts, 80% of budgets are in paid search, paid social, whatever else to bring traffic to a website. And then often SEO is kind of this afterthought where it's let's take a box, spend a couple of grand a month and we're doing SEO kind of thing. I mean, you're probably a biased person to speak to, but is that what you see as well and you're feeling as well?

Daniel Costa: Yeah, for sure. I mean, guess the biggest kind of factor that plays into it and I guess one of the pain points with SEO from my perspective is just the immediate results and the time it takes, like the Google ads side of things, paid social, will always have the upper hand on that. And I think that's why a lot of the time SEO is sometimes forgotten about or neglected in some ways. Just because you're telling me at 6-12 months, you're telling me there's no exact way to measure the ROI, whereas Google ads, you can measure it, ROAS, all that kind of stuff. And it happens as soon as you switch on the campaign. So I think from a business perspective, SEO can be, I guess, yeah, slightly forgotten about by the business owner for those purposes. But again, as you said, when you have a look at like analytics, they use it to track the website. Often organic is one of the leading, if not the leading source of traffic to that website. So then at the end of the day, I think it just doesn't make sense to me. If I look at my website's traffic and 30%-50% of it's coming from organic and the other is split between other channels, I'm probably going to invest more into the organic side of things because that's what's been working well for me. You'll also find that it converts better as well. But again, I might be biased, so who really knows? 

James Lawrence: But it is true in all the studies, particularly all the studies show that users trust organic. Visits more than they trust paid particularly true in B2B and longer buyer journey kind of searches. And I think more broadly because we've been doing SEO for a long time, when Covid hit, not just Rocket clients, but across the board, I think it often was one of the first things to go. And because it was that, well, you know, 6-12 months, can we afford to just to kind of pause it? Those budgets, I don't think have truly come back. And what we have seen as an industry is that CPCs in Google search in paid social have been rising every single year which which to me feels like a good time to be talking. So, if you are looking for kind of opportunities and gaps in the market, SEO potentially is one, even though you might be doing it, you probably potentially not doing it as deeply as you should.

Daniel Costa: Yeah. Couldn't agree more. 

James Lawrence: I mean, I think maybe just to get started, like what are the big trends in SEO at the moment? And it's a difficult question to answer in such a broad subject matter, but yeah, like what are the big trends out there?

Daniel Costa: I mean I think the biggest, and there's no surprise here, is around AI content and what that's going to sort of mean for SEO this year in 2023. It's not new to SEO. For the past couple of years there have been reiterations of AI content writers and content spinners or whatnot. But yeah, with ChatGPT, it's definitely something that has just taken it to a whole new level. So that's definitely something that's going to be sort of trending upwards, I guess, in this space this year. I think that's something that maybe some people are just kind of pushing off. But in six months time, once the end of June hits, we're all kind of forced to be using GA4. So think there's going to be a trend of people over the next six months doing a bunch of courses, learning as much as they can about it. If websites haven't gotten tracking set up, they probably should start doing that now just so they can have some sort of historical data. So yeah, probably a lot of rushing towards getting that stuff set up on on websites. 

James Lawrence: In terms of ChatGPT, like what if you're a marketer? What's your advice like? Do we need to be changing what we're doing? Are we thinking about it as it relates to developing content or are we thinking about it as a as an alternative to potential customers using it to search for things as opposed to Google? Like what's your perspective on that? 

Daniel Costa: Yeah, it's a good point. I think in terms of using it as a search engine itself, I think eventually at some point and kind of again, what we're speaking about earlier, Microsoft investing into OpenAI, who runs ChatGPT, it's definitely going to be incorporated into Bing in some sort of way. And I imagine in years to come there's going to be some sort of, I think, functionality within the major search engines. But yeah, don't see it becoming a search engine itself and people trying to get their sort of local plumber off. I think that's still where like Google and stuff are king. And then in terms of how SEOs could use it, I think the content is probably the biggest opportunity there. It does a pretty good job at spitting out like content briefs and heading structures, that sort of stuff. And I think it will never replace a human copywriter. I think the human copywriters, they're going to be able to incorporate like tone of voice, brand messaging, things of that nature that I can't really do for specific clients. I think it'll be useful for research for the copywriter if they sort of want to use that to help understand how they can structure what they're writing about. You can have it like write out schema for you, certain codes and ads. You can get it to write scripts for you. There's many ways that I guess you could be using it for SEO. .

James Lawrence: We've obviously done a lot of research into it and playing around with it as an agency and like our perspective at the moment is that it's a really useful tool to help. You know, almost talking to another agency owner recently and he was kind of there, they internally describe it as a way of kind of getting past writer's block. Just helping to get content moving. And I feel that's an okay position for Rocket at this point to kind of start to advance content for clients. But is it your understanding that literally just having, you know, a bot write a 1500 word piece for a website copying and pasting it on, is it you're feeling that that contravenes Google's guidelines at the moment? 

Daniel Costa: Yeah. I mean, I guess it's no surprise that like Google has suggested not to sort of just put content on your website from ChatGPT. Again, as you said, really good for the writer's block of things. If you're sort of a creative and you rely on coming up with new ideas, ChatGPT can help with that, it helps you save the time as well. So think it's a better use of resourcing in my opinion. You can get the ideas from there and sort of then have that spark. Guess the creativity in your brain to go ahead and build something off of that. But yeah, wouldn't be relying on it solely to just create content and just publishing ten blogs every single month that are just like written short form posts. Yeah, you still need that human element. Make sure it's valuable. 

James Lawrence: And I think everything Google's always said over the years, like, don't do it, we'll catch up. Yeah, they eventually do. So I think we're probably jumping ahead a little bit, but we've seen Google move more and more towards prioritising high quality content, deep content and content for the sake of content. So I think, you know, still working in that kind of paradigm makes sense. I do want to talk about GA4. I don't want this pod to be too technical. I think the audience being marketers, trying to practical takeaways to then go off and potentially solve issues off the pod. But in terms of for just if you're a marketer and you haven't yet jumped across or if you have, you don't really know what you're doing for instance, what are the big differences? What do you need to do? 

Daniel Costa: Yeah, for sure. So again, the ‘why do it’ is literally off the fact that universal analytics after June 30th is no longer going to be used in terms of tracking data. So it's kind of you have to do it. That's probably the main reason why. But yeah, I guess like the main thing there, the functionality is slightly different. There are a lot of really good free sources online that sort of help educate you on how to use it. Some training there so you can become familiar with it the way it does. Metadata is slightly different as well. The way Universal Analytics would measure a user is going to differ to the way GA4 does. I personally think it's going to be more accurate. So it is a good thing. It's just going to be an interesting 2024 as well. So that's going to be interesting to see. It essentially needs to be done. It's a pretty simple transition. Like it's not too technical. You'd probably still be, I guess, benefited by speaking to an agency that has specialised in for tracking websites just because they'll be able to do it really efficiently. But yeah, it's not a huge change. It's going to require some sort of adaptability from marketers and anyone involved or looking into it. But in a couple of years we'll understand the purpose of it. It will be a better user sort of experience for businesses.

James Lawrence: And I insert plug here Rocket. We have been working with clients, but actually this is not by design, but like if you are stuck, you can definitely reach out to us. We've done a lot of kind of migrations since well before June last year just to get all of our clients being able to gain data. But it is something we can help with. In terms of SEO at Rocket, we break it into three buckets. We're going to look at technical off site and then on site, then content is the three buckets of SEO. There's different ways of approaching it, but to me that just makes this very easy to understand approach. So just thought it'd be good to talk into each of those buckets. And once again, not wanting to get too technical. We promised beforehand we weren't going to use the word colonialisation on the pod. The audience is marketers and in-house marketers in Australia. So let's just talk to each of those. In terms of technical SEO, yeah, very quickly kind of what is it and then what are the big trends out there for this year? 

Daniel Costa: Yeah, I'll keep it very simplistic. The technical SEO side of things is just about how Google is actually crawling and indexing the content on your website. Given the name of technical, it does get very technical when you start talking about James's favorite chronicles. No index tags, all that sort of stuff. But essentially what an agency should be doing for the website is making sure that Google is crawling and indexing your website appropriately. And that's going to include making sure that the pages we do want indexed are indexed. If there's pages that we don't necessarily want to be indexed, they're not getting indexed. A lot of the times you can face sort of cannibalisation and that's sort of where you've got pages competing for the same sort of topic of keywords or cluster of keywords. If you've got some sort of filter mechanism on your website. I see a lot of times with e-commerce stores, if you've got some sort of filtering where a user selects a filter, it creates a new URL, you could potentially have issues that way. So it's essentially just where your SEO is going to go through all of the best practice technical stuff. Tech, I'd say, is not really one that there's all these trends and developments over like one year to the next. It's very much the technical audits we're doing now. I'd say pretty much the same or very similar to the ones we were doing a couple of years ago, because at the end of the day, what comes with technical SEO still stands. But yeah, it's just the efficiency of crawling and indexation. 

James Lawrence: You know how we intro the pod around? Maybe SEO is probably a little bit underestimated in terms of its importance in a well rounded digital marketing strategy. I sometimes feel the technical is that within SEO, which is prospective clients, clients will come to us thinking that that's fine and solved and good and pages load quickly. So we're all ready to rock and roll and they want to start jumping into content and offsite, but often the big leaps forward come from technical where there are these roadblocks or these things that can be quite difficult to diagnose, sometimes very difficult to fix, but sometimes actually not very difficult to fix. Is that fair? Like in your observation?

Daniel Costa: Yeah, I'd say so. If you've got a technically sound website, it's just going to benefit the user experience for all your other channels as well. So for example, if you're running an ad campaign and the user clicks on that sort of ad, it goes to a web page that's taken a few seconds to load. It's just going to lead to a bounce rate for that particular campaign, whereas SEOs are going to start looking at improving that site speed, improving the overall structure of that that web page that is best suited for that user. So again, maybe a bit of bias, but one of the benefits of SEO here is I just feel like it's focused on creating a better website and sort of a better user experience, and in turn that's just going to benefit all your social or your ads or your email, that sort of stuff. 

James Lawrence: In terms of technical SEO, how often does it need to be looked at? Like, is it a case of I've just launched my brand new website? It's great. I've had someone ordered to do a diagnostic. It's fine, you know, am I getting it looked at every two years, every year, every month? Like, what are the checks to make sure that you're kind of moving forward as well as you can?

Daniel Costa: The way we kind of approach it here at Rocket is we'll do a major audit. You could say, every 6 to 12 months. To do one every month or even every quarter probably isn't too necessary. It's probably necessary if you are, for example, about to migrate or you have just migrated at that point, you probably need to be looking at the technical side of things more often. But yeah, we'll do like a major technical audit on websites every 6 or 12 months. In between that, we'll also do sort of standard health checks every quarter just to make sure things are tracking as as they're meant to be. So it's something that we don't look at every week or every month, but at least once every couple of months, we just do a quick sweep, make sure everything's good. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, cool. In terms of off site, so that second bucket of SEO, like what are the trends there? Like do links still matter? So is it just are links the only thing that matter in terms of off site? Are there other factors? 

Daniel Costa: I mean, with the off site it's all about how other websites are talking about your brand. In its simplest form, it does come down to link building. That's probably the biggest aspect or not probably is the biggest aspect of it. Essentially you have 20 websites all talking about your brand. They all link to your brand. Google picks up those links and it helps improve, guess your authority or whatever that particular topic is that those websites are talking about. So let's say for example, you've got a beauty e-commerce store and you've got a bunch of other like beauty forums, beauty blogs, and they all talk about your website and link back to yours and yours have like a really good makeup selection, for example, that then people can pick up on those relevant signals and it helps sort of boost the authority of your brand in regards to that particular topic. But yeah, it's definitely still important, something that a lot of SEOs kind of don't do just because it is very hard. The idea behind it is if you create really good content, when I say content, I don't always just mean like a blog post, it could be an image or a video. Even this podcast itself is a form of content. You create really good content. Naturally, websites will link to you. That's the main idea behind it. 

Daniel Costa: It is very much so easier said than done. So there is a lot of outreach involved where you're essentially going to have to reach out to publishers that you think would be a good fit to link back to your website. It's a very manual process and probably for every 1000 that you reach out to, maybe a handful of them will actually reply. Maybe 1 or 2 of them will actually consider doing it with you. So that's where I think having again, an agency and not to plug Rocket again, but having a link building agency that can sort of help you with that. They've already built networks and built relationships with publishers in the past through other relevant or similar clients that again, they can just reach out to directly. They don't need to go through the whole emailing to someone who's not the best person to speak to. Then they have to forward that email to someone who is the person to speak to. They've also got the strategy behind it. What publishers should we be getting to link back to this website? What architecture to be using. What's the authority and the off page status of that website itself? Is it even worth linking back to us? There's a lot that sort of goes into it. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, and I think that's something that since you've been at Rocket, you've really revolutionised that in terms of, we've always known not all links are equal, obviously, you know, high domain authority or PageRank or have you. It is better than a low but kind of getting far more nuanced and looking at a particular client's website and going yeah well we've actually got a good number of high quality links. So we actually in terms of the backlink profile here, it's okay here to be going for, you know, a bigger number of mid quality ones or vice versa. We need all the premium ones that they didn't get to kind of matter here. Then obviously looking at geographically where they're coming from, the types of sites in terms of content themes they're coming from. So think you've opened our eyes up a lot to we've always known. And, you know, it's well known in the industry how important offsite is. But I think just getting even more surgical around it.Had a big impact on our clients. I don't know all the conversations I've had and research I've done like Google has modeled taking offsite out of its algorithm ranking factors and signals. And they feel that the quality of search results just falls to pieces when it happens. So I think it feels true that offsite signals aren't going anywhere in terms of their importance to ranking a website organically.

Daniel Costa: Yeah, link building three years ago is very different to now. I'm sure you will find even towards the end of last year I think there was like a link spam update that Google rolled out and yeah, guess if you read their official guidelines kind of suggest that what may have given you value at some point will no longer give you value. And I'm not saying that's all the time, but if they have a handful of referring websites that go to your website, if they determined that website's no longer valuable, you could potentially drop a couple of pages or a few positions because that value is no longer there. So yeah, I'd say it's something that Google still actively kind of looks into and it's still on top of. 

James Lawrence: Does it have to be a link - like do references and citations around brands and on external websites, social media references, social media content? Like do those things come into effect in a positive way, potentially in terms of off site SEO? 

Daniel Costa: Look, I'd say it does. At the end of the day it would. I think one of the biggest parts of SEO is building a brand. You need to build a brand and that'll sort of help your organic rankings indirectly. And I think you getting talked about on socials and different blogs and stuff is still beneficial even if it doesn't link to again, one thing that I always recommend is finding those brand mentions and potentially outreaching to them to get links, and that's another form of link building you could do... I think it's typically referred to as link reclamation or brand reclamation. There's ways where you can sort of find a list of articles or blog posts that have talked about your brand, but don't necessarily link to it, and you typically have a higher success rate of outreach into those websites because they're already talking about you versus a website who's never spoken about you and you're trying to get a link off them. So in the ideal world, yeah, you would have your website linked. But even if it doesn't, I do still believe that Google and search engines still see that and still see your brand being spoken about and that just improves, I guess, the value of your brand as an entity in Google. 

James Lawrence: Moving on to the last area, in terms of the big three; on site and content, what are the big themes? What should marketers out there be looking for in 2023? 

Daniel Costa: For the past few years and I think it still stays the same this year; ‘Content is King’ is an often referred to sentence. I think it stays the same this year as well. Don't care too much these days about; how many words are on a page? If you're going to tell me, I took 2000 words of content on this page and it's going to rank #1, that's cool. There's a chance that it might, but in terms of the long term, it'll most likely fall back off over time once Google sort of picks up on what you've done. I'd much rather like a very concise 500 word blog talking about a specific topic than a 2000 word blog talking about that topic. But it's kind of just like fluff. There's no real value about it. 

Daniel Costa: Content I still believe is king. It's all about the relevance of your website. So if you're trying to be visible and rank for a certain group of keywords, your content needs to be including those keywords for Google to see the relevance there. And you could group the content alongside like your title tags and your H1 headings and stuff and using those as more signals to understand the relevance. It's definitely something that can't be avoided. It definitely needs to be part of your strategy. It often complements your link building as well. So if you've gone ahead and created a really nice blog that's, cannot just use word count as the use of measurement here, but you create like a 2000 word blog that's actually really good. You got in there, you've got a video, you've got images and infographic and a link to a podcast, for example. Within that you've got the the value there of potentially getting sourced to by other publishers if they've seen you talking about it.

James Lawrence: That's because we've been saying it for a long time, like the internet has enough average quality content and yeah ChatGPT and other avenues will just continue to make it easier and easier to create content for content sake. And Google for years has been saying, you know, our mission is to solve the world, you know, people's answers and answer questions. It's always said prioritise quality content over thin content. So I think the idea that if you're pumping out 500 to 700 word blog articles and you're doing three of them a week and 12 a month and you're pumping them out therefore on social and that's your content plan, you’re probably setting yourself up to fail. Like it really is about systematically working through the types of areas of content where you can genuinely solve people's problems and give them deep insights into things. Yeah, I guess our philosophy now is very much on evergreen. Like we look at taking the kind of the Hollywood blockbuster approach to content, which is, you know, we see Hollywood just continuing to recycle Spider-Man and Marvel and whatever else, all the stuff that it knows users like rather than advocating an approach, like a newspaper approach, were we just have to keep pumping out content every single day. For most of our clients, the answers that they can give to their potential clients, they haven't really changed, right?

Daniel Costa: Yeah, yeah. 

James Lawrence: It's the same thing five years ago. So build deep content. And as you've said, it might be a podcast, it might be a video, it might be a 300 word answer to a question that's actually really, really good. And will be interesting to get your perspective, but Google also then looking at how users are interacting with content and if a piece of content, whether it's 200 words or 500 words, is answering people's questions and not hitting back and doing more searching, then over time, that content will move up and triumph over maybe a lot longer content. Is that kind of what you say as well? 

Daniel Costa: Yeah, for sure. Like I think the way users are engaging in your content is really important. If they've come through like a blog post or whatnot and you've got really good internal linking that links to like another relevant blog post, that they click on to that link to then read that other blog post. Like I've no doubt that is a good sort of metric or signal at least that what we're talking about is relevant. That adds value to that user. Another thing that I always, always recommend with content and often the fact, as you said, James, like a lot of the times agencies will just pump out three blogs a month for 12 months. They do that for a couple of years, but there's no real thought or strategy behind it. It's always good to after years have passed, good to go back and sort of determine if that content is still relevant, if it's worth keeping on the website, if it's worth refreshing to make it more relevant. That's always something you can do in terms of content doesn't always necessarily have to be new content you're producing. 

Daniel Costa: You can decide to look at existing content and look at how you can re pivot or reshape it to make it more relevant now. I won't mention the client by name, but probably our most successful SEO case study last year in terms of just actual traffic and conversion growth, the biggest piece of work we did for that client was a massive rationalisation of content on their site, right? Like primarily around their blog, but throughout other sections. And it was like amalgamating content, killing content, prioritising content. And as much as we continue to do technical and continue to do off site, it wasn't actually publishing any new content, it was the rationalisation of a massive site which has had the biggest impact on SEO uplift, which I think also leads into the reality that an approach to SEO will never be the same for two clients. Yeah, it's very much based on where you're at, where your website's at, where you're off sites at.

James Lawrence: How long have you been pumping out average quality content or conversely content's actually pretty solid. It's the fact that, you know, you've got massive crawl issues or you've never invested in proper offsite or you've done a horrendous offsite with, you know, buying links and, you know. It's that diagnostic is so important isn't it?

Daniel Costa: Yeah, 100%.It's definitely important. And with that particular project, I think it involved pretty much culling a couple of hundred blogs, which sounds scary, sounds terrifying. But if you're doing the proper auditing and proper research behind it, before you make that decision again, as we saw in that particular case, it had a a nice uplift after the fact. So yeah, it's definitely something worth investigating. The other part I'd add to the on site is just in regards to E-A-T, which has now become E-E-A-T. So they've added an extra E into there, which just shows how seriously they are talking about it. But it's just around like expertise, authority and trust. And the extra E now is for experience. You can't just be any random talking about this content or this topic. You need to show Google that you are like an expert and authority in that field. So that's something I'd also recommend for anyone sort of looking into their content strategy.

James Lawrence: And how do you do that? I guess for listeners, what are practical ways that you can signal to Google that you are those things?

Daniel Costa: What I like to do, and traditionally this has been more around your money, your life industries. So things like health or finance related. If you're giving financial advice, you can't just be a random who has no idea about finance giving that advice. You have to be like a financial advisor or whatever it is. So again, I think it is applicable to any industry now, even for its own website, if we're trying to show that we know what we're talking about when it comes to SEO and digital marketing, we need to show people that we do know what we're talking about. And I think creating like author personas is a great way. So let's say, for example, you write a really nice blog about SEO in 2023 or the impact on SEO. If within that you've got a section on that post that's like; ‘this was written by Daniel Costa’, for example. A picture of myself just to put a face to it that can then link to a separate page. That's a profile of myself and that can talk about; ‘Daniel's done X sort of experience in these industries has been in the work that these agencies’, that kind of stuff. Again, it's just showing that you are an expert in authority and what you're talking about. I think that's probably like the tangible like approach to it is creating like those profiles. You can also look at external resourcing again, for a supplement brand that I've worked on in the past, we were talking about how a particular supplement can help or aid in a specific issue or area of health, having links to other like sites, .edu sites and linking to them to show that the information we have here is factual and it links back. It’s got Harvard style referencing from back in the uni days. That's also a good, good approach to it. 

James Lawrence: That's really good. In terms of local SEO… it's obviously we could do, you know, two podcasts or three podcasts on it by itself, but yeah, just big trends for businesses out there like that. Let's presume you do have your GMB, but what are the trends for local this year?

Daniel Costa: I'd say in terms of trends, it will be pretty much very similar to last year. Your local pack is really important and is showing up for more and more search results. So that local pack is just if you were to type in, for example, ‘pizza near me’, you might have a couple of ads at the top. And then right beneath that you've got like a Google map listing with typically three pizza shops there. That’s going to stay the same and probably going to become more prevalent this year. It's very much like searches become more and more local based or locally, have a local intent behind it. So again, more keywords even. For example James, if you're in Melbourne and you typed in ‘SEO Agency near me’, you are going to get a different local park to what I would here in Sydney. Google is going to display listings and businesses that have local authority within the region that you're searching for. So because of that I see them rolling it out across more search results. You should be taking it more importantly, if you're not already, just because it's going to become more important, it's going to push your traditional rank one, two and three lower if it starts appearing more and more. Trends wise, very much the same. Optimise your job, try gets listed on some directories and citation websites. Get local business schema on your web pages as well. Just to show Google that you do have like a physical address. People can visit a phone number, operating hours, that kind of stuff. 

James Lawrence: And I think it's probably the biggest trend there is. Just do it. I think we find that so many businesses, even quite big businesses with significant local presence, obviously you have jobs, they'll have verified them, but then it's actually interacting with Google any opportunity Google gives you to interact, whether it's search console, weather. Just do it because it's another big signal to Google that you're real, you're active, you care. Dan, I told you I was going to put you on the spot. So we want your top ten tips. You've got to smash them out super fast. But what are Daniel Costa’s top ten SEO tips for 2023?

Daniel Costa: I'll probably say number ten is your local stuff. I was in Foster, which is a couple of hours up the coast from Sydney over the Christmas break, looking for a restaurant. I wasn't even really searching in your traditional Google search, I was on Google Maps, just typing in restaurant name and using that to sort of find it. I saw a bunch of other restaurants on the strip that weren't even showing up on Google Maps. So I think that goes back into what we were just talking about in terms of how important it is. Be good at your local staff, make sure your hours are updated, your phone numbers are updated. If you're closed on a certain day, make sure you update it on your job because if you don't, you're most likely going to get a one star review from someone who's not too happy. You just didn't verify it. You're actually staying active, engaging in it. Number nine, review your existing content. Again, going back to what we were saying before, you most likely already have content that's a couple of years old. Go through it, refresh it. Is it still relevant? Did you create a 2021 ultimate guide to SEO? If you did, maybe update it to your 2023 guide in SEO? 

James Lawrence: Nice. Sites. Number eight? 

Daniel Costa: Number eight will be site speed. I'd say do what you can to meet core web vitals.

James Lawrence: How do you test it? What's the best way to test your site speed? 

Daniel Costa: So there is a section within search console where you can sort of look at page experience and core web vitals. Otherwise you can look at page speed insights by Google and that will give you the information as well. 

James Lawrence: It's a big one. Number seven, I'm going to get caught up here in the numbers. I'm going to forget now.

Daniel Costa: Number seven is stay on trend. I'd say what are user searching? Again, for example, if you're a beauty website, is there a new ingredient that people are now talking about that you need to be on top of? It goes back to if you're an expert in your field, you're staying on top of all these trends. So yeah, writing content about that. 

James Lawrence: Yeah. Nice. Six? 

Daniel Costa: I'd say it would be finding the right keywords. I don't know if this is sort of controversial, but don't worry too much about search volume these days. I'd much rather a keyword with ten searches a month that has really good intent and matters to a business versus a very generic one that has a thousand searches. So yeah, definitely pick the right keywords for your campaign and that comes back to quality of content, doesn't it? Work out what you do as a business. Look at the types of things that you can pump out there that give genuine value to prospects and then just do it really, really well. Yeah. Just assessing over a more numbers driven approach just doesn't end up driving traffic and conversions. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, for sure. Five?

Daniel Costa: Don't neglect your offsite. A lot of people or clients that have come to us from another agency, we ask what kind of link building were you doing? And they’re like, oh, none. So yeah, don't neglect it. Reach out to clients. Maybe like if you're a B2B business, if you work with a supplier, you can potentially get links from that supplier’s website back to yours. There's different ways you can approach the off site, but yeah, it should be part of your strategy. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, for this is where we start getting into the good stuff, focusing on entities. The last six. 

Daniel Costa: The last six. Now, number four, focus on entities. I think Google is moving more towards an entity based search and entity that could be like, again, a brand which I've spoken about a couple of times, a brand, a person, a place, a thing like those are entities. Google is going to be like placing value on entities. And again, if you're building your brand really well, you're doing a good job at it. You're going to build yourself as an entity. And that's where Google is going to sort of see the authority of your website to what people are searching for.

James Lawrence: Nice one. Number three. 

Daniel Costa: Number three is value adding. Think about if what you're doing to your website actually means something to your user. Don't think of it from like, I need to do this for Google. Think about - I need to do this for my user or my target audience. That's that's the key there. 

James Lawrence: That's good too. Yeah. 

Daniel Costa: Two is build your E-E-A-T. Again, your expertise, authority. That's what it's all about. Improve your relevance. So let Google know that you know what you're talking about. Google doesn't want to have randoms appearing because they want people coming back to Google to keep on using it to search for things. So Google is going to benefit people that show that they know what they're talking about. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, and that's a really important one. Number one. 

Daniel Costa: Number one, again, build your brand. Don't think of it as something where you just need to post a few blogs or something and you'll eventually start to rank. You really need to look at your business as a brand and do what you can to sort of. Like build and improve on that. I always recommend like social media and like it's a really good way to build your brand and build your sort of data base and and get people speaking about your brand and linking to your brand and what you're talking about. 

James Lawrence: Love it. There's lots of stuff in there, I think. With all the pods and content we produce, I think if you listen to this pod and just pick one practical thing to implement in your strategy to 2023, that's a, it's a bit of a win. Now you've got to take your SEO hat off. What's the best piece of career advice that you'd give to an Australian marketer? Can't be SEO related.

Daniel Costa: No, it won't be SEO related. I guess from with me what worked well and what I always encourage is say yes when other people say no. It really helps you stand out and prove something to yourself. And it's not about being a suck up or anything like that or I'm better than you. It's purely look at it as a challenge for yourself. You can get through this. Then I'm sure in years to come you'll come a long way. Say yes when others say no. I think if you start doing that more and more, you might get a bit more stressed out because you've got extra responsibilities on your plate. But after years pass you can think back and be like, Yeah, I actually did that and I'm thankful. Did I improve from it, learnt something new from it? So yeah, that's my advice. 

James Lawrence: It's a good one. Hard things make more hard things possible. Yeah. I have a joke with a couple of guys in team. I'm not even a joke, but pressure makes diamonds.

Daniel Costa: We're going to get that up on the wall soon. 

James Lawrence: I love it. Cool, man. Well, thanks a lot for coming on the pod. 

Daniel Costa: Thanks for having me.