SEO Hacks: Marginal Gains Explained

James (0:00) Hi, so today I’m joined with Kasra Dash, and the discussion we’ll be talking about is marginal gains, specifically with SEO – and how the little things actually all start to add up and compound over time. It’s the marginal gains that you get with SEO that give you long-term rankings. So, let’s get started on the little wins that you can be doing. What’s initially your thoughts to start with about when people are kind of attending masterminds throughout the world, and they’re all thinking they’re missing out on a push-button SEO, big knowledge bomb and all this? What’s your thoughts to people who think that? Kasra It’s definitely not the case. I think the best SEO advice is the most boring SEO advice, and that’s literally like: build quality content, build good links, and you’ll rank. But not many people like hearing that. So a lot of people think that they need to be doing all these crazy calculations, doing all of these crazy link-building techniques – and it’s not necessarily the case. We’ve both got a lot of successful sites between us, and the one commonality between every single website that we’ve got, and every single industry, is that you need good content and good links. James Yeah, yeah, for sure.

I think the big part of marginal gains within SEO is: just do all things right.

So let’s just run through a few bits. Let’s say, let’s start off on technical. So, making certain that your site speed – that it loads fast. I mean, you don’t need to absolutely obsess over 0.01% speeds and stuff like that, but making certain that it does load fast enough that Google can get around your site quite easily. So I’d start off with that with technical. What else would you say with technical – what marginal wins for technical SEO? Kasra Good internal linking. Just internally linking to your most important pages – the pages that generate the most money.

And one thing as well: we’re probably going to knock through a few different things that you should be doing on your website, and that’s not to say that you need to do everything correct from the word go.

It can be like: “Okay, I’m going to work on technical today, and then in a week’s time I’m going to work on my content, and then another week I’m going to work on my internal linking.” Everyone just obsesses with, “Okay, Kasra and James have told me I need to do these 90 things, and I need to do these 90 things before I launch a website.” And it’s not the case. James Yeah, I think the biggest thing on that, that we always say to the team, is that – especially let’s say when you’re writing content – they procrastinate too much. I’m like: just go and get it live. You’ve got a button called the “edit” button, which means you can edit the content. You can add more bits to it, you can optimize, you can remove fluff that’s in there. Just get stuff done. People are obsessing over, let’s say, schema. Right – just go and get schema set up. And if you can improve upon the schema that’s on there, then great. If it’s organizational schema, if it’s local business schema, whatever it is from a technical standpoint – get those marginal gains in initially, and then improve upon it. It’s all about those compounding effects of those improvements of what you can do. But is there anything else even within technical – like I probably just mentioned there, schema – is there anything else that you would say are the small incremental wins? Kasra A lot of people are scared after doing keyword research. I think that’s going to keep going in and out of focus, but we’ll continue. So, what I mean by that is: they’ll go and do their keyword research and they just won’t know where to start. So I think, again, like what you said – publish, and then if, say for example, you’re going past your topical borders, you can obviously delete some certain pages. Some of our biggest wins recently have come from content pruning – so removing articles from websites. If you’re doing stuff like that, and if you’ve kind of got the go-ahead attitude, then by all means, you can’t really mess up on a website. You can always delete pages. James Yeah, for sure. I mean, doing the topical map and doing the keyword research – again, it’s an evolving system that you can be doing. You can always find new articles, new keywords. There could be new products, there could be new services that people could be doing that you could end up expanding on to cover your topical gaps. It’s the same then with link building: there’s always new link-building opportunities that you can be doing, but don’t over-obsess over everything. Don’t obsess that: “It has to have traffic, it has to be 100% relevant at a domain level,” and everything else. You’ve got to try to just keep moving forward and getting those referring domains built up. And you know what – if you did overcook it in areas, you’ve got the disavow tool. Like you’re talking there about content pruning – a lot of penalties are reversible. So you can do a disavow to remove any toxic links, you can do content pruning and delete any pages where you’ve gone too wide on. Is there anything else with regards to marginal gains that you can be doing with SEO? Kasra Marginal gains… So if I had like a checklist of marginal gains – obviously, let’s think that everybody’s on-site, their technical SEO is set up correctly.

And what I mean by that is: they are internal linking, they don’t have any 404s or double 301s.

Obviously everything that I’m mentioning now – you could probably just start running a very quick Sitebulb or Screaming Frog audit, and that will give you good guidance. And then away from the technical one, you’ve got stuff like: people don’t file-name the images, people don’t do alt text on images and stuff like that. They’re only little things, but they’re so important to do because you can start ranking the images, then that gets that little bit more traffic through to the page and stuff like that. But people think when they run a Screaming Frog, “Oh, I’ve only got like four 404s.” Just go and fix them. This is what we’re talking about – these marginal little compounding effects are what add up for you to go and win and beat your competition. But yeah, go on – what else, away from that? James Just adding to what you’ve said – I like to call it the 1% SEO. The only way that you can become a 1% SEO is if you’re doing everything across the board correctly. (Lighting interruption / off-camera chat happens here, then they resume.) James Yeah, so the lighting’s changed if you have been paying attention – but going back to what I was saying: 1% gain on the lighting! 1% gain. But what I was saying before is, if you want to become a 1% SEO – and what I mean by that is, it’s not necessarily based off earnings – but the 1% SEOs are the guys that are ranking in tough slots, for example ranking in gambling or CBD and stuff. If you actually run an audit across all of their websites, they do a lot of the foundational things correctly. So they’ve got schema set up, their files are obviously optimized to rank in Google Images, they’ve compressed the images so it’s not like six-megabyte images; they’ve got lazy load on if you’ve got ads and stuff like that. Anything like that – if you’re doing all of that, setting all that up, you’re off to a good start. And then away from that, it’s probably the keyword research. I would say that’s pretty important. I did a video last night on the Reasonable Surfer patent – and again, for some people it probably goes above their head, but I’ve tried to explain it very easily in the sense that you kind of need to be thinking of what queries somebody is searching before and potentially after your product. So if you are selling, let’s say, running shoes – are you covering the topic in its entirety? Can that person that’s purchased the running shoes then come back to your website and learn more about how to take care of their running shoes? Or potentially, the one step before is: do you have an article on your website talking about what type of shoes they should be looking at? So that’s another keyword strategy that you should be taking into consideration – but that’s kind of, again, a 1% incremental gain. A lot of people think, “Okay, to get to that I need to do that now.” And it’s like – well, have you got your base layer of content first? You probably shouldn’t be worrying about that yet. You should be worrying about the base layer. Kasra Yeah. Away from content then, people talk about “do all things” and “be a holistic marketer”. What’s your thoughts then about off-page or doing social media? Certain businesses might need a GMB, having an address, having a telephone number, ticking all the boxes for E-E-A-T. Is E-E-A-T even a thing in some industries? Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. But again these small incremental changes that you can do to improve the site might just add a little bit more trust to convert an existing client – forget just about Google. Having the telephone number and an email address and everything else that you can have on there, having accreditations, having awards that you’ve won, having reviews schema set up and stuff like that – again, these are all marginal little wins that you could sit there in an SEO mastermind and debate: “Is it worth it, is it not worth it?” Just do all things correctly and you go a long way. James Yeah, I think again a lot of people get annoyed when we say “build a brand”, because it’s like, “Oh well, it’s easy for you to say ‘build a brand’. It takes years to build a brand.” Go and check Surfer SEO. They built a brand – their website was quite literally non-existent two or three years ago, and they have done everything that you’ve mentioned. So they’ve got a YouTube channel, they’re running Facebook ads, they’re doing Facebook social, they’ve got a Facebook group, they’ve got affiliates talking about them. They’ve literally done everything that we basically recommend to website owners and business owners in a very short period of time. So if you are winning awards, go and get some link building done around those awards. If you do have a GMB, go and get some citations built. Go and get a press release service so your NAP’s being listed across the entire web. All of these little 1% things – and it is not to say that you need to do all of these things in the next 10 days. This might be a six-month SEO strategy, or a 12-month SEO strategy depending on your SEO budgets and stuff. But if you’re doing all of these things, and if you’re improving even if it’s month-to-month or day-to-day, you’re obviously going to get that end result that you desire. But what a lot of people think – and this is something that we were talking about before we actually pressed the record button – is, say for example, somebody wants to rank for “personal injury lawyer New York”. Everybody – or a lot of business owners – that’s the only keyword they care about. They don’t care about how well their website’s doing overall. They’re like, “Oh, well that keyword over there is position 8 still, I’m a bit annoyed.” And it’s like – well, you’re getting 4,000 more traffic over here. Why are you annoyed about that? You’re getting leads from here, but you’re only focused, like tunnel-visioned, on that one keyword. And I see it time and time again. It’s like, you’re getting 4,000 traffic, but you’re only concerned about that one thing. James I’ll tell you what’s mad – it was an interesting stat that I didn’t know about with regards to marginal gains. If you can improve – and Kasra’s speaking there about 1% improvements – if you can improve 1% every day for a year, you become seven times better. Seven times better. Now, you’d think that it’d only be 3.65 times better, because it’s only 365 days. But that compounding effect – the 1% on top of the 1% on top of the 1% – makes it so much more. Where you’d think, like you said, it’d be 3.65 times better if you did 1% each day, but it’s actually, because of the compounding effect and the exponential growth of what you get, it actually makes it seven times better – which is pretty incredible. So it’s these little 1% gains of what you can do. When you go into an SEO mastermind, stop thinking you’re going to get this one knowledge bomb which is going to treble your business. Try and find something that could just be so minor and so little that could improve a virtual assistant’s task, that could save you some time. All these little micro-wins are what add up and what compound to make you overall a much better SEO. So what’s some compound gains that you’ve done over the years – and it’s not to say what’s been some knowledge bombs – but what’s been some things that stand out to you that you’re like, “That actually saved me a lot of time,” or, “That saved me a lot of money”? Kasra So mine – if I’m reeling off a lot of them – they are: Improving site speed Improving silo structure Adding alt text to images Making the media richer – adding images and adding videos Sharing the images and videos on social media Trying to get traction with regards to improving the way that I write social media posts so they get more retweets, more likes, more comments and more click-throughs to my website Making certain I’m trying to rank my videos better Improving my thumbnails on my YouTube videos Having tags on there Sharing, once I’ve done the video, on social media. They’re all little easy things that you go, “James, there’s no knowledge bombs there,” but then it’s like: Having proper standard operating procedures (SOPs) Having SOPs for your staff to make certain that they’re following in the correct way Making certain that I’m trying to add images and videos to my citations Trying to do unique descriptions in my citations Doing the press release every time I win some awards, which gets me referring domain count. But when I’m doing a press release, trying to add a video, trying to add an image, trying to add the NAP listing in as many places that I can, adding the NAP listing in YouTube descriptions. It’s endless, and it’s all the little micro-wins that long-term, people go like, “How have you been so successful in SEO?” And I sit there and I go, “I’m a businessman, I’m not an SEO.” Because if you want to speak about knowledge bombs, there’s probably a lot of other people that are more intelligent about SEO than what I am, who’ve got the latest hacks, the black-hat techniques of what work. But all these little compounding wins over time – it’s just enough to beat the competition, then move on to another site and just do just enough to beat the competition on another site. Recently we’ve started to improve upon what a good quality link looks like. So we’ve been disavowing some links, we’ve now tried to start improving – going through the blacklist of guest posts, so we’re not paying $200, $300 for a link that actually has got no trust and it’s got a little bit of toxicity. All those little wins all start to add up, because every time you’re looking to acquire a new link, you know that it’s got trust and it’s got power and it’s low toxicity. Trying to get semantic triples into the content – I didn’t even know what a semantic triple was. I’m sat there like a schoolkid, and I’ve been doing SEO for over 10 years. When someone sat there telling me, “Did you get some semantic triples in?” I’m like – I’m thinking I’m advanced because I don’t do keyword research, I do topical research, and I get entities on my page and I’m thinking I’m advanced. But then when they start talking about SPOs and semantic triples, I’m like, “What even do you mean?” They start talking about the macro and the micro content, contextual borders – like, what? Making certain that even the heading hierarchy is really important. So when you start… little things like, okay, it’s a “how to” – that H2: okay, it should be a numbered list or it should be a video explaining how to do what the question is. If it’s a list, normally it’s a bullet-point list, unless you want it specifically in an order like a “top 10” – then it’s a numbered list. So all these little things – if we’re doing comparison, maybe putting the HTML table on there so you’re structuring, and you’re getting the HTML-to-text ratio to be good. It’s all these little micro-wins that you do over time and incremental gains you can get that make you a better SEO. It’s not a knowledge bomb going, “Okay, if I inject this bit of code 300 pixels to the left, I’m going to jump to position number one.” Do you know what I mean? I’d love it to be that. It’s not white text on a white background – it’s actually providing good quality content for the user. Plus, we mentioned removing fluff, removing contextless words. I used to be obsessed with correlation. “Oh, I’ve got to get these words in 16 times on the page. This question or this article needs to be 3,400 words because correlation tells me that it needs to be 3,400 words.” If I can answer it and get all the entities in – the most important terms on the page – and answer it in a more concise manner, and do it in 1,900 words – that cost of information retrieval for Google, as long as I’m answering it as good as I can do, and I’m getting all the different variations and examples on the page, 1,900 words is better than 3,400 words. But everyone’s obsessed with content length, saying, “Oh well, if they’ve done 2,000 words, I need to do 2,200 words.” Actually, no. It’s the opposite. It’s how rich your content is with value – getting the attributes in there of the rare, the root and the unique. Getting those in and going, “Okay, this is important.” So for me, I sound a little bit like I know what I’m on about – I don’t. I just know when I’m speaking to my content team who are editing – they’re the bits they’re telling me. When I’m speaking to the link-building team that are doing the testing, they’re telling me, “This is toxic, this is trusted. Oh, you need to be careful on this. Oh, try and get the link higher up the page, it kind of passes more weight if it’s higher up the page rather than right at the end of the article,” because of the Reasonable Surfer patent. So all little things like that – if we try and rank the guest posts and physically optimize the guest post to rank – which we refer to as “power posts” – if that page on that guest post starts ranking, gets traffic, it’s providing more weight through to the link. So it’s all little things like that that all marginally add up, that makes it key. James I think one thing – you started off very basic then.

So you were like: having a fast website, optimizing your images, alt tags and stuff.

That’s all like – I’m hoping everybody that’s watching this is already doing that. But then you started getting very advanced, very quickly.

One thing to bear in mind if you guys are watching this is: that’s took you years.

Do you know what I mean? Kasra Oh yeah, yeah. James It’s not been like, “Right, I’m awake, I’m going to learn more about semantic triples or page weight and PageRank,” and stuff like that. It’s kind of like: “Right, okay, now that I’ve got my strong foundational website set up – I’ve got maybe 40–50 articles set up – now I’m going to actually learn a little bit more on how to improve the content.” Or: “Now I’ve built, let’s say, my 60 foundational links or my 200 foundational links – now I’m going to learn a little bit more on toxic backlinks, what type of links actually push the needle, what type of links I should ignore,” and stuff like that. That’s kind of like, over time, you start to get better and better at that. It’s not something that you just wake up and you’re like, “Right, okay, I’m going to learn.” Kasra Oh yeah, for sure. Like you said, I’ve been in it for a long time. Every day is a school day for me – I want to learn every single day. I want my team to innovate or they’re going to evaporate. I always push upon innovation, with now new AI prompts and stuff like that. Some people that are watching this will be like, “Oh Dooley, you’re making up terms with semantic triples.” I haven’t made that up – that’s actually part of linguistics. If you actually start to look, a semantic triple looks at the subject, the predicate and the object within a sentence structure. It’s just having the sentence structure correctly. People go, “Oh, you’re just using complex words to sound good.” I’m not – that’s what the terminology is for that. It’s like the other day in one of the groups, someone was talking about the salience of an entity, and everyone was commenting, “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that.” And I’m like, no – you do need to worry about that. Because the salience of an entity is how confident and the prominence of that entity – so it’s how important that entity is within the topic. I want to try and get that, if it’s really important, higher up the page and potentially in the introduction. It’s the most important entity related to the topic. So all this is important – and again, these are the little marginal wins that you can get. Does that mean that adding the highest-salience entity in the introduction is going to automatically get you ranking? No. It’s incremental gains. But will it help? Absolutely it will help. If you don’t understand all these little marginal gains that you can get with SEO, you will struggle. But if you can understand every part of it – from schema, to technical, to topical authority, to how well your page is written, to your backlinks, and then your social media, and then building a brand, and trying to get a positive brand SERP and a positive sentiment around your brand so that people are having a good user experience – and if they are going off to check who you are, they’re going, “Yeah, I like these,” then the conversion is going to be higher than everything else. So again, certain things off-page aren’t just for better rankings – it’s for branding purposes as well. And like you said, for branding – with regard to, like, how Surfer SEO have done – could you get affiliates involved? Could you shout and scream about awards that you’ve won? Can you go and get yourself more reviews? The amount of companies that we speak to who say, “Yeah, we’ve been trading 15 years, we’re by far the biggest artificial grass company in the UK.” “Oh, that’s great, you’re telling me that – but you’ve got three Google reviews in the lifetime of your business. You think that’s good enough?” Go and start getting some more Google reviews.

Go and try and start promoting to your customers: “Can you leave us a Google review? Can you leave us a Yelp review, a Trustpilot review? Can you go get some video testimonials and then share it on your social media?”

All these trust signals then can all start to stack up as well, and potentially add to your SEO value with regards to E-E-A-T signals – whether you want to believe that or whether you don’t. Just do all things, and when you do all things holistically, a rising tide lifts all ships. Doing these marginal gains, everything together collectively, will make you a better SEO. James Yeah, definitely. So we hope you like the video with regards to marginal gains and doing those 1% improvements for your SEO efforts…