So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show

Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insight live show from Trust Insights. We are Trust Insights. I'm Katie Robert. I am joined by Chris Penn and John Wall. I'm pointing to them as if they are all in the same spot on every single screen.

It's a little bit like the Brady Bunch. So this is our pilot episode. We are testing this out. We would love any kind of feedback that you have. And so let's just get right into it because we do not want to waste your time.

Chris? All right. So today, what we want to do with this show in general, start there, is provide some useful stuff because there's nothing worse than staring at three talking heads for an hour. Right. So let's instead focus on being practical.

Today's topic is about SEO. Search engine optimization at SEO is probably one of the most important channels you can have from a digital marketing perspective, but also one that not a lot of people do well. And part of the reason people don't do well at it is because it's very hard to prioritize it to figure out, okay, I have this huge elephant to eat, right? Dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of pages on your website, and so many things that can go into what makes you rank well in Google. Now we're not going to spend a whole lot of time on trying to decode the Google algorithm.

So to start, let's go ahead and we're going to switch over here into uh screen sharing view. The first place that you should start with all of your investigation is within Google Analytics itself, um, to figure out how big a deal is organic search. If you know, then you can skip to skip this part of the video. But if you don't know, one of the first places I would suggest going is in Google Analytics, assuming that you have goals and goal values set up, which is a big assumption. Um conversions, multi-channel funnels, assisted conversions.

And what we're gonna look at here is the default channel grouping. Uh and again, there's a caution little slash bookmark there. Your default channel groupings have to be set up correctly because out of the box Google Analytics does a whole bunch of things wrong. Like it will classify, for example, uh mail.google.com, which everyone knows is Gmail as referral traffic and not email, but that's for another show. In this case, what I'm looking at here is organic search is the from an assisted perspective, meaning that it was part of the path to conversion, but was not the last thing somebody did, was the number four channel for the period uh July 1 to yesterday for the Trust Insights website.

If I click on last click uh or direct me, it was the last thing somebody did, it's the number three channel, right? So it's important. I actually am uh surprised slash confused why it's not higher, right? I know we have a robust email marketing program, and that explains why email is so prominent, but why is search not working as well as it should be? And that's a great place to start our investigation.

I mean, do you want the real answer to that? No. Okay. When it comes to understanding what's could have gone wrong, this is where a lot of people get stuck. They're like, okay, I know something's wrong.

Now what? Now what do I do? Right? How do you prioritize? Many companies will have uh access to Google Analytics.

Most folks who are savvy digital marketers probably have access to Google Search Console, which is the site that allows you to see from Google's perspective how things are working. Google will tell you, hey, I'm noticing some issues here. And some companies, a decent number of companies, will have access to some kind of SEO tool, like uh RFs or HREFs, or I don't know how to pronounce their company name. I think we determined it was Hrefs. Is that right, John?

Folks at Hrefs, they love us, and so we call them Hrefs. That's our new approach. We'll call them whatever they want to be called. But there is probably some sort of data that tells you uh you know from the SEO tool of your choice. Now here's the catch.

These all don't talk to each other, right? You have Google Analytics Day, which can tell you down to the page level how many visits from search did a page get. Um then you have your SEO tool and you have Google Search Console. The only thing these three tools have in common is the URL of the pages on your website, right? That's it.

There's nothing else in common, but we want data from all three of these. From our SEO tool, we would want to know like what keyword does a page rank for? Does it does a piece of software think this is relevant? Right? That's an important part.

Uh from Search Console, we want to see how many impressions did a page show up with in from Google's perspective, like this page here. 22,000 impressions. It's shown up in search a ton of times. 347 clicks. That page, yeah, not so hot.

And then from Google Analytics, of course, the pages and the number of searches each page has gotten. So to bring all this data together, there's a couple of different ways to do this. If you're doing it ad hoc and you've got good Excel skills, you could just take all three sources, hit export CSV, and spend a whole bunch of time doing VLOOKUPS and trying to match the three tables together. And that's okay. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that approach.

If you want to kick things up a notch, you can use data processing software. So you could do this, for example, in IBM Watson Studio within the modeler software, load all three data sources and say connect these three. Or uh if you're really uh a nerd, um you could write your own code to bond the three together, which is what I do because I have no life. Um that's not true, Chris. No, I think I to clarify, you do have a life, but I think that what you're trying to get at is that you're trying to work smarter, not harder, so that you're trying to get to more efficient information faster so that you can take action versus getting inundated, buried in all of the different software systems.

And more importantly, repeatability, repeatability and scalability. If you do the VLUckup route, even if you're uh an Excel master, it's still gonna take a fair amount of time to do that every time you get three new files. If you have a some sort of system or code-based approach like Watson Studio or like R, then it's gonna go a little faster. So, what do we get when we do this? What we get um is what we call a search loss report.

And I'll show you two versions of this. The very basic version tells me in the last two months, which is the time period I'm looking at, these are the pages that have lost search traffic. They're pages like, hey, this page is in trouble. It used to get more search traffic in the beginning of the time period than it did at the end. I need to go fix that page.

There's there's something wrong there. Um if we then look at the version of this that has all of our different data sets combined, like this is good. This is an important thing. This is like I know this page is in trouble. But this doesn't tell me what to do.

This doesn't tell me what to what could be a potential contributing factor. So remember how I said we're gonna bond those data sets together. When we do this, we get a spreadsheet for lack of a better visualization tool, that looks like this that has the same information, the traffic impact, the click-through rates. I'm gonna actually color code our click-through rates here, and most importantly, the keywords for those pages. And remind me, Chris, where did this particular data set come from?

So this is the blend. This is okay in the beginning here. We have the search loss report. In the middle, we have search console information, and at the end, we have keyword information and and search features from uh the Hrefs tool. So I'm also gonna color code this here as well.

So for this page here, which is our top loss page, we see this is applying machine learning attribution, applying machine learning to attribution. We lost 38 visits from search from in this time period. Um it has a 6.61% click through rate, which is actually pretty good. It means that when this page comes up in search results, you know, 6% of people click on it. So it's relevant as opposed to the home page where the home page is coming up with a lot of stuff and you know the click-through rates are pretty low there.

And here's why we lost where this page isn't going so well. It's ranking, you know, position 31, right? If you're not on the first page, you're not on Google. That's what it boils down to. Like you get some traffic, but let's be honest if you're not on the first page, you're not on Google.

Yeah, if you're if you're scrolling through like second page, third page, fourth page, then you know the person who's searching definitely does not know what they're looking for and they're just fumbling around, or it's probably a bot. Exactly. And what's happening in search now is these lovely things, which is my smart device here on the my desk, present one result, right? So if you're literally now, if you're not number one, you're nothing for for these other devices. I can see for this page, attribution score and applying machine learning are the two keyword terms.

And so I could go in and you know maybe tune up the page for those terms. Now, what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna scroll down, because the next section is the home page. And I have this page here, out of the box Google Analytics, right? Um, and then I look at the keywords for that, you know, out of the locker, outside the box, out of the box thinking. But when we go to the page itself, this is the page, right?

Outside the box, thinking outside the box, Google Analytics. When you look through this page, what is this page about? It's not about thinking outside the box. It's about Google Analytics, it's about more advanced Google Analytics. How can you use more advanced techniques to analyze your Google Analytics data?

So, what has happened here is we screwed up. So, Chris, how often do you think this problem occurs? So, you know, I think that one of the things that marketers and uh PR people are trying to do is come up with a catchy headline for their article, for their blog, for their thing. And for us, you know, we do that as well. Like, what is what's a what's the title of something that's gonna catch people's attention?

With no really no thought behind the SEO implications. Like, so we just named it thinking outside the box, Google Analytics, because to us that made sense of looking at Google Analytics a different way, but at no point were we trying to rank for Google Analytics, and at no point were we trying to rank for thinking outside the box, and we happen to start to rank for the wrong thing. So, people looking for Google Analytics on our website or for our expertise in that were not finding that because Google Analytics wasn't part of the SEO plan for this particular page, which is our error, which is what we're here to fix. Right, yeah, we screwed up, um, is what it boils down to. Yeah.

And so, how do we fix this? Okay, so we know what the page is about generally. What we now need to figure out is what should be on this page. So let's go ahead and do this. Um, we're gonna go ahead and close out of our performance, our Search Console stuff now, and we're gonna say, okay, what are the terms that we could be using on this page that would be related to Google Analytics?

Obviously, we want to change the headline, we want to be like advanced Google Analytics techniques or something like that. But what are some of the other things that you might want to say? One of the challenges with Google itself these days is that Google focuses on topics. It focuses on an understanding what the humans would want out of a page like this, right? So we have to do things like examine page structure.

Does this page answer the question that someone will be searching for? Like what are some good at Google Analytics advanced techniques? And does it answer the next question that would be in their minds? Which could be things like, how do I do that? This page has all those pieces.

So we're we're good on the content side. Now we have to figure out the tuning side for keywords and specific topics. Again, we want to focus on what Google would expect to see if it was a human, which it's not, but if it was a human, what are the things that we as people would want to see on this page? So how do we do that? So, Chris, before you get too far down that rabbit hole, how does how does someone figure out what Google wants to see?

And you know, this this might be a complicated question, but so let's say you go with the okay, I'm on my desktop and I'm Googling advanced Google Analytics techniques. Of course, I'm mimicking a phone as I'm talking about a desktop. So I've already screwed it up. So regardless, um, let's say someone is on their desktop typing and saying advanced Google Analytics techniques. Um, you know, how do you know as the person creating the content what Google is looking for?

And then you also mentioned other devices. So you have an Alexa, you have Siri, you have Google Home. Do you have to think about that differently? Because do all of those algorithms work different from the main, you know, Google.com search algorithm? So to answer the second part, we don't know.

Google doesn't know. And to answer the first part, we're actually going to dig through that because one of the challenges that again, a lot of marketers have is they don't necessarily know how to do advanced stuff, like for example, uh topic modeling and natural language processing. And that's okay. You don't need to know that. What you do need is access to qualitative data that would tell you what are the things that are related to this.

Now, one of the challenges with uh almost every SEO tool out there is that those SEO tools tend to be uh focused very much on narrowly related things. So, for example, if I put in uh in fact, let's go over to our friend Hrefs. If I put in Google Analytics in here, you'll note there's a whole bunch of search terms here that all have Google Analytics, right? You know, so it's a very narrowly focused thing. And those are things that we want to focus on for sure, but it doesn't explain the natural ways that you and I would have a conversation about that.

So to figure that out, what we would do is we would use a uh tool of social media monitoring tool. In this case, I've got TalkWalker. Um, by the way, full disclosure, uh, a lot of the companies that we're mentioning in here, like HREFs and Talk Walker are business partners of Trust Insights. So FTC disclosure, if you buy something from them through us, we get like enough money to buy a beer. Um, but we have to say that for compliance reasons.

When I put advanced Google Analytics into TalkWalker, I get the social media conversations that people are having and the most prominent terms. I did the word cloud here for fun, but you know, we can you can you mess around with this. When we start to dig in here, we go, oh, there's actually other things that really should be on this page that are semantically uh conversationally related that are not gonna show up in a narrow keyword search, like digital marketing, right? Digital marketing and Google Analytics are like peanut butter and chocolate. But if we go back to our page, do we see exactly one instance of that phrase, right?

Even though it's from a conversation perspective, that's what this is all about, right? Marketing campaigns is in here, analytics skills, power users, data studio, all these things are things that when people talk about advanced Google Analytics in social media qualitatively, we can find in here. Now, here's the challenge. Social media data is extremely good for qualitative purposes to understand conversations. It is terrible, terrible for quantitative stuff because you have things like uh selection bias.

People who are not particularly passionate about topic are not gonna chip in on a topic, right? Um you have interference of all kinds, like Russian troll farms just you know spamming and respamming accounts over and over again. So you can't rely on the quantitative side, but what we can do is export the social conversations. Let's go ahead and move this away here and move in our talk walker export. Yep.

So, Chris, when you were in TalkWalker, which social channels is it looking at? The standard Facebook, Twitter, go, LinkedIn, what is it looking at? Let's see if I can do this from memory. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Quora, Reddit, Ask.com, blogs, forums, newsletters, some web pages, um, and bulletin boards. There's a whole bunch of different data sources that it has in there that it it can pull from.

So there's a lot of it you can get a really nice wide selection. If you want to sp uh drill on a specific uh platform, you absolutely can do that. If I go back into here, uh I can choose under media types. Uh oh, yeah, there's like you know, other brands like Flickr, like for the five people who still use Flickr. Um, and I think that that's important to point out because I think when we when traditionally a lot of people who think about social media listening or might be newer to it, there might be this an assumption that it's only looking for Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram, sort of like the big four.

But forums, especially now, uh, Reddit and other forums, Discord, you know, uh, I'm sure I'll forget a whole bunch of them. Um, that's where a lot of the conversation is happening. And so as you're looking for the language that you know your potential customers are using, or your your audience you're using, make sure you're going beyond that narrow focus of just Facebook and Twitter. Yep. So now we can take that data out of TalkWalker.

And what we're gonna do is we're not gonna pay attention to Talk Walker's hit percentages, because that's not super helpful. Just for an example, you'd want to do some cleaning of this mentally uh first, some just logical stuff. But we're gonna skip that step and go straight into the processing side. Go to your keywords tool of sort of choice. Again, I'm used uh hrefs here, and then you stick your conversational terms in here to get keyword volumes on it, right?

So look at the the actual let's go to overview here. There you go. So this is what I've stuck in, right? What I just copied and pasted. Conversationally, Microsoft Excel was not super high up in what was in the TalkWalker data, but it's number one in here in in search volumes, right?

So as we rework this post, we might talk about hey, you might be able to take some of your Google Analytics data and export it to Microsoft Excel conversationally. And this is how you start to check the box on the things that we know are conversationally, logically and human related to Google Analytics, to advanced Google Analytics, that a regular keyword tool is going to miss. Now it's not to say that a tool like HRES isn't bad. It's obviously very good. We use it all the time.

But there is no substitute still for that qualitative look at what real people are saying because Google is optimizing for real people behaviors. So with that. So with, you know, before you dig into like the how, you know, I can certainly share a quick anecdote. And I would like to say, John, you probably fall in the same category as me when you were a beginner. I don't believe ever that Chris was a beginner.

So I'm just going to exclude him from this example. You know, when I was first getting uh up to speed on what SEO entailed, if someone gave me the instruction, go ahead and optimize for the keyword Microsoft Excel. I had the personally, uh I had the misunderstanding that when you're looking at the edit view of the post, you just put in target keyword Microsoft Excel, not even really thinking about how many times it was reflected in the content. And so for me, I had a huge misunderstanding and mismatch of how to actually optimize for SEO. And so, Chris, I'm definitely interested to see what specific, you know, low-hanging fruit you want people to go after, and then what are some of like the things that people might not know were the gotchas when you're optimizing.

So let's go ahead into this. The first thing we're gonna do is the keyword itself, uh, the term we're targeting really should be front and center in the title, right? There's the the I don't know what we were thinking here, but advanced Google analogs. And so as you're doing that, Chris, just another quick question is if I'm changing the name of a blog post on my website, do I then have to worry about a broken link, or is that only if you change the permalink? Uh it's only if you change the permalink, which is something we also want to do.

And from a content recycling perspective, or in this case a content upgrade perspective, the general process is we're gonna make a note of the old page, we're going to uh redo the URL, we're gonna redo the title, and we're gonna redo a bunch of the content. Uh effectively creating a new page, then we go into our either our admin, in this case WordPress, or go down to the server level itself and make a redirect to say everything going to the old page, all the links, all the traffic goes to the new page. Um, you'll also want to do things, you know, very tactical stuff like changing the publish date to reflect the the the brand new page. So there's essentially a checklist of things. You don't just go in, start mucking around, hit publish and you know, pray for the best.

Not if you don't want to get your butt handed to you. Um, you'll want to check things like your categories and stuff. If you're using a uh tool, uh like any of these uh SEO plugins, uh you can tell we didn't do any of our homework here. So even just having the you know, putting the key the focus keyword that you're gonna be using in here uh and identifying like, yeah, this is should be cornerstone content. This is a big piece of content.

We want to make sure that it's prominent. We're just flipping switches like that in either uh Yoast or rank math which are two of the more popular plugins for WordPress will change which algorithm the the these tools use to score your page and tell you hey if this is cornerstone content this page be it better be longer it better be richer it better have expertise authority trustworthiness and so on and so forth so what's the deal with that do you only get like X number of cornerstones per site like you can't just tag everything as cornerstone you could but then you would be essentially trying to optimize for cornerstone content for every single page so instead of like a 600 word page you're now gonna have to crank out like a 1500 word page if it's if it's all cornerstone content and things and you can have you know uh differences in the number of uh keywords that you use and and related terms and stuff like that there's a lot more um it's a lot more rigorous uh on that front the catch being that their recommendations are also not always correct either so you they take them with a grain of salt um I'm not going to go through and optimize everything here because it's probably about a 30 to 45 minute process and nobody wants to watch that but what I will say is that when we're going through we're looking at structure so the structure of a of a good cornerstone page is going to look something like a what why how what is the thing why is the thing important how does how do you know how should we do the thing or thing or what's so in this case we have what is it this should be rewritten to say what is advanced Google Analytics and we there is no why section here so we need to add a why section why is advanced Google Analytics important to digital marketing for example each of the major section headings should be logical things, but logical things that we have pulled from our expanded topic list, right? So we we go down this list, and then you have the how. Um so I would say from these terms, digital marketing is a is a a why term, right? Strategic planning is a why term.

Why do you need to do advanced Google Analytics? You need it for things like strategic planning and so on and so forth. Um, and then the how terms, things terms like Microsoft Excel in here, um, Google Data Studio in here. So we're gonna we would go back to our page, reformat it, um, and then add in the why section, and then a lot of what we have here is the how stuff. How do you do these things?

How do you apply these different uh techniques? That will help this page stand out more and will be more authoritative, more trustworthy, and demonstrate a lot more expertise than what we have been doing. So, to wrap up, if you want to make the most of SEO and you want to get your activities focused, you first have to do an audit of your data. You need to pull in your Google Analytics data to figure out which pages are in trouble. You need to pull in keyword data from the SEO tool of your choice to figure out why those pages might be in trouble, and you need search console data to understand how Google is seeing that page perform.

Each of those data sources is important on their own, but you get the biggest bang for your buck when you put all three together. Once you've done that, once you've put all three together, which is not an insignificant step, um, it is then incumbent upon you to build your punch list, look at for for easy stuff. So easy things would be like keywords completely out of alignment with what the page was supposed to be about. Um, other things to look for in here would be uh pages that uh have a lot of traffic loss with unusually low click-through rates, telling you, hey, people see this in a search result, and frankly, they don't understand why it's even showing up. They don't understand it's relevant.

So you would need to do some tuning on uh basic things like your title and your your meta description to tune what snippets it shows. And then after all that, the final section is you go in and you do the hard work, the you know, 30, 40, 50 minutes of tuning the page. You might find out, like I might I have a personal blog that's about 10 years old at this point. You might find out that a page you're getting a lot of traffic on, eh? You know what?

It's not relevant anymore. And it's okay to in those cases to redirect it. So um so questions, yeah, lots of questions, tons of questions. I have so many questions. Not all of them related to SEO, but I will keep them focused on SEO.

Um so okay, so let's say I go through the steps that you've just outlined, I re-optimize the page. Now what? So once what do I do after that? Once the optimization is done, then you rerun your auditing tools. Uh you you watch it carefully in Search Console, uh, and then in another seven, 14 days, rerun your auditing tools and find out did the pages that you just optimized have are they grown in search volume?

When we look at um this traffic impact report, if I go all the way to the bottom, uh let's go further. Oh, another million lines. Um, there are pages down here that have grown in traffic since the last time through. Question is are those things like, for example, the great shutdown here. Is that something that we care about, right?

If if I optimize a bunch of pages in the next month, I see traffic's up on those pages, great. Then we did our jobs. If traffic is still down, then we know that we didn't solve the root problem. We need to do some more digging, some more investigation. It sounds like that there is definitely a lot of planning involved in doing an exercise like this, but the planning is probably worthwhile because organic search is it's in for all intents and purposes, it's a free marketing channel, meaning that you're not paying for Google to pick it up.

It's not a paid uh search, it's not a paid ad. So as much as you can double down on your free channels, because it is, you know, Google search engine is you know the most widely used. Um, I think that it definitely makes sense so that that way when you're looking at this, like I know off the top of my head when we did this our exercise for ourselves, there's definitely a handful of pages that I started doing some work on, and I made a note of which pages I had done work on so that when we run the analysis, I'd be able to see did the work that I do have any impact at all? Um, so I think that you know, if someone is looking to do something like this, definitely make sure that you have some way to keep track of what it is that you're doing. Don't just run this, mess up a couple of pages and then go, okay, I'm done.

Like there's definitely a process and a project and a methodology to it. Um, one question I do have for you, Chris is so we're so focused on Google as the search engine, but there are other search engines out there that are popular. You know, where does that factor in? Bing, Safari, um, you know, duck duck go, those different search engines. Like, do you follow the same process?

You follow the same process for the data. So instead of using Google Search Console, if you're optimizing for Bing, you would have a Bing Webmaster Tools account. And in that Webmaster Tools account, you would then be uh pulling that data in and doing exactly the same process. DuckDuckGo does not provide that information. Um, so uh you're out you're kind of on your own there.

Your SOL. But also it's not a huge search engine right now. It's you know, one to two percent of queries, although you should be looking um in your Google Analytics to see which search engines are sending you the most traffic. One thing that's important about Bing is that Bing, because they are much more open with their data and their APIs, they are used by a lot of other devices. So, you know, this these little cute uh the desktop systems and things, uh, awful lot of them have uh uh Bing as the back end for their search.

So there's a there's good reason to uh to go ahead and optimize for Bing as well. That said, Bing has the same optimization goals as Google, which is deliver a user experience that's compelling enough to get people to keep coming back so that they can sell ad revenue. Um which means that the things that work for Google most of the time in most instances also work for Bing. Okay, that's good to know because I think that I think Bing is one of those overlooked search engines that could actually be a very powerful competitive tool for people who are focusing on those more free um digital channels. One of the questions uh that we got was how do you deal with optimizing for quality versus simply simply quantity?

Um Google only Google Analytics only tells you how many eyeballs, not how good they are. So that's a good question. Uh the answer to that is that you need to uh also be running and looking at attribution analysis in parallel. Um, attribution analysis will help you understand um which channels are contributing to actual conversions. So this is an example of one.

Uh, this is a digital customer journey roadmap for the Trust Insights website. Um, and what we're looking at here, we see Google Organic Search was responsible for 4.9% of conversions. Um, this is a very specific conversion goal in the Trust Insights website in the month of August. If we spend all of our time optimizing and we don't pay attention to attribution analysis, then yeah, you could figure out oh, actually, we optimized for crappy traffic, right? We optimize for stuff that you don't want.

Part of that is going to be topical relevance. So if you have very specific customers, let's say like you're a big uh complex sale company, you sell mortgages or Gulfstream jets or you know, B2B SAS appliances or something like that. Chances are you probably have a customer advisory board or you have focus groups with customers. You should absolutely be taking those conversations and mining them for words and phrases like we just did with the social data and putting that into search engines as well and using that to optimize your the pages that focus on those very specific lucrative audiences because that's what people, the humans talk about. So optimizing for quality requires you to be looking at the outcomes that you care about.

If you're you could you can absolutely can have you know great optimization for stuff you don't want. My personal website has uh it ranks really well for uh someone searching for the difference between pseudoephedrine and phenolephrine, which is I wrote a blog post 14 years ago about the difference between those two medications. That still sends like a thousand visitors a month that have zero conversion value because I mostly about machine learning and AI, not decongestants, but it's still out there. Um that said, there is a lot of value to um you know, if you're getting if you have a traffic generator and the traffic is poor, remove that content so that you're not attracting audiences you don't want. Well, and again, make sure that you have a plan as you're removing things from your web page so that people don't just get a bunch of error messages.

Make sure you're smartly looking at you know, redirects and correct error messages, 404s, those kinds of things, that if you don't have those in place, that will harm your search rankings overall for your website. Were there other questions? John, did you have a question that you were you know I did just one about tool stack as far as so everything you're doing, you're doing in the for this site in the WordPerfect uh um in the WordPress interface, you've got Yoast plugged in there. Is there any place else that you go to make any changes? It depends on the changes you're making.

Um so for example, if you figure out that you're you've got uh reputation problems, right? Meaning that your content is fine, you're showing up the right keywords, um, but your performance is really crap. Um, you may in that case have poisonous inbound links. Um in that case, you're gonna go say into your Google Search Console, you're gonna make a list of the all the links that link to your site from the SEO tool of your choice, and identify the crap ones, like you know, promo codes, you know, Disney.com or whatever, sending you those garbage uh links. That gets loaded to Search Console, and you say, I'm disagreeing these links.

I'm saying these do not count these at all whatsoever towards how you see my site. The challenge there is you need a fair amount of experience in SEO to be able to understand what symptoms you're seeing together. Because if you see content's okay, keywords are okay, but you're still losing traffic and the traffic losses are pretty sustained across the site, that probably means you've got a reputation problem, as opposed to a content problem. One of the challenges that it's one of the reasons why it's important to have access to all the data and look at the data holistically, is that you may jump to the conclusion you have a content problem when you really don't have a content problem. You have a trustworthiness problem.

Um so Search Console is absolutely an essential part of the package. And you should have both Google Search Console and Big Webmaster Tools because they can detect different things. Um you should have a good SEO tool and you should be looking at all this data, have it in like a data studio dashboard and have it be something you pop in and look at it once a week. Um, same for your attribution analysis, pop in and look at it once a week so that you go, okay, what's happening looks makes logical sense or that's weird. What happened there?

Yeah, I guess we go down the rabbit hole of additional questions. Um, you know, but again, we want to make sure that people's time uh is well spent. So if you have additional questions, um, you can reach us at our free Slack group, trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. Again, totally free to join. If you go to that link, um, you will get an invite.

Um, you can subscribe to our newsletter, trust insights.ai/slash newsletter, where we actually talk about a lot of this information and share resources on a weekly basis every Wednesday, uh, is our new newsletter. Or you can just contact us and you will likely get uh one of the three of us because you are looking at Trust Insights, and one of the three of us will respond to you, and we may even feature your question on one of our shows. And so we've covered a lot of ground. SEO is a big topic. It's probably a lot more complicated uh than people realize, but with that complicated um technique, you get a lot better results for what you're trying to do because search engines and you know, people in general, everything is getting more complex.

And so trying to keep up with what's happening is really difficult. But doing really good content that's really well optimized is the thing that will stay consistent across the board. Chris, John, anything else that we should cover before we wrap up for today? That's all folks. Good for sure.

All right. So we will see you again next week. Uh, we're gonna be doing this every week. Uh, the So What show, so what, the marketing analytics uh and insights live show from Trust Insights. Uh, that's us.

And you can find us on YouTube, you can find us on Twitter, you can find us on Facebook, or if you just go to our website, then you will find all of the uh social channels there that you're looking for. Thanks for watching, folks. Take care.