June 18, 2020

SEO Tips & Website Speed Hacks w/ Matt “500k Visitors/ Month” Giovanisci

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So you spend hours writing an epic blog post. You really pour your heart and soul into each word. 

Then you sit back and wait for that sweet sweet Google traffic to roll in...

But all you see on Google Analytics is this...

Tumble Weed

Well, Matt Giovanisci from Money Lab doesn't worry about that happening any more. His main website generates an average of 500,000 visitors a month!

He joins the podcast today to chat about...

  • How important your website loading speed is for ranking on Google (and how to improve your website speed today)
  • The exact strategy he would use if he was to start again
  • Quick wins that you can do to improve your SEO today
  • The secret to building backlinks

SEO Tips & Website Speed Hacks

w/ Matt Giovanisci

From Money Lab

Matt Giovanisci

Make Time Online Podcast on iTunes - Online Entrepreneur Tips

Listen to the full Matt Giovanisci podcast episode

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Tips and Tools mentioned in the podcast

How Matt manages his business income and expenses...

  • Profit First book by Mike Michalowicz (affiliate link- as I really want that $0.29 commission- sorry for the British sarcasm- defo get it though!)

SEO has 2 sections to focus on:

  • Website speed = 25% 
  • Content = 75%

Here is the very professional pie chart I made on the chat to make this more clear...

SEO Importance

Improve your speed

How to make your website lightning fast...

  • The theme is important- Matt built Carbonate (a super lightweight theme). I use Generate Press on my health and fitness site and Thrive Themes on this site (find my Thrive review here)
  • WP Rocket plugin (affiliate link- $49 for one site- check out my WP Rocket review here to see how I used this plugin after the chat and my page load time went from 4.4 seconds to 1.58 seconds)
  • Cloudflare CDN (free- this basically stores your website in different locations around the world)
  • Use GTmetrix.com to test your speed on desktop for free (I also used webpagetest.org to test my mobile test speed)

Make great content

How Matt makes great content...

  • Ahrefs keyword research tool ($99 a month- not a affiliate link as I still don't use them even though I know I should!... Listen to Matt around 39 minutes to see why- I still use Jaaxy)
  • Find low difficulty high searched terms
  • Write the best article you can on that keyword (keep doing that forever)
  • Matt did this for 2 years- 1 article a week and got to 100k pageviews a month
  • Make content that helps human beings... NOT robots (don't stuff keywords)
  • Use personality... even on boring topics. Use analogies, stories and personal experience

If you're like me you're probably wondering... how can I write the best articles on that keyword? That's what I normally try to do.

Well Matt lays it out for you...

Quick SEO win

  • Use Google Search Console 
  • Pull up Search Query by number of impressions (see below screenshot)
  • Find keywords that are getting lots of impressions but not many clicks
Google Search Console
  • It's probably ranking around 8-10 in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page)
  • "Master craft" that article
  • Open the top 10-20 ranking articles and find what are the common questions/ subheadings they use
  • Boil it down to the main sub headings and make your article answer those points really well
  • Matt GUARANTEES this will boost your traffic (he even said if it doesn't he'll send you his SEO course for free... just email him... no, not really, but I've done this for 2 articles and they are now ranking in the top 3 positions #justsaying)

Here are the stats for the click through rate of articles ranking on page 1... 

Google CTR on page 1

Do you notice that I just linked to this Backlinko article? Yeah that's a stats post... see why creating stats posts or skyscraper content can help get backlinks? Read on to see what I mean...

If you have tons of content

  • Do an audit
  • ​Go to ​​​moneylab.co/content-audit
  • Delete poorly performing posts
  • It may be relevant in other articles so you can use it in better performing posts (sometimes you just need to delete it though)
  • If you have content that doesn't add value then it can harm the way Google views your site and content in general

Backlinks

  • Don't ask random people- it won't be good long term (but it may help a new website get more authority in the short term)
  • Create content that can naturally be linked back to (skyscraper & stat posts i.e. make content better and bigger than other people)
  • Personally I'm of the opinion that you should spend your time creating awesome content and ideally some link worthy posts. That way you will get backlinks organically over time (if you're a big agency with a team then by all means focus on backlink strategies).

Advice if Matt could go back in time

  • Get better at writing
  • Do more videos sooner (he's naturally good at this)

Matt Giovanisci Podcast Transcript

Matt Giovanisci 0:00 I have another website called brew cabin. And that site is all about home brewing. And that's I still own again, zero promotion, no social media. We have an email list, but it's pretty much on an autoresponder so like not really a thing. And we don't publish every week, we have about 50 articles on the site, and it continues to grow. I have not published or promoted a single thing.

Mike Beatty 0:27 How is it growing? Are people backlinking because it's good content or something?

Matt Giovanisci 0:32 Yeah, that and because like everyone else is slow and we're just much faster.

Mike Beatty 1:32 So Matt, I actually signed up to your email list about two weeks ago and bought profit first straightaway. Got the audit orderable straightaway, and I was like, yeah, this guy. I like this guy straightaway. So yes, that is such a good book. It's such

Matt Giovanisci 2:28 a good book. It's an accounting book. And the guy's like, not an he's not an A, I don't think he's an accountant. He's like, I didn't think he was an accountant Anyway, now, but it's it's kind of funny. I mean, it's kind of I wouldn't say it's Yes. It's easy to read for accounting books.

Mike Beatty 2:42 Yeah, I mean, I mean, I've read a lot of books and stuff, but that one, you very quickly realise. Yeah, like the author. And I very quickly realise. He knows his stuff. You know, he's not just, he's not just chatting stuff, whereas I actually had it. I haven't read his other books. By imagine the other books, I imagine the other books are just chatting and stuff, just the way that he's all mentioned that. Yeah, profit first is awesome. What do you think just like explain what it is cuz I know how much you use it in your business.

Matt Giovanisci 3:11 Yeah, it's so funny because it's like he took, he took something that was tried and true in the personal finance space, which is where I come from as well. And he just applied it to business. I, you know, when you read the book, and they kind of explain it, it's basically I would call it a framework for how you organise your accounting with your business. And so the idea is simply you should the business should profit, right right away. So the business and it's very similar to the personal finance adage of pay yourself first, right? So the idea that like the business always profits, even from the first you know, revenue check, and whatever is left over. So you you pick a percentage, and in this case, like the percentage that I use is 10. percent. So my business profits 10%. Every single time we get, you know, we get paid every year we get paid, you know, obviously like different checks come in from different areas. And so at the end of the month, I kind of tally everything up, I take 10% of the revenue that we earn for the month, and I set it aside into a an account a literal like bank account a savings account under my business, that's strictly for profit. And then, what you're what it what it allows you to do is it forces you to kind of look at Well, now you have to operate your business on 90%. And, you know, the other percentage, the other larger percentage, there's taxes. So in his, I think in the one he has a couple of different frameworks depending on the size of your business, the one I use is pretty much the lowest one. It's 15% goes to taxes. 10% goes to profit. And then or I'm sorry, 20% goes to taxes if 10% goes to profit, and then Again, your leftover with 70% you pay you have to pay the salary of the operating officer, the person who owns the company. Yep. Me case, because the idea of doing all of this is that a business is supposed to make the owner money. And so that's like, that's why someone starts a business is so that they can, you know, not only pay their employees that obviously but to pay themselves they've why start a business if you're not planning on making money from it, you're just gonna like, you know, live in a cardboard box for the rest of your life trying to start a business that makes no sense. And so, um, so you so you have that cost, right, that's a percentage. And then you're left with this like, depending on which framework you choose, which which allocation percentages you choose, you're left over with like, maybe 35%, or even 30% that you're sort of forced to run your business on. It's the it's all other operating expenses. This includes all the overhead This includes employees and so on. So, that is kind of the point at the point is like, what are you left over with? And how do you budget your business to fit that instead of going like, Well, you know, we need this and we need that and you kind of overspend and you're willing to sacrifice maybe your own pay, you know, you're willing to, like float the company with credit card debt, you're willing to, you know, take a cut from your employees to pay for overhead. It's like, you know, it basically forces you to operate as lean as possible and to keep an eye on your operating expenses so that you're well within your allocation percentages based on your revenue. Yeah.

Mike Beatty 6:36 Actually, I spoke to Jeff and Ben from dollar sprout, and they said how they use the they basically, only, they're only ever try and spend 50%. So as they're growing, they're only ever try and spend 50% because I imagine that this is actually a little bit different, like for like a business that you are who's obviously like established and you've got this income or wherever you can come Have do all those numbers and things like that. But if you're, let's say you're in the startup phase, and you're growing, I'm guessing it's a little bit different. It's not like you're going to be like, what? I guess it's still you do want to do the profit. First thing, you definitely want

Matt Giovanisci 7:12 to do it, it's actually the best time to do it. Right. Right. Like your business profits from day one. Yeah, insane. Because it's like, oh, and then what you do is that the one thing I forgot to mention, is kind of the crux of it, your profit account that you're collecting 10% on every month, so even if you're in the startup phase, and let's say and, you know, I think you should follow this because the allocations are just based on percentages. So it doesn't matter what your revenue is, if you make $10 a month, okay, you know, $1 goes into the profit account. Okay. Yeah, it's something it's, it's it's still money. And so, what you do is, you know, what he talks about the book is that every quarter, you take half of the profit of half of what is in the profit account, and you pay that to the owner, you pay that to yourself in this case, and and so, basically like you have this like, ever grow up Prophet account that you're only ever taking 50% on. And that is like a distribution that is a that is a bonus, like you ran the business, you did? Well, you know, you didn't sacrifice employees, you didn't sacrifice, you know, you kept the books lean. And you know, you are rewarded for that as a business owner as the person who is in charge of doing that. And it may sound like yes, this is all going to the top. But no, it's really just like, pure allocations, it's it's an obviously, as you get bigger, those allocations change, you know, you may not be putting 10% away in profit, you may only be putting 5% away in profit, and you may not be paying yourself 50% you may only be paying yourself 30%. And so it's it depends on where you are and how much revenue you're making and what it takes to run your business. Obviously, mine's online, so my overhead is very low, but somebody with a brick and mortar location might have completely different operating expenses and have would have to ship those hundred percent. But ya know, I just really liked the simplicity of it. And

Mike Beatty 8:55 I did I think I heard a podcast that you did recently and you were talking about how He almost uses too many bank accounts and I really liked your way you just use three I think you said yeah, he makes it. Yeah. I was like, my eyes were like glazing over that because

Matt Giovanisci 9:10 this is yeah. Yeah he talks about it's kind of early in the book too and if I if I you know and i and i understand his reasoning for you know, telling somebody why they should have all these bank accounts is really you know, to protect you from yourself you know, and not everyone is as disciplined with money as maybe say somebody like me who was the complete opposite I was very undisciplined, very terrible live paycheck to paycheck until I started a business in 2012. And I was like, Okay, I need to really change the my, you know, how I do things. And I read a bunch of like personal finance books got into personal finance as like a you know, a media and started just really learning and now I'm more now I could be more disciplined. Yeah, well Whereas like, I yeah, I only need three bank accounts, I need my my income account that the one where all the revenue comes into it's a basic checking account for my business. That's where I do my operating costs from. That's how I pay myself. That's how I pay employees and things, team members. And then I have an account for my taxes where I keep where I allocate money towards there. And I have an account for profit, both of those are savings accounts attached to the same bank so that they are instant transfers. And I do it every month, I just transfer it over. And I just do it's kind of really simple. Keep it simple. Yeah, it's like, Yeah, but again, you know, I do have very easy access to those accounts, if I in end up in dire straits, for whatever reason, and so, I think that that's, you know, he said he recommends setting up to tax account and to profit accounts so that you can do an easy move, but then you want to like move it to an account. That's much harder to get access to like an outreach Bank, maybe that you actually have to drive into, you know, you don't have a you can't just like, you know, withdrawal or you know, so he just he's just basically advocating to make it complicated on yourself so that you avoid taking money out.

Mike Beatty 11:12 Yeah. And it just makes so much business sense or just common sense, I guess. But it's a really nice way.

Matt Giovanisci 11:20 It's really like personal finance brought the business Yeah, it's really what

Mike Beatty 11:24 exactly what anyway, I want to dive into SEO because I know you know, lows of goal, you know, you know your stuff, basically. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 11:32 That's right. Yeah.

Mike Beatty 11:35 What is it like 500,000 pageviews or something? I saw that one light your custom is been more in less than?

Matt Giovanisci 11:43 Yeah, now it's been, you know, obviously, we're heading I've run a pool business called swim University. And so as we head into the summer months, you know, we're talking about a million visitors a month. Wow. You know, and then in the wintertime, we're talking about 300,000 visitors a month. So On average, it works out to be about 500,000 unique visitors a month

Mike Beatty 12:03 epic. Right? So yeah, the question is, then if you had a blank slate, let's say you were doing streaming University again, you know, just a complete blank slate. What would you do to make sure you set up your website? Well, for SEO?

Unknown Speaker 12:18 Yeah. So

Matt Giovanisci 12:21 it's kind of an unfair question. Because

I learned that, you know, over the last, I guess, 20 years, I've been building websites personally, like, I'm the one that I'm the developer. And it's where I started, I started with website design and then you know, kind of moved into content with so so so many diversity and all my other sites are built off of a theme that I created, which is like, you know, talking about being simple. It is a stripped down theme. It is for WordPress specifically, and I would use that because it's already set up for SEO. It's already SEO is in every possible It's lightning fast. Can anyone

Mike Beatty 13:02 do Can anyone use that thing? Or is it Yeah, it's bought. Yep. Cool.

Matt Giovanisci 13:06 Yep. It's it's called carbonate and you can buy it at bicarbonate calm. Cool. Yeah. So So bicarbonate obviously is a chemical but it's bu y carbonate genius is a it's a pool by carbonate is what they use to increase alkalinity in a pool. Oh, that was a little clever wordplay for the for the domain name, but yeah, it's a $79. Once you buy it, you own it, but it's really stripped down. Like there's no cost. You can customise things and I teach you how to do that. But it's all with code. And you have to go into the code, you have to change things, but I tell you exactly what to change and it's commented so you can't really mess it up. But, and that's what all my sites are built on are all built on this like really simple. You know, lightweight no JavaScript. Super fast. How important is that? I think it's probably, I mean, if there's two Yeah, I mean, like there's two things, there's having a really lightweight, really user friendly, like to the to the actual visitor, having a site that's fast and easy to read is a probably I would say 25% important, you know, and 100% pie, and the other 75% is like content is basically, you know, making sure that you do the right and this is kind of the second point is, that's what I would start with. And then the next thing I would do is basically go and do a bunch of keyword research. I use a tool called hrs because I think it's the best and I you know, I've been using it for numbers multiple years now and and I would go and do a bunch of research and go after you know, low difficulty high, searched terms, find those terms and then run Like, pretty much the best article you could possibly write on that. And I would do that consistently, forever. And, you know, there's a there's a, I have a story of a website that I built called roasty coffee that I eventually sold. But for the first two years, the idea was, and this site is completely different, but it's a coffee website. And what I did there was we published a new article every single Monday for two years straight. And I did zero keyword research. I would only I just literally just had a bunch of questions in my mind because I do like coffee have been brewing it since I was six. And I want it

Mike Beatty 15:39 since you were six?

Matt Giovanisci 15:41 Yeah.

Mike Beatty 15:43 You had to be the wild as a kid.

Matt Giovanisci 15:46 No, that was no coffee doesn't have that. I mean, I drink it every day, but it doesn't have that effect on me for some reason. I mean, maybe it did. I could ask my parents. Paula was worse for me, but that's true. didn't stop my growth. I'm six two, so I don't know all the Yeah, but my It's kind of like I think it's an Italian thing. You know, like I grew up my It was like accepted in my house.

Mike Beatty 16:05 Real coffee not that instant crap?

Matt Giovanisci 16:08 Oh, that was an instant but it wasn't far from real. Definitely like Folgers French roast. But we so So, again, we published an article every single week, based on just questions like I had a question of what's the difference? Like what's the true difference between those white filters and those brown filters? Like why would you choose one over the other? And the only keyword research we would do is look at, okay, are people calling them white filters and brown filters? are they calling them something else? And it turns out, they're calling them bleached and unbleached because that's what they actually are. And so okay, we would just like kind of, optimise for the term, but not go after. It's like the first article I ever wrote was about French you know how to use the French press, which is like a very difficult keyword to go after because it has high difficulty, but also high search volume. Probably not the first thing we should have created. But in two years, we went with zero promotion. This is no social media channels that we were promoting on. We had an email list, but I wouldn't even say it was that good. We ended up getting to 100,000 visitors a month by the end of two years. Wow, you know, unique visitors by doing basically just content and not based on keyword research. So, and honestly, like the writing, it was subpar, I would say like it was decent, but it wasn't like gonna blow anybody's mind. You know, it's like, oh, this is just a I think that site looked very good. And it was very quick. And it was well written. So it wasn't like you know, shitpost But yeah, it was just basically the consistency of it and going after that now I did I ended up selling that site. I needed the money and at the time because I was in debt and and I've used a whole article on money lab about it, but You know, the person who's running it still running it today, and it still looks the same way. So it's, I mean, clearly it's doing well. And the and, you know, I'm not saying that that is the right way to do it. You know, that's just one way that's my way of doing it. Because it is so handy. I didn't do anything like I, I built the site. And then I had a keynote with a bunch of questions. And then I just hired a one man, you know, team to, to write and publish articles. And I had a graphic designer, it was, and we just did it consistently every Monday.

Mike Beatty 18:31 How much how much Clinton were writing per month, roughly. Before or articles per month? one a week?

Matt Giovanisci 18:39 Yeah. No, per month. So by the end, yeah, by the end of two years, you had about 100 joules per article. Wow. So Exactly. On the money. Yeah. So, um, and, you know, my graphic designer, we just do the graphic for it. And my writer would do the writing and then you know, it would all be published and they would just go out every Monday.

Mike Beatty 18:59 So you You would do nothing. Nothing. Wow. That's incredible. All right, I've got loads of questions from what you just said. But okay. First one is, well, I want to dig into the speed a bit more. Okay? Because what what do you use to like, just track your speed? And you got, I've just gone on to Google Now. So I want to do this for my website right now. And I want

Matt Giovanisci 19:24 to I want to gt metrics metrics as an x at the end.

Mike Beatty 19:28 So it's, that's number two. Yeah, yep. on Google. Yep, that's

the that's what I use for exclusive. So let's type in what's Uh, what's a good speed? Because I've got to be honest, I don't do this

Matt Giovanisci 19:42 on anything under two seconds is good,

Mike Beatty 19:44 okay. And just do my

Matt Giovanisci 19:46 age or should I use another file, do a blot, do it do your most popular post, okay, do or do your most popular page if it is your homepage fine, but usually it's like a post or something.

Mike Beatty 19:57 But we change that then So under two seconds is good.

Matt Giovanisci 20:03 under two seconds is pretty good. Yeah,

Mike Beatty 20:04 I mean, what's really bad? I'm scared now.

Matt Giovanisci 20:10 Anything over? I don't know. I mean really bad. I've seen I've seen sites that load in like 25 seconds. I was like, oh, how does all that mean it big sites like look at I mean, if you type I mean, I can probably type one and now, I mean, like a big site like box comm For example, I think the last time I checked them or even like CNN, they're like, their homepage, just just I think it was like 16 seconds followed. Right? Because because they have, you know, they had so manymjust have so many ads and yeah, third party shit that's being loaded. So it's just not. And again, this is part of like, why I end up, you know, focusing so much on pace because I do think it's a competitive advantage to these bigger companies who like just, you know, they have So much they have to do and they have a lot of obligations. And, you know, they have a lot more data but and maybe speed is not important to them because they're maybe this is a new site, and it doesn't really matter. And they have, you know, they're publishing on like, Facebook, Instant Articles, and they're publishing on amp, you know, so we're using amp to publish. So I, you know, they're already creating stripped down versions of their content. And it's like, well, why wouldn't you just have Why would you just do that from the beginning when the reason is because they make their money on ads and ads are? Yeah, so I just did the homepage for Vox and it loaded in 19 seconds. Well, that's mad.

Mike Beatty 21:37 Yeah. It's 5.8. Okay. Yeah, isn't it?

Matt Giovanisci 21:44 It's not great. Okay, so I What, what score did you get? What's their PageSpeed score? Is it D

Mike Beatty 21:51 93%.

Matt Giovanisci 21:54 Oh, it says

Mike Beatty 21:56 fully loaded, fully loaded time is 5.8. Should I be looking at something else?

Matt Giovanisci 22:00 Now that's the right one. How many requests do you have?

Mike Beatty 22:03 34

Matt Giovanisci 22:05 that's not too bad. I mean, so you you could easily speed that up. Right? Easily speed that so I use live I use Thrive Themes. I've got a Thrive Leads popped in on that page and I've heard that can be a bit slow. can be slow, I think. I think you would probably benefit a lot from lazy loading images.

Mike Beatty 22:25 Of course, like is it BJ? BJ? lazy load or?

Matt Giovanisci 22:27 Yeah, yeah, I would use the WP like, look at WP rocket. Oh, yeah. If you do that, I guarantee you and CloudFlare to use CloudFlare at all. No. So that's a CDN

Mike Beatty 22:39 thing, isn't it?

Matt Giovanisci 22:40 Yeah.

Yeah, so I would it's free. So WP rocket cost money, but it's like, I don't know, like 30 bucks a year or something and it's plug in, and then CloudFlare. So I think if you added CloudFlare to your to your website and you added WP rocket. It could help It would definitely help. It could probably bring you down closer to like three seconds. Awesome.

Mike Beatty 23:03 So like getting it down to three, two seconds, you want to under two basically trying to Yeah, I mean, I just

Matt Giovanisci 23:09 Yeah, because here's the thing that I've

it's a competitive advantage. You know, Google has said the PageSpeed is important, obviously, like, if you went and looked at some of the top ranking pages, like they're not super fast, but you know, a lot of people are on mobile devices. And I run a website where 75% of my visitors are coming through on a mobile device. And if you can make the assumption that they're probably not on Wi Fi, you know, or maybe only half or maybe only, you know, and I have an older audience for my stuff. And so my goal is to try to get my content to load almost instantly on a edge or 3g network. And if I can do that, then my site becomes that much more fun. valuable and plus it stops people from Pogo sticking so if somebody, you know is in Google and they type in, you know how to get rid of pool algae or whatever they say, and and they click on a site, because they want their problem solved and it takes four or five seconds to load and they can't see anything like that, like people are impatient, they get tired, they hit the back button, they go back, they, they select another thing, and mine is going to be instant. And so it's like, oh, okay, I'm immediately started reading. And this is great. It's exactly what I'm looking for. So that to me, it is it is a competitive, competitive advantage because a lot of these bigger companies are not going to invest the time in trying to cut their PageSpeed. But you've seen companies like Walmart and Amazon these big, obviously huge ecommerce stores who have only like, who've done tests where they've sped up their website by like half of a friggin millisecond or some ridiculously low amount. They saw a 1% increase in sales, you know, from that one variable tested. And that's like, clearly it matters if those companies are willing to like, I mean, they have huge infrastructure, and it's not easy to make those sites fast. Yeah, you know, they have to, I mean, I mean, they run the whole gamut. So like, they have to, they have to upgrade servers, they have to do like really just intense shit where we don't have to, we can, we can use stuff like CloudFlare and caching stuff. And, you know, we're obviously on WordPress, and, you know, you can even upgrade to a better hosting company, which is like a huge gain. One of the things that I did was, you know, move to something like WP engine, which is already pretty damn fast, you know, and so, I believe that that's probably the major reason that like, my coffee site was able to see so much traffic without really any promotion. And I ended up uh, so I have another website called brew cabin, and that site is all about homebrewing. And that's I still own again, zero promotions. No social media, we have an email list, but it's pretty much on an autoresponder. So like not really a thing. And we don't publish every week, we have about 50 articles on the site, and it continues to grow. I have not published or promoted a single thing. I see.

Because, one, we are equalising kin because it's good content or something.

Yeah, that and because like everyone else is slow, and we're just much faster and we and we targeted very specific keywords. And yeah, I think it just and I mean, nowadays, it's growing because of the more people are getting in the homebrewing you know, during these COVID days, but it even before that every month, it would go up, you know, maybe only about by like maybe 1000 people or 5000 people but again, it's been a year and I've created zero new content I've updated I've only just like kept plugins updated and it continues to see more and more traffic. Every month and make more and more money. I'm not we're not we're not breaking the bank here. Because it's not something I focus my time on. But it is certainly an excellent case study for like, you know, you create good content you have. It's not even really about consistency. Clearly. I mean, I don't think every I don't think every industry is the same. This is very anecdotal. But I don't know, it seems to be working, obviously, like, there are more competitive industries that you could build a website in, where you will have a problem like staying top dog, right. This is not one of those industries, and neither is the pool industry, I guess, in my case, so either I picked really good industries, or both. I mean, I have a background and all those things, right. I, I, you know, I've been in the pool industry, literally in the pool industry since I was 13. And I've been home brewing since I was 21. So just stuff I've been doing for so long. Yeah. 30 Now,

Mike Beatty 28:02 I think Google is starting to recognise that as well, don't they? Like, if you have legit knowledge, and I don't know how to do it, I don't know if they actually do know if that the author is, has background in it or what but,

Matt Giovanisci 28:16 you know, um, so I talked to Morty from rank Ranger, and he, he has put it the best. And I think he's sort of speculating, but he has some insight. And he wrote an article and I, I'd have to go find it. I think it was from August of 2018. But basically, it was talking about how Google can now profile an entire website, almost acting as if a human being like you and I worked for Google. And our job was to just, you know, Google would give us a website and we would be like, is this good or not? And we'd be like, Yeah, it's pretty good. I like the site, like, Okay, and then it's like, cool, like, we're gonna like, give that a thumbs up. But they're doing that with with Ai, they're doing that with machine learning. Wow. And so they're able to profile and kind of look at a site holistically and not just per page and how many fucking keywords you can stop. But, you know, it's more about is this site reputable and not just, you know, you look at a site's like, you know, and it's really tough in the health industry in the finance industry where you're like, you know, anybody can write an article about, you know, Lyme disease, right? It's like, Well, are you qualified to talk about Lyme disease? You know, are you a doctor and it's really not about I don't know if it's about the adding credibility, but it's an how you present the content. So it's like, if you are not a doctor, you need to make it clear that you are not a doctor and and you can't make like substantiated health claims based on zero research. And if you do, do the research, like, cite your sources cite where you're getting this from. And I think a lot of people don't do that because they want to seem like authority figures, especially on bigger sites where they don't have full control over everything that's published, they kind of just let people publish it, you know, free reign. We don't do that. It's it's we are, we have a lot like every site that I own has a core philosophy to the to like what we educate about. And we cite, we cite our sources, if we like we did a big article on some University about COVID. And how, and it's right at the top of every page right now, because people are worried. Can you still swim in a pool? I can you can catch it from you know, all this stuff. Well, no, we're not going to write an article about that. Until and this happened. The CDC released an entire thing about swimming pools and hot tubs because people were worried and so all sudden, now we have a reputable source telling us good information. And then we backed and then we backed it up with what we know from you know, obviously like 20 Five years of pool care, and we were like, okay, here's what the CDC recommends. And then here's how to do it. You know, it's like here's the pret, like we just gave practical tips on, on implementing what the CDC recommends because they were obviously very vague about it. Like, just make sure your pool is sanitised. Okay, what is a sanitizer? How? You know, how much sanitizer Do you really need? And, you know, we have guidelines for that based on our philosophy that we've kind of developed over, you know, 25 years.

Mike Beatty 31:27 Yep, I guess he's just kind of showing Google look. We're legit. And also, here's the sources and you're just trying to help Google there's that whole eat thing, I guess, isn't it like expertise, authority and trust and stuff like that? Just

Matt Giovanisci 31:41 Google, you can you can do it without bragging right? You can there's a way to do it without going like, Oh, my doctor, like, okay, you know, like, you don't have to hire a doctor. You just don't. I don't know. It's really it's kind of like it to me. And when it comes to content, and Something I really can't teach. In like SEO, I have an SEO course and I talk about it. But there's this like, there's a matter of taste, right? You have to kind of know like, one you have to be like moral and to get to know like what you're doing is like a good thing for the for the you know planet and people that are reading it. And it also has to be like entertaining even though it's even though it's about algae. Like you can make it fun to read just like this, just like Mike did with profit first. Like he took an accounting concept which inherently is very boring, and makes it easy to read by telling stories. And by like just being like using fun language that's like more human language like not robotic, not very, like legal ease, no doctor speak, just very like down to earth. And I think if you can build a lot of trust that way, and Google sort of is smart enough to recognise that you don't really need to, like hack the system anymore. Yeah, not gonna be like good.

Mike Beatty 33:00 I think there's just it's just becoming really, really smart. Like, the more I learn about it, and the more I'd speak to people about this sort of stuff, there's just saying a very, very similar thing. You know that whole, get an order green light. Well, what's your take on getting the green lights on Yoast plugins and things like that? And you know, making sure you put it in the first sentence and the key word

Matt Giovanisci 33:19 in it up? Yeah, I was like, Yoast is a great tool for a lot of things. But like, no, we're not going to make everything turn green because we don't actually believe in that sort of scrutiny. There is an I this is so common in the SEO industry. And it's such a hard because it's like everyone wants a definitive answer, right? Everyone wants, how many words is my blog post need to be? It needs to be exactly 1500 words. It's like no, it can be doesn't know it needs to answer the question. That's the more vague answer that no one likes to hear. Because it's like, well, what does that mean? Well, if you can't figure that out for yourself, you're blocked. All kinds of things in life and so Maybe you shouldn't be on the internet creating content if you can't answer that question. So I think, you know, it's like I, I think it's it is nuanced, and it is just having that like developing taste. And I think you can develop it over time, go out there and read what is good, what do you like, you know, maybe you're the person who does like long form content, and that's really, you know, very difficult to read. Maybe you're into that, like, I know, people that are into that. They read like, you know, medicine journals, but that stuff is entertaining, and it's like, okay, and you're going to attract those people. And that's fine. I am not that way. I, I, I need things like dumbed down for me to use, I need analogies to understand concepts. And so that's kind of what we do. And I think it's it. We've gained a lot of trust. Because one, our site is fast. And what that tells Google is not only like will our stuff actually get served up on on, you know, 3g work, but that we actually care about making the site like we care about the site. Like we were doing it for the user. Yes, it has a you know, search engine implications. But really, how annoying is it to click a website and it takes more than two seconds to load it just, it's, you don't think it's annoying? It's a little bit annoying and so on. How long are you willing to wait

Mike Beatty 35:22 on that whole point? I have spoke to some people who have said a little bit of that just to sort of counter that argument, I guess is as long as it's not too long. It doesn't really make much difference because particularly again, I'm I'm sort of thinking more someone that's in like a startup phase or someone who's growing their website. I hear you know, people that are like literally getting no traffic asking me, oh, how do I optimise my website, XYZ or whatever? And they're like, you haven't even got any content out there or and stuff like that? And is how do you get prioritised? That How do you decide what is the most efficient thing, obviously, like you said, if you can do it from day one, then that probably really helps.

Matt Giovanisci 36:04 Yeah. And in the way you do it is just by uncomplicated the entire website building process. Like the more you should use more plugins you add, the slower it's going to base the bottom line. And so like, you know, what I usually tell people is, you know, yes, I have a theme fine. You can spend the money if you want to, but really, you need to pick the simplest theme like pick like the freest, simplest, like just this word, white, white background, black words, you know, like, there's nothing else you really need. And make sure that you and then the real, like, the real way to rank is, you have to write good words, and you have to make sure that you're writing something that's good that people are actually looking for if not looking for it. It's like did you even really make it and that's money lab. Money lab is is a website that has really good content, but does it gets zero search engine love because I am not titling my articles to be search engine friendly. And so it's like the only way that that content gets out in the world is through social media and other sharing things. Not that I have share bars on my website, people just kind of like word of mouth it. And that's the way I prefer it. I mean, I didn't, I didn't, I mean, I could absolutely make an SEO play and get search engine traffic. But I think most of my search engine traffic comes from people like googling My name or googling money lab, because they heard about it somewhere and they forget the website, you know what it was? And so, or, you know, they typed in a word that I don't even I don't even know why I rank for it. Like, I shouldn't rank for it. But you know, I've just done so much content over the years that like, I think I rank for like, fuck email or some like weird, weird shit. So it's like, oh, yeah, because I had an article that like mentioned those two words together as a bit. But yeah, so it is. I think I mean, you know, The research is, it's like, it's like, it's sort of like an insurance plan that you will rank for something. And then writing words is really just, it's really where like most of the work needs to go. It's going to be a forever job. So, you know, a website can evolve over time. You may work on it once a year, but you should be working on your words every single day.

Mike Beatty 38:22 Yeah. And so, that kind of leads on to like, how important is something like h refs, or like a keyword research tool of some sort? In your opinion? Okay,

Matt Giovanisci 38:33 I will say this. And I've been doing this for 15 years, for the first seven years, maybe eight years, maybe 10 years. And I'll say 10 years, I didn't use any SEO tool at all. Okay, I was kind of just, you know, using Google and typing in things and like, you know, kind of making like random guesses. And had I started using a tool like a dress in the beginning. It would not have taken me 15 years to get where I am, it would take me two, or one. So I think my biggest failure, and my biggest lesson was, research is kind of important. And I know it's an expensive tool, but it is worth its weight in gold. If you're if you're planning on making SEO like your your, like primary traffic play for your business, then you kind of you kind of have to have it. And there are other free tools out there. I mean, I don't I think you have to you have to use something like a traps personally. Yeah, and I wish I had I wish I had you know, it's like, it's a regret, for sure.

Mike Beatty 39:42 Cool. Yeah, that's good to know. Because, again, that's something I've had like different people have different opinions on and things like that, you know, some people just like, kind of like you say, you just type it into Google and see what comes up and then that's a key word that you can rank for. And I guess if there's not much competition, then yeah,

Unknown Speaker 39:59 but can work I think is the whole

Mike Beatty 40:03 is more, I guess it's gonna take more elbow grease and stuff isn't it's gonna take a lot more, you're gonna have to throw

Matt Giovanisci 40:09 a lot more stuff at the wall to see what actually sticks. You're gonna have to write that much better. You're gonna have to like, kind of be Yeah, I think so. And your website, too. I think another thing that I think is important, and I really didn't touch on is design. And I know a lot of people kind of say like, oh, who cares about design, and even not even five minutes ago that I mentioned, just get a theme with a white background and black words. That is important. But I do think the trust factor comes from how well your site is designed. And I don't mean over design. I mean, how simple like if you look at any of my websites, and you go on then you're like, this website looks like it's very looks professional, even though it's cartoony as like my logo is bubble letters. But I mean, again, like that, it's it's kind of hard to explain because it is a taste thing, but it's just like it's kind of like perfect The simple Yeah, and yet somehow that screams frost because I certainly see it in other websites.

Mike Beatty 41:07 Yeah, I think there's something definitely like the whole white background and black text is just a must, isn't it really but also just the cleanness of a website, you sometimes just see things were, you know so much in the sidebar or like, just when there's loads of ads, you know, like, if you could look on any recipe ever. I hate it. Yeah, I just never go on and eat it too. I would never order every website.

Matt Giovanisci 41:31 Yeah, so like, whenever when Amazon slashed all our Commission's, which is where I primarily make most of my money from, everyone kind of reached out to me and said, like, now's the time to start putting ads on your site. And I kept saying to them, what is what When did we go when is this 2001 I'm not when I'm not a new site. I understand that there's still money to be made there. You know, but there's still money in podcast ads too, but you don't see me running the like, create, you know, Create a bunch of podcast ads like I don't, I don't think that is such a web 1.0 way of making money. And I think there's so many better and more like user friendly ways to make money instead of going, like, instead of just like interrupting someone's experience with your site and, and, and trying to, in serving them irrelevant ads or even if they're somewhat relevant, like there's probably crappy design, they're probably JavaScript loaded. So they're just creating a bad user experience. Like it was, like, I know you've been on a website where you were reading something and the page just like jumped, you're like, what the hell just happened? Something loaded later and or an ad change and you're like, damn it, it's a bad user experience. And it makes you I don't read news sites, because they're so terrible to read. Yeah, it's like I just and or if I do read one, I do it on my phones. I can stick it in reader mode with with Safari. So it's like, I don't want to see anything else. I don't want to see the front In images, it's like give me the I just want to read the news when I want. So, yeah, I think it's a, it's definitely a way to make money, not my preferred method for the user experience user experience. And that's what Google wants. Google wants a good user experience for their people, because that's how they make money. And so I'm kind of helping them provide that,

Mike Beatty 43:20 right. So if you if someone's listening to this, and like, got a website up, and they're thinking, Oh, crap, I've got all these things kind of going on. I need to improve a PageSpeed and things like that. What is like a quick win sort of thing? What is something that they can do other than PageSpeed related? Is there anything else that they that someone can do to improve like, just get some more traffic from Google? What are like some little things that people can do?

Matt Giovanisci 43:49 If they want to get more traffic from Google, okay, here's a quick win. It's a quick tip.Okay.

Good. So if you don't already have Search Console, Google Search Console hooked up. to your site, hook it up, it takes two seconds, and let it collect that up. But if you already have it set up, go in there and look at search queries and pull up the search query by the amount of impressions and the position and what you'll find is you probably are getting a lot you're probably getting a lot of impressions on us on a page that you rank number seven for, right or number eight for and so you want to find keywords that are like on the precipice of of getting a lot of traffic and those finding those right and going, Okay, look, I reg, um, this this page is getting a lot of impressions, but it's not getting a lot of clicks. And the reason it's getting impressions is because I am number eight. So a lot of people are searching that term. They're scrolling down to the bottom at least and then they get they're seeing your post but they're not clicking it. Okay, but if you were in the top 123 positions, which, you know, it's already getting a lot of traffic because there's a lot of impressions on your low ranking page, then all you need to do is go in and like beef up that content. And so find that find those like, about to rank for like, if it did rank, you know, it would perform well and go in and like, Master like master craft that post, like, in the way that I would do that specifically, a very quick way to do that is Google that word, you know, Google that, that keyword, term or phrase, and just open up all 10 tabs, like every single thing in the top 10 or the top 20 open them up in all new tabs and scan the page and just see like the look for eight you know the headlines and sub headlines and look for the questions that they're answering. You know, look for like what they're talking about. Compile that all into a outline and what your goal is. is trying to do is take basically take the top 20 results and distil it down into an like a really, really well written really good story of answering a question exactly the way somebody wouldn't want an answered and using sub headlines to do that because sub headlines are crazy important like h tos h threes. So that's what I would do and see what happens I guarantee you Why not? No, there's no guarantees, but I will I will bet I'm willing to bet that if you pinpoint that which requires no as all free shit all free tools you could take that from say a number eight ranked number eight at least ranked number five and you'll get more traffic just by going up a couple of points. You know if you can get it to number three great to even better one obviously, kick ass but

Mike Beatty 46:51 what internal linking does that have it impacts on that sort of thing?

Matt Giovanisci 46:56 Yeah, but that's I yes. Yeah. I don't know, it's more strategic and just, you know? Yes, it definitely does. And and there's a couple of like frameworks, you could you know, when you think about content, you could you could think about content and a hub and spoke model, right? Where you have like a master, you know, best you know, how to use the French press is like your master posts, but then you have all these, like, you know, secondary and tertiary posts of like, you know, the best coffee to use for French press and all these little things and you kind of like, all link back, they could they kind of all linked to each other, right? You have this like master post that links out to all of them, and then all those like, you know, secondary, or tertiary posts, all linked to that one. Right. And so you create this like hub and spoke model. There is some benefit to that, because, one, you know, you're basically passing along the good. I think they call it link juice back in the day. I think I'm right, yeah. Where the idea is like, you have a page that ranks really well, so you want to link to a page that doesn't rank really well. So that That page can kind of like lift it up, right? There is some benefit to that. But I do kind of believe and I think you, I wouldn't look at it as, again, you're not doing this for the robots, you really should do this for the humans, right? Because the robots are basically becoming human at this point. So if you can create a post, and it makes a lot of sense to internal link to something else on your site, because it would be legitimately helpful for the person reading the current post, then absolutely do that. There's so much benefit to doing that. Just from a user perspective. Like Imagine you're reading a post, you're like, that was awesome. Like, I want to keep going, like I want, you know, you know, the effect of like Wikipedia, where you go down the Wikipedia hole, right? clicking links, like yes, you should absolutely do that. I don't know if I would necessarily focus on it as a SEO tactic. You know, meaning like, go through all your shit and fix it. You absolutely could. And I, you know, I know I have friends who've done it and it has worked for them. Another quick one you could do. And this is something that I've written about on money lab is do a content audit. If you're somebody with a large site, and you're not just getting started, you probably have a lot of bloated content. And it just needs to be deleted. And I've done it. I've done it on all my sites except for money lab, because money lab, every single thing I write is perfect. So that's a joke. But everything else I've purged and I've consolidate it and I've done this whole thing. There's a whole spreadsheet you can download and stuff. It's all there. But I've I've heard that so many people have told me how much that has worked after I've done it and even before I've done it because I have heard it and I was like I'm convinced I did it. Holy shit. I like 25% traffic bomb from doing like from deleting things, not adding anything. Why? Because it gets rid of

Mike Beatty 49:53 Okay, junk. Basically, you're showing Google our stuffs good.

Matt Giovanisci 49:58 Yep, yep, you're good. Kinda like best foot forward, you're also taking things and this just happens over time you know as you as you start writing posts, you're like wow, I have like seven posts on really one topic and so you take those posts you delete six of them and you combine the best of all of those posts into the bigger post and all of a sudden that post ranks for that plus all the other keywords you were trying to go after. Yeah, you know, so it becomes like this like massive thing which is why I'm not really like a hub and spoke kind of person I'm more of like a every single post should be like the fucking answer like them, like every answer to everything. And you do that over time, you know, not to me. A post is never finished, you know? Yes, it could be published. But every I mean, the way that I look at some University, the way I look at through Cabot and all my other sites, I look at them like textbooks, where every year we update the text. You know, every year we we we have a new edition of the website where like things have been added. To an updated and improved upon, instead of looking at our site as a magazine that will forever create issues that will just live in your fucking trash can. It's just like it's not, you know, and it becomes like this limit if you collect it every if I click that every homebrew magazine ever like I wouldn't have a house it would buy houses the fastest and I'd be a hoarder. And so but if I had like a textbook that I updated every year like a college student, it's like, Yeah, this one textbook kind of answers all the questions when it comes to whatever. Yeah, that's the way I look at it. And yeah, and that's to say, like, you know, there's new chapters that are added because new things happen. So it grows. It's a growing textbook, but it's like it's kind of also contained,

Mike Beatty 51:42 wet. Now, where can people get that? You said that you can, like take it from money lab? Is it like a freebie just like,

Matt Giovanisci 51:50 is it? I think it's a whole post on money lab that I wrote. I think it's probably called money lab.co slash content dash audit. It's probably that

Mike Beatty 52:00 Makes sense? I'll find out. I'll find it. I'll link back to show notes though or

Matt Giovanisci 52:03 Yeah, it's Yeah, it's exactly what it is, though just called the content audit experiment. I did this on roasty in 2017. And, uh, yeah, there's a I think there's a video on how I did it. There's like spreadsheets on how I did it. Like just how to keep track of everything. I did like a total like, overhaul. So I think we went from like, having I mentioned that we had 104 articles, and we ended up

like combining it down to like, 70.

Mike Beatty 52:33 Wow. Yeah. It must be so much work.

Matt Giovanisci 52:38 It's a lot. Yeah,

I mean, kinda yes and no, right? Because like mostly your delete and we still do this, like at some University. Every year we do an audit. Wow. It's like, Hey, we have this post that like, isn't really ranking. But But actually, the content and it belongs in this post that is ranking really well or like could be ranking really well if we we beef it up. And so what we'll do is we'll delete the post will will forward the old URL into the, into the new URL, because, you know, maybe it did get some traffic. And so we want to send people to the new thing, which is still relevant. And we're just kind of like consolidating and keeping, you know, assuming diversity kind of has like a 200 article. It kind of lives in like these 200 articles. And sometimes they come and go, sometimes, and they get bigger, or they get smaller sometimes, because we will even go and delete, like, sections or paragraphs or sentences because it's like, you know, why don't we add the sentence the sentences to it's a fluff sentence, it adds nothing adds no value to the, to the reader. And so we'll even do that. So we're always looking at our content and improving it, which always keeps our content fresh in Google's eyes without adding new stuff all the time, but like creating a brand new blog post, but you know, hey, you know, all of a sudden people are searching for, you know, index pools is a big thing right now because of COVID. Like people are buying pools. And we've never done any content on buying a pool because we're more for pool owners. But now there's a lot of people who want to become pool owners. And so what we're doing is saying, oh, wow, there's new thing that appeared because we look at the trends. We look at Google. And you know, there's a think think what Google is the name of the website. And then there's like Google Trends, obviously. And so we're, we have our finger on the pulse of what people want. And we're obviously we get a tonne of emails and stuff. So we keep track of all that. And oh, okay, now we actually aren't we have to create a new blog post because a new thing emerged, you know, maybe a new technology emerges in the pool industry, like one year, all of a sudden variable speed pumps became a thing. It was like a new technology and it's like, wow, okay, we need to kind of look at this seriously and like write a blog post. And what's great about some University is that kind of an authority. So when we write about the thing that we're in the space for, we rank pretty quick.

Mike Beatty 55:00 So it's great. It's really cool as this really cool way of looking at it. Honestly, I could just keep picking your brain and asking you like, I'm very aware like I've kept it for quite a while already. Just a couple of really quick things I want to get. Okay, first. First is backlinks. I think I saw that on your course you just sort of said, You've probably tried like guest posts in email outreach, skyscraper, social media, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm sure so many people listen to this guy. And you have tried that. Yeah, I've tried that. I've tried that. And what I what are your thoughts? What is the answer? What are

Matt Giovanisci 55:39 you lumped in scribe skyscraper, which I do like is a strategy Yeah. I don't,

Mike Beatty 55:45 backlink stats in skyscraper like just always makes sense to me. Have you ever like you know, just getting writing stat posts and things because people love stats, and they're going to link back to stats because it's useful for loads of stuff.

Matt Giovanisci 55:58 I'm good with that. It's creating content. But I'm not okay with is asking for people for backlinks and I'm not okay with it doesn't matter. Google doesn't need it. Yeah, they don't need any. It's I mean, there's anything we learned they're fuckin AI. So why do they need votes? They don't need votes anymore they are they are though. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I will say that if you are like if you want to go and rank fast and big, you know, maybe that backlink strategy would work and it would work well. To me. It's not a long term plan. It's obviously not something I want to align myself with as a person. Like, I don't want to be the company that's like man, some University keeps emailing me asked me for a backlink like I hate this company. Like I don't want to be that guy who's spamming people for backlinks. I'm not sure. So I write good content. I get backlinks, all natural, and I'm cool with that.

Mike Beatty 56:47 With that. And last main thing is, I want to I want to go back in time, I'm really like, we haven't spoken a lot about your backstory, but so you've been doing this first. 16 years did you say about a year since 2000? Or 2006? Somewhere in that area?

So what were you doing like just before that

Matt Giovanisci 57:08 working in a pool store?

Mike Beatty 57:09 Oh, cool. So right, let's go back. Let's go back to that. Did you enjoy that? Yeah, I love it. Awesome, right? Well, that's probably not the best but anyway, let's go back to around that time. So you still like running the actual business and everything knowing everything that you know now if you could go back to like, before you actually started this, the actual websites from university and anything like that, what would just be like a couple of pieces of advice you'd give yourself if you could go back sir around that time.

Matt Giovanisci 57:40 get better at writing

done and and get better at writing in like, do videos right away. Awesome, man talk about video at all, but like, yeah, it's just, uh, I think I'm good at like, it was I was always good at video as a kid like I was into it, you know, in my home movies and stuff. So I never really used it as a superpower and way later in life. So yeah, I would I would say, like get better at writing because I failed. And I didn't go to college. I failed because of English, like English classes. I failed every English class really, except for creative writing. And

yeah, I need to get better at writing. And so I wish I did that earlier.

Mike Beatty 58:17 Cool. Great advice. But yeah, no, thank you so much, Matt. I really appreciate the time. And I've learned heaps even if no one else has, so go.

Matt Giovanisci 58:27 Really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, man.

Mike Beatty 58:33 So you can just tell Matt has so much wisdom and SEO knowledge and just general online business wisdom in general, so I genuinely could just chat to him for ages and keep learning new things. So I just want to summarise my five key takeaways from the chat and hopefully that will help summarise it for you as well. Number one is that he said a website if you think of it as a pie chart, think of it as 75% content And then 25% speed, basically speed is really important for a website. And he says if he can get it under two seconds, then that's awesome. But you know, anything you want as quick as possible, basically, because that just gives you a bit of a competitive advantage. And he did give some tips in there. Obviously, you've got things like that your theme and your hosting that can have a big impact from day one. Or you know, you can even change to a another hosting or whatever, at any stage. But two things that he said for my website, which I'm guessing could be quite helpful other people's website as well is to use a lazy load plugin, and he recommended WP rocket is about $30 a year I think he said I'm not sure I haven't looked but I'm gonna look into that hundred percent

Unknown Speaker 59:47 and get it straight away.

Mike Beatty 59:52 Hey, it's Mike from the present day now speaking, and I have done the speed tests and I have used Wi Fi rocket. And by the way, just get it. It's ridiculously simple and just improve your speed by a whole week. Just to give you an idea, I think my PageSpeed overall went from 4.4 seconds to 1.58 seconds loading speed. It's insane. It's crazy. And just you know, the plugin costs $49 to get initially for one website, if you want to find out exactly what I did more information about this, go to the show notes that make time online.com forward slash 60 back to the Old Bay. And then also CloudFlare when I've heard of the CDN, to NAS, I'm not techie at all I don't really know what it is, but I've heard this from numerous people now and I need to do it, it's free. So get that and that and I'm going to see what happens to my PageSpeed and I'll let you know. Number two is to focus on writing, finding low competition and high search terms. And obviously, like Matt said, he did it for about 10 years by himself just using Google and finding things. But once he started using h refs, and again, I've heard about h refs a lot from people. It sounds like out of all the keyword research tools, h refs is probably like the most accurate one because every single even href, I'm guessing, I'm not sure I haven't really used it to be totally honest. But all of them are never 100% accurate, because they're sort of going on past results and things. So there might be like this new trend coming in, and it has no idea about the traffic they're about to get. You know, that's just an overly simplified example, but it sounds like href is one of the best ones. And Matt has found it really, really helped for his business, and it's helped for him. It's, you know, some guy getting like half a million page views every single month, then I'm guessing it can probably help other people kind of starting out. It is a hefty price tag. If you don't know anything about it. I think it's around 100 dollars a month. So it may even be one of those things that you could potentially use for one month, I think even like a $7. I don't know if it's seven day trial or something like that. It's something that you could definitely sort of use. Try it out, get as much keyword research as possible. But you're obviously going to have to go into it with an idea of what you are going to research and things like that. And again, you know, that's where Matt's course was probably going to help because I don't know what you would need to do when you're inside the number three is, here's a really quick win. I liked this one a lot. And I've had this sort of thing before, but go to Google Search Console, search queries, find the number of impressions or sort by impressions, and then find articles that are like position 789 10, that sort of area. So things that are already getting lots of impressions, but not many clicks. And that's normally because you're at the bottom of page one. Typically may not always be the case, but find any other Like that, because if you can get those that are not getting any clicks, but they're getting loads of impressions, that's a sign that you can go and really try and beef up that article, as Matt said, you know, try and make it way better really answer the question and try and get ranked in the top three positions. That's the ideal because that can make a huge difference in traffic. I've got the numbers in front of me but just like as an example, I think it's something like page number one in Google get some like 30% of the clicks the number two is that 10 and a, you know, seven sick and it is a real big drop off right at the start sort of thing. The first three get some of that night. I've got the percentages way wrong there, but it's something like the first three get 80% of the clicks, you know, the whole 8020 principle. Basically, that's the aim there to get a quick win. Number four, is go to money lab.co forward slash content. audit. And that is going to give you max content audit that he does once a year. And it involves deleting posts, putting other posts into other posts is getting rid of your Deadwood, basically. And kind of as he said in the in there is that you can it shows Google that your website is good if you don't have loads of posts that are just not being ranked. If every single one of your posts was ranked in the top three of Google Google's like wow, this but this website is amazing sort of thing. And

Unknown Speaker 1:04:33 they're gonna

Mike Beatty 1:04:34 rate it better for other posts that you do in the future. So that's a really good idea to do a content audit, especially we've got loads and loads of articles 100% I need to do this. I know I need to do this. So I'm going to go there. And that's going to explain it for you. And then number five is to always write for humans don't get out of this idea of keyword stuffing and Get an order green lights for Yoast and things like this. I've heard this numerous times as well. I think it's, it's not a bad light if you're a complete beginner and you don't have any idea how to do any keyword research and how to write for SEO and things like that is not a bad way to just get like a bit of a template and an idea. But once you've kind of got the process if you've written more than 30 articles using Yoast, you will know exactly what Yoast is asking you to do. So just naturally try and kind of incorporate it in. But you don't even need to worry about keyword stuffing or anything like that anymore. Google is smart enough to realise and recognise what your article is about. So write for humans, stop writing for robots. I'm just rambling now, but there was so many useful takeaways. You can get all those links. So I even met the link I just mentioned, just go to make time. online.com forward slash 60. That's make time online.com forward slash six, zero, and I'll give links and everything to what matters has talked about in the podcast and hopefully that will help. Take care guys. Thanks for listening in to this episode of Make time online. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. And please take a moment to write a review for our podcast in the App Store. keep changing for the better guys. Take care

What are your main takeaways? What can you implement today? Any other questions? Drop a comment below...

P.S. Mine was 100% the WP Rocket plugin. It took some time to tweak the settings but I was amazed at the speed improvements! Check out my WP Rocket review here to see how I used it & if it's right for you. 


About the Author

Mike Beatty has built a passive income online whilst working as a full-time PE teacher without any marketing or technical experience. Learn more about how he's done it here.

Mike Beatty

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  1. Thanks for sharing your idea Sir, currently my website has the problem of drop of the visitors too much after google master tool to discover the error link, but now fixed already, the visitor still not back to the normal and I feel worry about it. I will follow your article to solves my problems and hope it will be better.

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    Sean Sorath

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