SEO Login & Google Smashing Affiliate Sites with Lukasz Zelezny

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: SEO Login & Google Smashing Affiliate Sites with Lukasz Zelezny
Host: John Wright
Guest: Lukasz Zelezny
Published: Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:53:00 +0000
Duration: 53:55

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: And another part of the story is obviously trying to go extra mile with the content. And what I call this, I like to call this like breaking the wall of text. Today, creating a wall of text, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that no one will care about because we have access to AI, is so easy.

[00:00:23] Lukasz Zelezny: And you, I feel like we reach the wall where one people, a bunch of people is generating tons of content. And then a bunch of other people will start to generate creating AI that will be shortening that article into the bullet points because nobody wants to read 15,000 words. I'm John Wright, and you're listening to Affiliate BI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by Stadstine. Welcome to the Affiliate BI podcast. Today we're chatting with Lucas Jalesny. He is an SEO expert. I've been following for quite some years.

[00:01:01] Lukasz Zelezny: He's been, he speaks at a lot of different conferences around the world, and he's the founder of SEO.London. Lucas, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure and honor and yeah, warm greetings to everyone who is listening to us. All right, so we're going to be meeting this week in Brighton, and I want to start off this chat by talking about a message a friend sent me. He said, by the way, this Google update is killing us. And this is what a lot of my friends are sending me as private messages. And it's kind of something I'm starting to see a pattern of in the last couple months. Do you think there's so many updates and disruption that it's risky being an affiliate?

[00:01:40] Lukasz Zelezny: And would you say like maybe to not have all your eggs in one basket? Definitely what you said about not having all the eggs in one basket is the very, very important thing. Because the problem is that if something works, then there is a risk that people will start scaling up to the crazy level. And when the people will start scaling up to the crazy level, then Google may need to react. So something that was absolutely fine in the past, not necessarily will be all right in the future.

[00:02:20] Lukasz Zelezny: And there is a big surprise. So I am the last one to say like, hey, full speed on because it works, because I know I'm too long in this industry to believe that it will be forever like that. I remember when people started selling links and everyone was like, oh my gosh, now SEO will be so easy. All that, not like that. It's not like going like that. And this is one of the many examples. So definitely diversification is the point. And second thing, predominantly people who are saying like that,

[00:02:57] Lukasz Zelezny: kind of trying to go and cut the corners. So people who may want to have a result by night and doing lots of stuff that they believe it works. And it may work for a short term. And then unfortunately, the update is coming and there is a wake up call. Thankfully, these people always are very creative and they will find another way. But you know, when you reach a certain age, you want to sleep well, and you don't want to worry like what will happen tomorrow if there will be algorithm update. And this is what I am.

[00:03:32] Lukasz Zelezny: Would you say to be devil's advocate of what you said about not putting all your eggs in one basket? I've seen some sites that they try to have a product-led mindset where they're focusing on making such a good product that it sells itself, that it leads to natural SEO. Would you say that more sites should also maybe double down and try to find a way where it's like, can my site be more than just information that everyone else has? I think partially I would add here that even on the local level, caring about the brand name, caring about the brand recognition will be a critical part.

[00:04:10] Lukasz Zelezny: Of course, there is a big problem right now in 2024 with finding the right brand. I have always this story like somebody saying like, what is your brand? Meet. OK, meet.com. No, no, no. We are meet. OK, we are meet.com. No, no, no. We are meet.io. Jesus. No one will ever remember that. On the other hand, I was travelling around my local villages in Surrey in England, and I saw I think it was Cobra Construction, a big snake.

[00:04:48] Lukasz Zelezny: And I went to the guy who was on the van and I was like, dude, is this your company? I was like, no. But I was like, dude, whoever owned this company is a bloody genius because you can't forget this. Even like the local building company, you know, Cobra Construction. And you remember that. So I think that is a part of the story. And another part of the story is obviously trying to go extra mile with the content. And what I call this, I like to call this like breaking the wall of text.

[00:05:23] Lukasz Zelezny: Today, creating a wall of text, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that no one will care about because we have access to AI. It's so easy. And I feel like we reached the wall where one people, a bunch of people is generating tons of content, and then a bunch of other people will start to generate, creating AI that will be shortening that article into the bullet points because nobody wants to read 15,000 words on the website. However, there are some brilliant examples, and I'm always telling this money-saving expert,

[00:06:02] Lukasz Zelezny: which is kind of affiliate website. They are some credit card. It's a price comparison website here in UK. And when you type balance transfer credit card, or bad credit credit card, or something, something, something, something, they always first or second, and their pages have 15 or more thousand of words, but there is like FAQs, leads, deals, newsletter, tips. And it's like sliced into so many things that these guys must have tremendous time on page

[00:06:41] Lukasz Zelezny: and tremendously low monthly as well. So there is a way, but it is not something that you can do in one night. Yeah, it makes sense. I think it also applies on the context. Like in my example, I just started to do long-form content for affiliate program categories, the niches. So I basically said, okay, what does the competition have? They're having 3,000 to 5,000 words. So I said I need to at least compete. And what I'm trying to do to be a little mindful is I use Surfer SEO for the content writing, but I say Surfer tells me to write this, but I'm like, if I'm the expert, I need to write something that's not what Surfer is telling me to do.

[00:07:20] Lukasz Zelezny: And so I'm trying to put that one extra thing on there that's, like you said, it's going to keep them on a little bit longer. Absolutely. And there is also, I will give you like a very simple example. If you need to present the data, why don't you load this permanent into Looker Studio and then embed that Looker Studio in the page? That's already something that is breaking up this kind of wall of text. Another brilliant, fantastic tool that I love to the bone is Lidoo. Lidoo.com. You may think the name maybe is not that descriptive, but Lidoo.com is actually not a lead generation.

[00:08:00] Lukasz Zelezny: I mean, partially is, but it's actually a bunch of snippets, something similar to OptinMonster, but less intrusive and more creative. For example, inline chats, inline chatbots, inline quizzes. You know, so you're scrolling naturally the page and then you have like, you know, and let's say you're doing a glossary or knowledge base, and you can start embedding that snippets into the text. And yeah, they can start generating these. Notes taken.

[00:08:36] Lukasz Zelezny: So I know you, or at least I think I know you as more of like a technical SEO, and we're talking about a lot of things that almost seem counterintuitive to tech. And I want to jump into, you know, your strength of talking about programmatic SEO. And maybe if you could just shed some light on what is it for the users that aren't familiar with it, and maybe how would you do it in the right way? Absolutely. I think, you know, there was no better time for me when then I was working in Zoopla. Zoopla, I understand is an equivalent of Zillow in US market.

[00:09:13] Lukasz Zelezny: And in here in UK, we have three leading portals or maybe four property oriented. It's Zoopla, it's right move, it's on the market. And let's say it's a prime location. And these portals actually are doing a fantastic programmatic SEO, which means they really don't care that much about being first or second on keyword property, London, London property. It's nice to be. And anyway, if not then, then who else can be first or second or third? I mentioned four biggest one.

[00:09:52] Lukasz Zelezny: So, you know, the same with price comparisons. If you take price comparison, then you will get the biggest price comparison. But what is more important is that Google is used by people like the way that they are searching properties in sorry, or properties in and they are giving a specific postcode or properties in specific boroughs properties in Chertsey, sorry, Chelsea properties in Patney properties in London. That's quite the properties in, you know, a full on or they can go into specific street.

[00:10:30] Lukasz Zelezny: And if you will go a clever way and you will first of all, if you have enough inventory, because there is there is no shortcuts, I was working with a few people who are like trying to have programmatic SEO and they were working actually in the doesn't matter. One industry that they have very little inventory, let's say two, three hundred items, and they wanted categorization to be so broad that every time they were adding one category, multiplying by number

[00:11:07] Lukasz Zelezny: of geolocation, it was almost like 10,000 additional pages. And I was like, listen, you are repeating over and over and over the same content that cannot work. It's not 2004 or 2005 when you could do this. But on the other hand, when you have a Zoopla and they have not only properties that are actually on the market, but also archive of the properties that have been sold, the archive of the properties that you can check the prices and so on and so on and so on. Then it start making sense. So this is one of the examples of very well done programmatic SEO.

[00:11:46] Lukasz Zelezny: Another can be like a use which did back in the day broadband in. So people are broadband in Manchester, broadband in Liverpool, but they can go as small as Brogan Wigan or Great Yarmouth or Yovil and so on and Cherty, Adlstone and so on and so on. And every page was containing local, a very comprehensive list of providers that are available in the area. Also the prices and so on and so on and so on. So from the user perspective, it was very useful. They were not doing like, you're looking for Cherty.

[00:12:25] Lukasz Zelezny: We actually don't have a data, but the closest one is Agam, which actually is like 10 miles away. And let's convert this into our, just wanted to make this easier today just for our American listener. I was with something in Nashville. I was in Memphis. So if you would write broadband in Memphis, you don't want to see the closest location, which is Nashville, which is 250 miles away. Because the owner of the website is saying like, well, we don't have providers there, so we will try to cover it up. You can do this on the small scale. But if you will start doing this over and over and over,

[00:13:05] Lukasz Zelezny: and at the end of the day, most of the pages are covered up with the small selection of data that we only have access to, it will not work. You really need to have tremendous amount of data and very clever way of tax implementation of this data. And maybe a quick question. Do you think it's important to have like any type of content on these pages? Let's assume that rather than doing the 10,000 pages

[00:13:31] John Wright: and also not the opposite of like just 25 pages, but we're going to do hundreds. Like would you say it's worth anything from like doing AI content or automated scripts or even like taking a single paragraph and saying, the reason why this page exists is because, like you said, here's an example. This might not be what is you're looking for, but it's close enough. Once again, if you're doing this on the selective number of pages, let's say once again, I'm living in church in Surrey, and let's say there is no data for church. We can do this trick and say like, you know what, we actually don't have data for church, but the closest one is Adelstone.

[00:14:09] John Wright: So we assume that it will not be very different if it's about broadband prices and so on and so on. But if this is about the properties and someone is specifically looking for properties in church, we're going to show that person on the property in church page,

[00:14:25] Lukasz Zelezny: listings from Adelstone or EAGAM or HITRO or HANSLOW, that doesn't make sense. In terms of the text, this text again, I'm trying to avoid going into... And here is the paragraph for SEO reason. If you really want to make it work, we would need to show something that again is giving added value for the people. It can be a simple thing. Church is the town in Surrey with 15,000 people and that many internet users.

[00:15:04] Lukasz Zelezny: The cover of the internet is 95% and so on. So again, today having this data and moving from spreadsheet into Google Docs and then placing API from OpenAI,

[00:15:22] John Wright: it's a brilliant, brilliant idea. Writing a prompt, create one paragraph of SEO-optimised text which will include following details. One, two, three. So in other words, we have a name of the town, column B with the, let's say, how many persons of internet user, what is the population, what is the average price and so on and so on. Back in the day, you would be doing this manually and we were doing something which was called best place to leave on use, which many, many years, 10 years ago. Although we see whole content being prepared by content writers that took ages and we get only like 150 pages.

[00:16:01] John Wright: But actually, when someone was looking, is Edinburgh best place to leave, we were ranking in the top. Okay, I'm not going to lie. You mentioned something about SuperGap analysis, I think in our last chat and it's on your website.

[00:16:19] Lukasz Zelezny: I'm just getting started with content gap analysis. So if you can just tell us what is this? Absolutely, that's my kind of golden nugget or some silver bullet. What I, first of all, what is gap? Gap, if you know SEMRASH or HFs or any other tool which is kind of industry standard, there is something which is called gap analysis. So it analyze what are the key, I always explain this to the client. It shows what are the keywords that your competitors at the moment rank on and you are not,

[00:16:58] Lukasz Zelezny: but you probably would like to. And this is the best explanation I can do. However, we are talking about SuperGap and these tools that I mentioned always have a limitation. You can go up to, let's say five or maybe 10 websites when I like to go with 20 or 25. And that's a very massive spreadsheet, a massive spreadsheet, spreadsheet that weight 40, 50 megabytes and you really need to have a powerful machine to open that spreadsheet, but if you will do and you cannot use Google sheets for that, you need to have an Excel. When you will do this,

[00:17:35] Lukasz Zelezny: then you can pretty much see through the whole industry. And now, first thing, I don't need to know the language that I'm dealing with. I was doing this in Arabic, I was doing this in Hebrew, I was doing this in Russian, I was doing this in different alphabets, in different languages, of course, for English is the best, but immediately you're getting keywords that are kind of industry standard. They may not say anything to you. For example, what is path testing or what is,

[00:18:10] John Wright: let me see,

[00:18:14] Lukasz Zelezny: I don't have an example right now, but like path testing recently, this is something about housing and certification of house electricity and all that stuff. And I don't need to know what really that things means because data is telling me, but I'm going extra miles. So what I'm doing, I'm not only checking where they are ranking, I'm also checking if my client doesn't run. And this data, I'm pulling from the search console API. So I'm building a data studio spreadsheet, data studio dashboard,

[00:18:50] Lukasz Zelezny: which allow me to export up to 1 million keywords, not 1000, 1 million. So I'm exporting that and then I'm doing VLOOKUP, I also using the similarity in the URLs, grouping keywords, not semantically, I'm not thinking, I'm just looking if a bunch of keywords are triggering same URLs, sorry, same competitors. And the URLs are consistently the same. I know that this whole group should be used on one specific page.

[00:19:25] John Wright: And at the end of the day, if I choose competitors right, then I know that I will fall into keywords that Google really expect me to write about. So I'm able to get extra couple of steps ahead of all the process. And rather than scratching and pulling my last few hairs,

[00:19:50] Lukasz Zelezny: I can tell, listen, that's all the topics that you should go with. And I think that they are right because of ABC. And the funniest thing is, when you're showing a gap analysis, especially in the language you completely don't understand, and the client initially is like, it's all wrong. I was like, why? Because we're ranking on the keywords. I go, all right, now check. And they are checking and they cannot find themselves. They are ranking on maybe different keywords, which are not even that similar to what is in the gap. And they are like, hold up, we're not ranking on the keywords. It's like, yes, you're not ranking on the keywords.

[00:20:28] Lukasz Zelezny: And that's the reason why these keywords are in the super gap analysis. And you're getting a super accurate keyword, if you will, later, I'm doing like a pivot table, and so on and so on. And when you will say like, I want to see only that groups that exclusively are triggering four or more competitors.

[00:20:51] John Wright: So at least four competitors from the group of the selected one must rank in Google top 100 results. So you completely exclude all the noise, all the brand names, and so on and so on and so on. And you get super generic keywords. So I guess it's similar to what I mentioned before about, using surfer and surfer says, here's the keywords you should put in. And then I'm going, well, I have my industry expertise, so I'm gonna add that layer. And I have used Ahrefs for the gap analysis on some of my keywords. And I think I've done a good job in researching my competitors, but I think you're right.

[00:21:29] John Wright: I think there's kind of like, well, what else could we do? And I think that's something I struggle with. And I think a lot of people struggle with this as well. I can give you one extra anecdote, which I believe can be very useful for everyone who is really actively doing SEO and probably facing that.

[00:21:50] Lukasz Zelezny: There can be a situation where the client or the employer is saying, listen, in next 12 months, I want to go on this website from zero to 100,000,

[00:22:05] John Wright: or 200,000, okay, fair enough. Because our competitors are there. And then you're doing gap analysis, you're presenting that. And then you hear, oh, no, no, no, but this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this is not relevant. And I'm like, why? Because indeed it will rather not be converted. I was like, hold up. Now I'm trying, it's almost like this triangle where you can choose two and not three. And there is like, hold on. So either you are strictly care about conversion and nothing else. And you're really looking on, ha, we have like 10 person conversion rate.

[00:22:44] John Wright: Or you're going more relaxed with the traffic and you're going broader because competitors actually are broader and you're trying to reach that 100, 200, 300,000. It doesn't cost you money if your website, or maybe except of the server, maybe transfers, your website will go from 100 to 200,000. It's not PPC. And some people are still thinking the PPC kind of way. But you cannot say like, I want 200,000 visits, but not from that keywords. And I want the conversion to be on that level and, and, and, and, not the end of the day,

[00:23:21] John Wright: you know, the whole Jenga tower is collapsing because there is too many conditions dragging into different directions. We'll get into bottom of funnel content and SGE in a bit later with some of the other questions. Absolutely. I wanted to jump in cause when we were chatting last week, you gave me a lot of insights about the different types of page titles you can create for blog and page content. And then it made me think, I'm like, my, my titles of my podcasts, episodes I don't think are optimized. So I wanted to take this opportunity to rip a couple of part and maybe get some ideas of one, how do you think I could change them?

[00:24:00] John Wright: And two, maybe, maybe even using chat GPT of how I could actually just dive right in and actually just feel confident that I'm actually got a better idea. Absolutely. So you see, we need to step down a little from strict SEO and stop thinking about this demand and so on and so on and so on because I believe that your podcast is getting lots of attention through the social media. And then the main difference I can see over years is that, you know, I will never forget

[00:24:35] John Wright: Basz Fitt article, which was, I'm originally from Poland and the article was like 23 reasons why you should never go to Poland. I was like, what? Click. And of course there was like super buy, I was like first, Poland have very ugly mountains and the beautiful photo of Polish Tatra mountains. Yeah. And you know, and this and that, I was like, clever, clever. Now that topic would never work for SEO. Nobody would ever write 23 reasons why I should never go to Poland.

[00:25:13] John Wright: Why not 25 reason or 17 or maybe six. Yeah. And this is what I was many, many years ago explaining to one of very big client I was working. It was a cosmetic industry client, lots of websites. And they were writing 10 reason why you should,

[00:25:34] Lukasz Zelezny: 10 ways to take care of the skin during the summer.

[00:25:42] John Wright: I was like, it's all wrong. It's all wrong. Nobody's searching like, give me 10 reason why I should take care of my skin during the summer. No, they searching how to avoid sunburns and they will search. They haven't been lucky to visit that article. How to deal with sunburns.

[00:26:04] Lukasz Zelezny: Yeah. And what is a good UV filter and so on and so on.

[00:26:13] John Wright: And I'm always teaching everyone who's working with me. Listen, what and how. I had the presentation many years ago in Chicago with Vicks.

[00:26:25] Lukasz Zelezny: They invited me to talk to their customers.

[00:26:28] Lukasz Zelezny: And I was showing the charts. How Wells Fargo, Suntunder, BBC and Shopify.

[00:26:37] John Wright: How many articles which start from how and what they have. Also best. But actually, as we're talking about this, you know what is the biggest unigram ever searched in Google?

[00:26:54] John Wright: Like the word, yeah? Yeah. Lots of people will say how. Actually, how is the second? So what is the first one? Want to try to guess? Did you say it was what? What is I think third? Why? No. When? I was thinking the same for many, many years. And actually, CEO of Accuranker, Henry, had a brilliant research. And you would never believe what is the biggest unigram. But it makes so much sense when I will say it. You ready? Yes. Login. Login.

[00:27:35] John Wright: You know why? Yeah. Because people are Facebook login in Google enter. Gmail login enter. So the login is the most searched part of the keyword of the unigram of many, many, many keywords. Would you ever, it's so simple. Yet so difficult to guess. I never, I would never guess. When Henry asked me, I was like, how? Nah, how is second? I mean, a lot of ideas in the affiliate marketing space with the affiliate program reviews. And I've seen a couple of examples of this where it's not massive searches, but it's highly intense.

[00:28:12] John Wright: Like program name plus the word API. Because they're looking for the API to connect that. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant idea. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, like one more thing to add on top of that, how also project into other languages.

[00:28:30] John Wright: In Polish, how writing yak. In Russian, kak. And if you go to a keyword magic tool,

[00:28:40] John Wright: and you will write how, or you will write how in any other known language.

[00:28:49] Lukasz Zelezny: Among the funnest are like how to reach. And then there is a, you know, like lots of different towns and cities. Yeah. Okay, then I will take only one podcast title and we'll work on improving it. But you know, actually about podcast, one more thing, one more thing I wanted to add. If we will step down from this year, because I just went a little around. I wanted to mention, because you mentioned the AI. And we were talking last week, and I was telling you my concept of making people feel more attached. Your podcast is global.

[00:29:28] Lukasz Zelezny: So you may have a challenge, but whenever I started doing this for a couple of years, whenever I'm going on a conference, somewhere to the town, to the city, somewhere in Paris country, I'm trying to choose the topic of my presentation that will resonate with the local audience. And for our Indian audience, I don't need to introduce Bahubali. A big hero, a big movie about like, you know, a superhero somewhere in the ancient India. So my presentation in 2019 in Bangalore was become a Bahubali of organic marketing.

[00:30:07] Lukasz Zelezny: And I had a full room of people.

[00:30:10] John Wright: When I was in Bulgaria, I had a presentation about some more local stuff

[00:30:18] John Wright: that will resonate with the variant audience, which I absolutely loved the bone. I love Bulgaria so much. And I said, do a marketing like Madarsky, Connick, or something like that, which is Madara horse. Also something from 600 and not the mini and it's in the historiography of Bulgaria. So from one side, you know, it's a bit of paying respect to the audience that you know something about the country that you're coming to. You are not completely blue. And from the other side, you know,

[00:30:53] John Wright: it also have this kind of a little humoristic aspect and it's like, oh my God, you know, let's go for this presentation. Of course, a bit of concept is needed because sometimes something can be sensitive, something can be maybe not fully appropriate and so on and so on. So I would recommend to our listeners to always check this. Yeah, I try to learn like basic phrases and even learn in a language. How can I say like, you know, I wanna learn this language and learning it in like Serbia and or Catalan and those people, they freak out when you just say it. They're like, what?

[00:31:32] John Wright: Yes, yes. Goes a long way to respect. And on top of that, just you know, like a charge GPT can be very helpful if you write a prompt saying like, when I was speaking in India, my presentation title was becoming Bahubali of online marketing. When I was speaking in Bulgaria, my presentation title was becoming Madarski Konik of online marketing. Now I'm going to Serbia. What would you suggest? Give me five examples. And you're getting brilliant examples. You're going to Wikipedia, you're checking

[00:32:07] John Wright: and it's like, yeah, you know, spot on. Note taken. Okay, so this one example is, so here's the title. How to sell SEO with the apprentice winner, Mark Wright. So I interviewed Mark Wright, who was on the apprentice UK 10 years ago. And he had a really interesting insight, which he said the reason why he felt he was good at winning the competition and also winning SEO clients was that he said, you know, people don't like to speak in what's like keywords that are associated with the industry. It's like, as soon as you go deep into that, you know, you lose them.

[00:32:46] John Wright: So anyways, I figured how to sell SEO with the apprentice Mark winner, the apprentice winner Mark Wright would have been good, but it doesn't seem to be my best converting one or best ranking. Yeah, I would say that it's great for social media. Again, when I would see that potentially I would click and I would go there and so on and so on and so on. Unfortunately, Google and the keywords that people are typing there, either are very specific long tail and type very rare. So I call this ultra deep, like with the Hubble telescope, ultra deep field. So this is like ultra long tail.

[00:33:26] John Wright: Or we need to go with something way less creative, but more often search. Very good idea is, and lots of my colleague in the industry is doing this, they're looking for the keywords which have relatively high search volume and very low keyword difficulty. So, you know, how to be a SEO consultant podcast.

[00:33:51] Lukasz Zelezny: I bet there are from top of my head, there are some searches. Depends what is important for you, because again, that topic I set right now on social media may not be that popular. But again, if it's about the rankings and especially if we will choose SEO, then, you know, even you can go like super no creative, best SEO podcast ever. Yeah. And I bet that there will be 1000 searches around the world monthly, because, you know, that's how people search.

[00:34:28] Lukasz Zelezny: So the creativity is not always the best

[00:34:33] John Wright: if it's about SEO, unfortunately. And this is what I sometimes need to explain to some clients, that we need to play the game that the rules being set not only by Google, but also by the users on Google, the way how they are searching. Yeah.

[00:34:52] Lukasz Zelezny: I have this example of keyword which is searched a lot.

[00:34:59] John Wright: It doesn't make any sense. No credit check credit cards. In UK, anybody who is doing, who is applying for credit cards, I think again, I wouldn't don't take, I'm not that into the industry, but I believe everyone who is going into credit card and is applying for the credit card need to go through the credit check. No credit check credit card is automatically a product that doesn't exist. And lots of companies is writing about this. First to educate customers, second to say like, listen, that thing doesn't exist. But we believe that you may have some troubles

[00:35:36] John Wright: with your credit score. So we have some cards that maybe sit up for you. Maybe the cards that are good for people with lower credit score and will help you to adjust this credit score. So we will never again search no credit card, no credit check credit score, no credit score. Yeah, you know what I'm trying to say. Yeah, yeah, I cannot even repeat that. Yeah. So to summarize the last question of the best title for a podcast, we're gonna call it SEO login.

[00:36:13] Lukasz Zelezny: That would be the best. I might try, it's worth a shot. Maybe that should be the episode. Try to go, SEMrush login.

[00:36:22] John Wright: Oh, it'll work perfectly. I bet there is like 30,000. I will not be going to SEMrush to check that right now.

[00:36:30] Lukasz Zelezny: By the way about programmatic SEO, they also doing fantastic thing. Type a keyword trust, trust pilot, probably. Type trust pilot SEMrush or SEMrush trust pilot. You will see two websites. Trust pilot of course with their SEMrush rate reviews. And then you will see SEMrush with trustpilot.com information as one of the thousands of pages that they have. Yeah, they've got a lot going on. I've been studying what they've been doing recently. So I wanna jump into SGE, which everyone says it's coming and it's gonna turn everything upside down.

[00:37:08] Lukasz Zelezny: What do you think is gonna be the change or the future of search and how should people prepare themselves for this disruption? I have a very reserved enthusiasm to this,

[00:37:26] John Wright: mainly because it's not really about implementing this and now SEOs are in troubles. It's more about the users and about Google business model. If that would be that lucrative and prominent and such a revolution, first of all, we would already have SGE and second of all, being implemented this and Quora to some point implemented this and very often there was like so many nonsense. I know that maybe GPT-5 or GPT-6 will be even better,

[00:38:04] Lukasz Zelezny: but it's more about the behavior of users. Very often when they are searching, they're looking for a form of document that they will be reading. And this is so deep down in the perception of internet, the talking to the machine that is answering and also the writing this, it takes so much time. It's not yet ready to be used every day and so on and so on. At the end of the day, if that will be implemented,

[00:38:42] Lukasz Zelezny: I don't see any problem because we will adjust as an SEOs, people will adjust. I think the biggest question is that how Google will be monetizing this. I bet that they will find a way to monetize this, but I also believe that they probably will be trying to postpone this for as long as they can because it completely make upside down the whole monetization model on the Google side. And I had this conversation. I remember this with my manager in HomeAway

[00:39:19] Lukasz Zelezny: in London on 24th floor of Portland house in Victoria, London in 2010. And we were talking exactly the same, except the AI was then voice search. We done, we done, everyone was like, we done, voice search is taking over now. It will be completely different. Fast forward, we are in 2024. So that's how many years? Well, it's maybe 14. 14. Yeah. 14 years.

[00:39:55] Lukasz Zelezny: And frankly speaking, nothing has changed that much.

[00:40:01] John Wright: So maybe even like, you know, because charge of these already two years and somehow, you know, people didn't start abandon Google for charge of duty, you know? No. So I would be very careful with these things. Of course, the new generation, people who are right now 10 years old and mothers and fathers are still limiting access to the devices because of various reasons. Some of them are very serious because you need to have a control. You cannot let kids to use internet freely

[00:40:41] John Wright: because there is too many bad things online that they could see. But maybe that generation will come fresh and they will say, like, I see my niece who is 11. And she is very often using the voice search. But of course they are in minority. There is too many older generation, which prefer typing because of the privacy reason, because of the, they get used to and so on and so on. So I don't think that it will be, they will press the button and everything will be like, oh my gosh, what now? But do you think that maybe things are moving towards social proof where people go to trust me

[00:41:20] John Wright: because I get to see other people talk about SEMrush or, you know, it's like your restaurant review. It's like, I actually wanna get, you know, this is why I think Reddit and TikTok and the video sites are becoming not just their own part of search, but people are kind of going there going, I want community, I want real people. And I wonder if this is gonna be a weird problem for Google search moving forward. Not to say that Google search is gonna be gone, but I think it's gonna be not as dominant. I would say that this is more likely than SG taking over by night, yes.

[00:41:58] Lukasz Zelezny: I was reading articles, again, it's a double side coin because from one side, I believe, Google decided to promote Reddit more. Now people are saying like, oh, you see, if we would be like Reddit, let's be honest, I think that, you know what I mean? It's always like the egg and chicken problem, you know?

[00:42:19] John Wright: So of course, there is, my generation is missing definitely like the time when the forums would be a big thing.

[00:42:30] Lukasz Zelezny: Facebook groups took over forums and they have not the same functionality, but it's already so many years that people almost completely forgot about forums in the same way like they forgot about IRC or ICQ or AOL messenger, that's probably things that young generation didn't even heard about before, or BBS, even, you know, this kind of things. You're talking about record players for some people now. Once again? You're talking about record players for certain people. Yes, exactly. How do you use this? What is this? Yeah, yeah, the symbol of this cat has the save button.

[00:43:11] John Wright: Like why you would do this in 2024? But yeah, like, you know, I also feel like that Facebook and all that hype on social media is a little decreasing. I think people are fed up, fed up of seeing, again, I don't want to sound grumpy, but sometimes it looks like this movie, Idiocracy, you know? I don't know if you have a chance to see the Idiocracy movie if you didn't, is the movie about the guy who, you know, who is moving into, by an accident, he's ending up in 2,500 something.

[00:43:51] John Wright: And you know, it's completely mad world where people cannot almost do anything because they completely forget all the knowledge and he's technically the smartest guy on the planet.

[00:44:06] Lukasz Zelezny: Despite from the fact, in our world, it would be absolutely average here. And you know, you're going on Facebook and scrolling like a zombie and you're like, well, I am even doing this. And I personally started going more out, meeting personally people, having chat with them, going to my local restaurant, having a steak, having chat with the staff if the restaurant is empty. It makes me so more happy, you know? I stopped fighting for presence, reach on LinkedIn. And you know what? When I'm posting something, this is predominantly like, have a happy Sunday because it's nice weather

[00:44:46] Lukasz Zelezny: and I'm taking my car and I'm standing somewhere, I will click photo, rather than juggling and jumping there and fighting that. If I will put a bit more colorful slides on LinkedIn, I will be more click by, you know.

[00:45:00] John Wright: And the same on Facebook, yet another, do you want to scale up your company to 6789 figures? If you do, buy my 2399 dollar course. So you can scale up to eight, nine figures. Yeah, yeah.

[00:45:17] John Wright: And then you're saying like, this is not worth it, this is not worth it. It's different with Google because the intent is much stronger there. You're going to Google and you're searching for something. When you see the advert, and then on Facebook or on Twitter, you're scrolling based on what? Based on because I'm in England, why do I see tickets for some football match when I've never been on the football match? Only because I'm in England or because there are other reasons. And Google is different when you're typing something, someone, you know, but everyone knows what I'm trying to say. Okay, so I'm pretty big on bottom of funnel content.

[00:45:56] John Wright: I've been studying this probably a bit more in the last six months. And I kind of wonder if there's kind of like a connectivity between SGE and bottom of funnel where maybe things like what is SEO, it's like, well, anyone could answer that. Like, you know, SGE could answer that for you, anything could. But I think bottom of funnel content is maybe what people should be creating. So just wanted to throw that back your way and get your take on Bofu. Yes, I am a big fan of bottom of content and you know, all the forms of glossaries, knowledge base. And what I really, really, really like is something that I call anti-snapshot.

[00:46:35] John Wright: So it's a reverse to the snapshot. Snapshot for me is like looking at the keywords that are ranking already very high, but not yet first, optimizing, and getting to the top. Anti-snapshot is something that looking on the keywords which are ranking on position 30, 40, 50, 60, and knowing that even the best optimization and even the best link will never push this keywords up to the level where they will start getting traffic. The main reason is because the content is not aligned

[00:47:12] John Wright: fully with the intent, yeah? So for example, what is path testing

[00:47:23] Lukasz Zelezny: and higher path testing inspector that's are in my opinion, two separate pages. If someone is typing higher path testing inspector and they will see that what is path testing is ranking position 50, never try to optimize for this higher path testing inspector because you will never get there. If someone is searching for higher path testing inspector, they know perfectly what is PAD or path inspection.

[00:47:55] John Wright: So they don't need this knowledge. They want to know what details, they want contact form and so on and so on and so on. And looking at the search console, ideally through the eye of Looker Studio, you can easily identify keywords which have zero clicks and let's say a couple of thousand impressions because they are in position 40. And very often you can find that there are keywords which doesn't exist in any external tools like SEMRASH, HFS, SE rankings, Sanuto, search metrics. But you are bringing the keywords and even the client or the employer or your blind manager can say like,

[00:48:34] John Wright: ah, we're not going with this because there is no search volume, hold up. There is not like there is no search volume. The keywords doesn't exist simply in the tools you know,

[00:48:45] John Wright: but that doesn't mean I have a hard data from search console. So that is definitely the way I would go. And so last question I ask everyone, which is what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence? I think because of the fact that you can write the content so easy or you can generate the content so easy, it will be more challenging. And what I said about money saving expert, balance transfer, credit card, money saving expert, that's the way to go. So the pages or other side of the coin going with very specific niche. I was not doing an affiliate,

[00:49:23] John Wright: but I launched one's website and it's very easy to run and you can generate tons of traffic. The problem is where, how you will monetize. So I will tell you the niche. When I was sitting on the bench one day, many years ago and I was like, what are the keywords that everyone is searching for? And nobody cares about the CEO. And I found one, which is how to cook broccoli, tremendous amount of searches. Everyone is every day searching about how to cook broccoli. And second, religious phrases, everything related to religion.

[00:49:59] Lukasz Zelezny: People are typing to Google about some really theological questions, but also about some historical figures. Doesn't matter what religion we refer to, that works of course in different countries and so on and so on. Difficulty, almost zero. Amazing surgery. Of course the challenges help to monetize this, but this is just an example. So yeah, I think very specific niches or being first in the new niches or going extra, not mile, extra few miles to make this pages really different

[00:50:38] Lukasz Zelezny: and not a wall of text covering keywords that people took from, make your magic go from so much. I think that's something that seems to be a pattern. Most people don't wanna go, not just the extra mile, the extra few miles. It's almost like that's what a lot of SEOs I talk to are saying. And when I ask them, I'm like, would you be worried being an affiliate jumping into a space? They just say no, they just laugh. They're like, it's extra work, but when you do it, you just start separating yourself from everyone else. Yes, absolutely.

[00:51:10] John Wright: Lucas, thank you so much for doing this. I wanna pass it back to you and ask or yeah, ask how people can get ahold of you. Absolutely, here I think below my video, there is SEO.London, nothing more after. .London is a top level domain. So SEO.London and you can also find me on LinkedIn where I am every day, but I'm not posting that often because again, I'm not anymore bothered by this kind of rat race there. But if someone wants to contact me, I think these two places are the best. Or find you at the next conference

[00:51:48] John Wright: where you'll probably be speaking anyways. Absolutely, absolutely. I'm always posting this on LinkedIn. So yeah, who knows? I've been in a couple of conferences we sent the quite cool. I am going to Brighton as well. So yeah, I'm not speaking this time in Brighton, but whenever I will be somewhere and then, and at the end of the day, there is anyone who will be self-promoting. If anyone wants me to come and talk, sometimes I'm going to the agencies where I can sell my kung fu of my SEO kung fu.

[00:52:25] Lukasz Zelezny: And the nicest thing I could ever hear was in Poland where I was on Takao to Pro, that's Shimon Swovic agency. When after an hour, we had a small break and the training was really kind of like a conversation. When I started saying like, maybe some of the kung fu will not be exactly the same that Shimon is teaching you guys, but that doesn't mean that me or him, someone of us is wrong, he's just different kung fu. And I really respect this guy. He's also my good mate. And when we went out, we went for a cigarette

[00:53:03] Lukasz Zelezny: and they came to me and I was like, this is amazing. And I was like, what makes you feel about this? I was like, dude, this is not something what you can find on YouTube or on Facebook group, you really sharing your 20 years kung fu. And that was very nice feedback. And that made me feel that sometimes coming to agency for half a day or a day with a break for a lunch, you know, maybe work. All the reason to go to these events. Looking forward to seeing you there. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for having me and hope to see you soon. Thank you to the affiliate BI podcast.

[00:53:40] Lukasz Zelezny: I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. That helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners.