Transcript
June 30, 2020
ANNOUNCER: [00:00:11] Welcome to Search Talk Live, with search engine optimization and marketing experts Robert O’Haver and Matt Weber. Brought to you by Pixel Cut Labs.
Robert O’Haver: [00:00:20] All right. Welcome back to another episode of Search Talk Live. I’m your host, Robert O’Haver, along with Matt Weber, the co-founder ROAR! Internet Marketing in Orlando, Florida. Matt, how are you?
Matt Weber: [00:00:30] I’m doing great. Robert, how are you today? It’s a beautiful day here outside of Orlando.
Robert O’Haver: [00:00:34] It is a beautiful day. So today, we’re going to be talking more about content marketing. One thing that you can do at a lower cost than paid advertising is to get that organic traffic – honing in on things in slower times like this. So really coming up with good content and bringing that lower cost in traffic to your site is key. Wouldn’t you say, Matt?Â
Matt Weber: [00:00:56] Definitely.Yeah. People are looking for reach, you know, in tough times like this, every part of marketing gets re-evaluated. I think it’s great because now people are looking at absolutely everything, and organic search is one of those things that’s being reexamined.
Robert O’Haver: [00:01:08] Absolutely. Today, our guest is Fernando Angulo. How are you doing, Fernando?
Fernando Angulo: [00:01:13] Oh, great. Today is a beautiful day here in Prague, a sunny day!
Robert O’Haver: [00:01:17] So welcome to the show. Why don’t you tell our guests a little bit about yourself?
Fernando Angulo: [00:01:21] Oh, sure. Definitely. Well, my name is Fernando Angulo. I’m head of communications at SEMrush. I’ve been working for SEMrush already; it’s going to be nine years next month. And, of course, I was in the digital marketing world for more than 10 years. So I was working for different companies. Actually, I have my own personal project that’s growing, with SEO, with paid advertising, with social media. And I entered this team in 2011 working, not for SEMrush, but for another project that we have that is called SEO Quake, which is a toolbar that gives you several metrics around your Web site, about the links, about the keyword stuffing, about the keyword density, and so many others metrics.Â
Robert O’Haver: [00:02:13] And does that tie into SEMrush’s tool?
Fernando Angulo: [00:02:18] Oh, yes, definitely. Right now, it’s fully integrated. If you have SEMrush account, well you don’t have to have it, but it’s better if you do, we’ll have, for example, different scoring’s, different metrics to see how good is that site and of course, you’re compared to just how good they are in your own industry. So right now, they’re really integrated. Back then, we had around two million downloads on Mozilla. Right now, between Mozilla, Chrome, and other browsers, we have more than 40 million downloads. This is sort of our brand awareness. So from there, I was working for SEMrush in customer success, in sales, then in marketing. Every single job that you can do in the marketing team.
Matt Weber: [00:03:05] As far as being an evangelist for organic, you are probably one of the most traveled speakers we’ve ever had on the show before the virus. You traveled quite a bit, correct?Â
Fernando Angulo: [00:03:13] Oh, yes. That’s right. Before this situation, I was doing basically three or four countries per week. My personal record – I was doing three conferences on the same day in two different countries. So, yeah, it was quite a lot. Right now, I’ve learned to live in one single place. But again, I’m doing a lot of online. Everything is online now. And it’s kind of more comfortable for me. I really get used to just having calls, not going to the airport, but I still miss the airports. Right now, it’s going to be more difficult to go through security, right?
Robert O’Haver: [00:03:49] Yeah, so let’s dive into it. I wanted to go a little bit back to the birth of content on websites and how it’s really kind of, you know, improved over time. I mean, you know as well as I do, you’ve been around long enough that content used to be just SPAM-central. People could throw a paragraph of the same keyword a million times and rank for it. Remember those days?
Matt Weber: [00:04:15] Those are the days!
Robert O’Haver: [00:04:18] Yeah, but content, I mean, blogs came along in a way that was really meant for people, but it was also meant to get the search engines to come to your site more often instead of having that static content that really never changed. You were able to have a blog where you could add stories, and create interest, and rank those stories so that not only do the search engines hit it, but you get actual people that want to read those stories. So that’s really how it’s kind of progressed. So it’s more about the person than it is the search engines like it was back in the day.
Fernando Angulo: [00:04:52] Oh, yes. In the beginning, well, it was basically like an open diary. You could write a book about what was happening to you, as you did with a piece of paper. Basically, you build your Website, no matter if the interface was awful. If you have only a couple of pages there or it was not a personal domain, you could be using public domains inside of other domains. So you were using subdomains or folders, or whatever. So nobody was thinking about the technical part of blogging at the beginning, just about the content. So what is the story that you want to tell – your story? But as you mentioned, the time has passed. And right now, it has become really technical. If you are not working the technical part of your Web site, your visibility is going to be lower than it could be if your Website is not really fast. Visibility is going to be affected. Your rankings are going to be affected. If you have too much code, too much HTML code, and you don’t have much content out there, also, your ranks are going to be affected. So everything went very technical. But it is still about content. It’s about solving people’s problems. So it’s about answering people’s questions. Actually, I believe you remember a couple of years ago, people from Google were telling that search engines are changing from “search engines” to “answer engines.” So basically, people are searching for answers to their questions about how to do something, how to create something, and how to buy whatever. Right now, I believe last year, Larry Page was saying that search engines are changing a lot, and we’re thinking of changing that answer engine into “getting-things-done-engine.” So the search engines are going to be reminding you what you need to do, and what you need to buy. So there’s going to be a more interactive web out there.
Robert O’Haver: [00:06:53] Yeah. And in your eys, how do you see that? What do you think is going to happen?Â
Fernando Angulo: [00:07:01] Basically, most search engine results, for me, over the last two or three years are these little fellows called “Featured Snippets,” and all the other search features are good because they are enabling the power of voice assistance. So if you’re working with any kind of technology related to voice recognition, you will see that “Okay, this technology’s working really well.” But in order to make an A.I. work well, you need to have tons and tons of data. And companies like Google, or Apple, or Facebook, they have that data, and they can provide a really strong source for empowering A.I. So for doing that, we research how Google right now is supporting their own voice devices. And we saw that the main source for voice search results is these guys – the featured snippets. So basically, it’s around 86% of the answers that we got from a voice search query – So let’s say I want to buy Chinese food or call my doctor or go to the doctor next to me. Whatever the search query is, the voice query, Google is giving those results from featured snippets. From there, enabling the power of answering your search queries to activate them. Then this time, it’s not so far if you know what I mean.
Matt Weber: [00:08:40] So are you saying that you think Google is architecting the search engine results in a way that will help them get deeper into the voice search business through their own appliance?
Fernando Angulo: [00:08:51] Oh, yes, I believe that’s the ultimate goal, to have a really powerful system that can help you think about other things that are more important than doing your normal work activities. So if you are, I don’t know, a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer or whatever that you can do manually if Google or any other A.I. can do that for you can remind you what you need to do or how you need to implement it, how you need to improve that process, they’re going to do that for us, of course. And how are we going to be enabling it? Right now, we are feeding these A.I.’s with all the data, with all the knowledge that we have. Actually, I was amazed by one of the latest research that Google has launched. It was based on how people are actually acting during this quarantine period. And they were just publishing information about every single country, about the location of every single person, of course, with no names, all anonymous data saying, “Okay, there is 10% of people who are going to their jobs. 5% percent of people who are going to parks and 65% of people are staying at home. So they have all the information already from all the people who own any device or GPS. And basically, if you have a mobile device and you have your Google maps, or you have any other Google product, you already are part of their data source, so you have already provided all this information. And where are you based right now? It doesn’t matter. The only thing is that you are using any Google product, you are already feeding their database.
Matt Weber: [00:10:36] That’s super interesting because you’d think at the end of the day, this is all they’re telling us SEOs what to do that will ultimately help them sell more Google homes?
Fernando Angulo: [00:10:46] Well, that’s my personal opinion. But I believe as well that when people from Google are talking, they’re basically not talking to SEOs, right? They’re talking to a different public. Sometimes it’s very hard to understand what they’re saying from an SEO perspective because we want to know more. We want to know their ranking factor. We want to know what we need to do. And they’re trying to hide a lot of things from us, to not tell the whole thing. Because it’s a secret, it just needs to be kind of complicated for it for everyone. But I believe that they really want us to give us all the information. And at some point, they’re just going to be predicting what a user wants from their story.
Matt Weber: [00:11:37] Wow.
Robert O’Haver: [00:11:38] I wonder what implications that has. As far as, does it really give, you know, other Websites once it’s locked in on that particular site that everybody favors, what opportunities do the other sites with better content have?
Fernando Angulo: [00:11:55] Well, if we see the latest Google update of their algorithm, more than 90% of them are related to the quality of the content. So we see, even if in the latest core update on the sixth of May, it was also related to the quality of the content. So if you have content that is answering people’s needs, people’s questions, if you have good sources for that and you’re linking those sources, so you need to have really good external citations there, you will be doing good. But also, you need to share some additional information based on research. So you need to give your sources. So that’s basically – I think if you’re in the, for example, the health industry, or news industry. But I don’t see how that’s efficient if you are in the travel industry or the hospitality industry because it’s there, right? You have your own location. But for most of the cases, for the situation that we’re living today, if you’re in the health industry, you need to be a 100% trustful resource. So the content that you are providing needs to be really trustworthy, needs to be original, and of course, all the research that you have there, if you are saying that, “Okay, the next vaccine for the COVID-19 is this,” you need to support that with something really big, right? So all these changes are basically made for the quality of the content.
Matt Weber: [00:13:34] What advice would you give to someone who has a service that’s kind of a commodity – a plumber, an air conditioning repair company, or a pest control company, where the consumer just needs it, and they need it now. They’re really not looking for any depth of content. How does that type of business provide the type of content that you now say the algorithm is favoring more heavily?
Fernando Angulo: [00:13:54] Well, basically, for a plumber, or let’s say any other related profession, that they are not really into digital right now because they are the classical services that you can find in any store. All that stuff has changed with this situation. I believe all the digital transformation that should come the next five to 10 years, that’s something that is happening now. All those people need to think about the main questions that users are entering in a search bar. For example, if you need a plumber, what would be the questions that people are entering into Google, for example, to try to acquire those services? Around that, I believe that you can find more than 1,000 or maybe 10,000 search queries from there. Let me check. Oh, yes. I have around 800 questions, different questions that people can ask about that. For example, how to how to hire a plumber, where to find a plumber, what is the price of plumber services? Those questions are really good if you are building your own Website. But I will definitely recommend using three key questions. So first of all, to understand how trustful you are, you need to reply to the question that start’s with “what is” – what is the name of their service, the name of the product that you are providing, of course, what is your plumber service? You need to have that in a paragraph explaining what the service that you are providing is? What is, I don’t know, Fred’s plumber services? What is that? Answer that question. The second one is how to – how to use those services, or those products that you are providing, how to close a deal with these guys. Whatever how-to that you have, you need to have that content already on your Website. And the last question, which is a really good one that you need to have if you’re a plumber, of course, is where is. And with the answer to that question you, of course, if you have your map and your webpage that’s good. But if you are just creating content, basically using in the title, “where is Fred’s plumber office? You can have also featured snippets with all of these three questions: what is, how-to, and where is, you can have featured snippets but for your own brand name or fo your own services. So I will definitely suggest starting with those three questions.
Matt Weber: [00:16:38] Fantastic. Good advice.
Robert O’Haver: [00:16:40] What if it’s more like your local citation type of thing? It would be important to have that kind of stuff in your content as far as, you know, “plumber near me.” I know that’s all location-based search queries. I would like to add to say that, you know, having that local citation and type of content as well is important.
Fernando Angulo: [00:17:00] Oh, yes, definitely. If you are mentioning your name, you need to mention your address, your phone number. That’s what you need to have. Number, address, and phone. And so if you’re in Google My Business, that’s the foundation of being with the local citation, yup.
Matt Weber: [00:17:19] As you travel and you meet local, small and medium-sized business, is it your sense that most businesses make the mistake of looking at their own Website in a vacuum and they just look at themselves without looking at the competition that they have to get past and get beyond on a Google search engine results page?
Fernando Angulo: [00:17:35] That’s something that happens all the time. It happens all the time. And I was sure that traveling from one country to another, I was sure that I need to ask this same question. And I was asking basically in most of the countries, the last one that I remember was in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam for a small group of people, business owners, I was asking them if they had acquired, if they had tested the services of their own e-commerce business. The result was pretty depressing because only two or three hands went up and the rest, there was like 100 people in the room, the rest, they didn’t even try to acquire something from their own stores. So what we’re talking about, you’re selling something, but you don’t know the pains of the user. You need to check first, then provide the service. If you are thinking only about the selling, about closing the deal, that’s not a good sign that things are going to be good in the next couple of years for you, because it’s about the user. It’s about the experience. And it’s about the service. Yes. Basically, it’s a common situation in every single country. Even most of the most of the business owners, they are not trained in their own services. They don’t know how good their experience or user experience is, and that’s something that obviously needs to change.
Matt Weber: [00:19:07] So if you were creating a plan for a typical business, who’s right now, in let’s say average position eight for their really important keyword, non-branded and they want to go higher, give us just a simple three or four-step plan that you would offer them. Here are the four things you want to do in priority to get up higher on that Google search engine results page.
Fernando Angulo: [00:19:25] Well, there is a structure that I live in. I really love to use it.When you are creating a piece of content, you need to you need to think about that as a separate project. So you are creating a blog post, let’s say. The reason that you are creating this blog post is to rank. It is not because you need to do this just for the sake of creating content. You are creating something because you want to rank, and you want to rank higher. First, okay, you think about the keywords or the longtail keywords that you’re going to be using. Because when you are posting something, when you’re creating a piece of content, you’re not going for just one keyword, right? The more keywords, the better. In some cases, I saw one post with 10,000 keywords. As a result, they are really amazing. So the more positioning that you can have from one single post, the better. For doing that, you need to do your keyword research. Understand what are the questions that can be included there for getting featured snippets. Once you’ve created the piece of content, you need to be able to support it with different other strategies. So the second part here will be, you have an email list. Send that post to your email list. Ask your audience to do something – post a comment, share, or whatever the action you want them to do. The second, in this very second step, you need to use several strategies—first, email blast. Second can be great podcasts on that. Create a video on YouTube about that that is linked to that post. You are working with infographics, Pinterest, for example. Also, publish that and put a link to that piece of content. So the more resources you can interconnect with your piece of content, the better for creating half of the featured snippets. I believe this is the main goal for a piece of content that you are publishing because from there, you can see the quality of the content that you are writing, and you can have several older results. First of all, brand awareness, visibility rankings, and at the end, you will have new users going to your to your webpage. So one piece of content is not one hour. It’s not three hours of work for us. For example, at SEMrush, one piece of content is around two weeks. The first week is research, put in their data asking influencers to quote about that related topic, creating designs, putting out their webinar, training a video to support that between Facebook Ads to promote promoted that in Google Ads. So it is an entire project in order to go for your main keywords.
Matt Weber: [00:22:26] That’s pretty insightful. That is really insightful. So the take away here is, for companies that struggle to come up with ideas for content, take the ideas that you have and repurpose it, and put that content in multiple places to get the maximum amount of value.
Fernando Angulo: [00:22:40] Yeah, the more support that you have from your channels, the better results you will achieve.
Robert O’Haver: [00:22:46] Absolutely. I would also recommend adding schema markup. It goes a long way in helping you rank for those featured snippets.
Fernando Angulo: [00:22:54] Oh, yes. If you are using schema markups, that’s a sign that first, you are using more technology because you need to use codes there to do that. And of course, you are giving Google just a sign that you are the best result for that because you have solidified that schema markup, the site links, the map, or whatever it is, it’s really good to have.
Robert O’Haver:[00:23:24] Absolutely.
Matt Weber: [00:23:25] Hey, I want to stir the pot a little bit Robert and Fernando because we’ve had a couple of folks on the show with different opinions. We’ve had a couple of folks say, listen, don’t go for those featured snippets on your most important keywords because they’re not going to get to your Website. And now you’re not going to get any other organic listing on that page if you get the featured snippet. And then there are other people say, no, you should go for it, because at the very least, you get brand exposure. If your keyword is so important to your business, it’s the number one keyword that you’ve got to win, do you really want to waste it on something that’s not going to generate a click to your Web site? Robert, what are your thoughts?
Robert O’Haver: [00:23:58] I have to say it depends on the business. If it’s an e-commerce site, or a legal service, or plumber, I wouldn’t say I would rather have the organic listing and, you know, obviously the local three-pack. But if it’s a blog post, more informational type stuff.
Matt Weber: [00:24:17] What’s your thought, Fernando?
Fernando Angulo: [00:24:18] Oh, that’s actually a good point. And I really agree with ‘it depends on the type of business.’ But I will also say that if you are working for corporations, for big brands, and you’re not anymore interested in traffic if your main goal is not traffic. So, yes, go for the featured snippet because you want to build brand awareness. You want to build trust. You want to support your high results not because of the traffic, but because of your exposure. But if you are starting and are using your transactional keywords for that, you need to be smart. Of course, you need to have that clip. So it depends on the strategy that you want to achieve. For banks, electrical companies, insurance companies, I definitely recommend using a featured snippet. For e-commerces, they are promoting 3000 products. I will not recommend to use a featured snippet for each product. For their model of business, yes. But for their products, no.
Robert O’Haver: [00:25:22] We both agree on that one.Â
Matt Weber: [00:25:23] When you look when you look at Google Suggest Robert and Fernando, here’s a theory for you. Are we going to see LongTail keywords go away? Because when you look at Google, suggest they’re now kind of telling what’s the next best keyword for you to focus on? And users are clicking on these Google Suggests, so they’re not authoring or creating their own queries anymore. They’re just responding or reacting to what Google suggests. Have we seen the end of the longtail keyword because of that?
Robert O’Haver: [00:25:51] I think a certain percentage of it, maybe, but I wouldn’t say it would completely go away.
Matt Weber: [00:25:55] What’s your thought, Fernando?
Fernando Angulo: [00:25:56] I need to agree with that because, for me, it’s just common sense. When you are using the Google Suggest, well, that’s the auto-complete, right? It’s the same thing.
Matt Weber: [00:26:09] Yes.
Fernando Angulo: [00:26:12] Isn’t that only for playing or for creating games, or for parties? But when I want to use it for something specific, Google autocomplete is not helping me out a lot because the longtail keyword is way more complicated. But it will be good to see what is the first upcoming words in that sentence for the autocomplete? To check, that is basically really easy. But I’m not sure that that is something helpful for a business, for example.
Robert O’Haver: [00:26:49] Yeah, and I’ve always found too, as you’re typing out that longtail, you’re almost to the end by the time it actually gets it right. So, you know.
Matt Weber: [00:26:57] Yeah, yeah. But look how much it’s changed, though. Remember, back in the day when you would start typing in all the Google suggest would be the same words that you typed, right? They would all have the same words. But now you look at Google suggest, and it’s going to suggest queries that may or may not start with the same words that you typed.
Robert O’Haver: [00:27:12] It’s getting smarter.
Matt Weber: [00:27:13] Yeah. Yeah. Fernando, what do you think is the most overlooked ranking signal by the average SEO, the one that has the impact that people don’t spend proportionately the right amount of time on to get their content to rank?
Robert O’Haver: [00:27:27] Can you hold that question real quick? We have to take a break for the messages. We’re going to have words called, “Who Influences the Influencer” after these messages.
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Robert O’Haver: [00:30:43] All right. Fernando, it’s time for, “Who Influences the Influencer?” We want to know who influences you online or offline. Whoever, wherever it may be. But it keeps you up to date in the industry, besides the wonderful tool that you use.
Fernando Angulo: [00:30:58] Oh, yes, we have tons and tons of data, of our own research. Actually, inside of the company, the CEO of the company is actually not a very well-known specialist or influencer. His name is Oleg Shchegolev. Basically, the ideas of this guy are really impressive. It’s all about the audit. It’s all about what they want. We need to build it. We need to be so flexible to create a service that is going to be solving their problems. And we have so many focus groups; we have so many people helping us with the products. You know, with an army of around 300 developers working daily on innovations, experiments, you can have a lot of wins, right? Quick wins. And of course, you can have mistakes as well. So one of the people from my company, of course, he is the owner of the company. He was inviting me, I believe that was nine years ago, my first month in the company, to read one book. He recommended me one book that I think I’ve read that 11 times already. And I met the author last year is “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. I went to his workshops as well. I was sure that the things that he’s actually recommending in the configuration, the setup of your daily tasks, how you can organize your personal and professional life, just writing it in a piece of paper, your thoughts, and creating the next step to each idea. So an idea without the next step is useless. You need to have every single time that you have an idea, the next step for getting things done. So I will take this to these two people, these two experts, on my list.
Robert O’Haver: [00:33:02] Very good.
Matt Weber: [00:33:03] That’s great. And, you know, when we were talking before the show, I was wondering how you keep so organized and get so much done with your immense travel schedules. Now you’ve given us the secret. Give us the title of that book one more time.
Fernando Angulo: [00:33:15] Yes, it’s GTD by David Allen. GTD means Getting Things Done. Getting Things Done. Oh, yes. It’s amazing. So amazing. So easy to do. But again, it’s so easy to do that. You can think, oh, my God, this is to easy.
Matt Weber: [00:33:30] Fernando, what do you think is the one ranking signal that is most overlooked by SEOs, the one that has the most impact, but proportionally they don’t spend the most amount of time?
Fernando Angulo: [00:33:39] Well, I will say it is something that is not very new, but it is something that I will definitely out there that needs to be overlooked by SEOs. That is, the HTTPS. Yes, all the SSL certificates that need to be in place. Why is that? Not because it’s really a ranking factor. At least Google is not saying that. We had several research based on the correlations between HTTPS and their ranking. We saw some results, of course, correlation is not causation, but we saw that basically, if you have your Website, that is not HTTPS, and you want to have some acquisitions to sell something from there, people are just not going to do it. And they are going to be losing your trust. And that obviously affects user behavior and obviously affects your final results. So having HTTPS and not problems, not any problems with mixed content, so not a single URL inside your Website with HTTPS will be really, really great for your rankings. Starting from the correlation perspective between trust and user behavior and security, of course, which is the main part of this.
Robert O’Haver: [00:34:55] Yeah, I’d say anytime you’re taking down someone’s personal information, you should have it secure. Or even if it’s just name, address, phone number, it’s important.
Matt Weber: [00:35:04] Agree. Let’s talk about that user-centric signal that Google now seems to be emphasizing, particularly with the new core Web vitals. Fernando, do you think now with Google spending so much time talking about the user experience and user-centric signals, are things like backlinks going to be devalued because of what’s happening on the page and the user satisfaction is becoming valued to a greater degree?
Fernando Angulo: [00:35:27] Well, I believe that’s something that is not going to change in the near future because they’re just going to have anything else to change that. And that’s one of the major signals just to see if your site is really authoritative if your Website is really good because other people and other Web sites are mentioning your site. So backlinks, I don’t think that Google is going to rid of them in the nearest future. I was checking how, for example, other search engines like Jambix or Bing, we’re working with their own market equation. So at some point in 2013, I believe Jambix, they were getting rid of their backlinks system because it was really a mess. But they returned to that three years ago because there are no other signals that the backlinks are a major, major signal. It was a mess without backlinks. It was a less mess with backlinks.
Robert O’Haver: [00:36:28] I’d have to agree with him on that. I think that backlinks will always have an important place because obviously Larry Page came up with the idea and it’s been the best so far.
Matt Weber: [00:36:39] But, yeah, they seem to be doing a lot more, though, with was the user satisfied with this piece of content and trying to measure what the user’s response was when they got there. And that seems to be placing a heavier role in ranking now. What happens to the user when they get to the content now? Fernando, what’s the most interesting research that SEMrush has done so far this year that surprised you, that the outcome surprised you?
Fernando Angulo: [00:37:03] Oh, we have the latest one that we did actually one month ago. It was based on Google manual actions when Google is going to a Web site, and they penalize it for doing black SEO stuff. We were researching around 1000 Web sites that have been penalized with a manual action. And we found several similar stuff on them. First of all, of course, are links that were from no natural sources. Then we have similarities inside of the pages that we’re promoting. But products, services, experiences, basically. Yeah. If you go to SEMrush, you can see the Google penalties, the manual action research held by SEMrush. You will see there all the manual actions and how to try to fix all of them. Because we also found in the comments that a lot of businesses, they are really afraid to report something to Google because they have taken it manual actions on a few URL. Of course, they say these are the URLs that you need to improve. So they need to go to a site and do a data backing audit to change the text. But they don’t know exactly where it is or why do they need to change it. And they’re not saying anything to Google for three years. Because they’re afraid if they are going to be sending that maybe they’re going to find something on the whole Web site and there’s going to be collapsing the whole domain. So there are different situations that a lot of Web sites are suffering if I could say that these days.
Robert O’Haver: [00:38:44] Yeah, I would. I could see why you wouldn’t want to say, hey, Google, could you look at this?
Fernando Angulo: [00:38:49] Yeah. Very risky, right?
Robert O’Haver: [00:38:53] Well, it’s time for, “Believe it or leave it.”
Matt Weber: [00:38:57] I believe it or leave it, Fernando, one of the most popular parts of Search Talk Live. We’re going to give you three statements that we found on the Internet. And we’re going to ask you to tell our listeners whether they should believe it or whether they should leave it. Are you ready?
Fernando Angulo: [00:39:11] Perfect. Ready to go.
Matt Weber: [00:39:12] okay, here’s number one. Google’s emphasis on page speed and the new first input delay will kill the shared hosting business because shared hosting environments cannot deliver the speed Google requires. Believe it or leave it?
Fernando Angulo: [00:39:27] Believe it.
Matt Weber: [00:39:27] Oh, wow. Wow. You made a lot of people just take a deep breath. Tell us why you think that.
Fernando Angulo: [00:39:33] Well, actually, speed in terms of ranking factors is one of the main ones with the push that they were doing with the AMP project, selecting a group of brilliant minds, working on this speed tool and speed environment that could catch all the information they have in one of their Google services. So they are very serious in terms of speed, right? They’re investing so much in that. How it’s working right now, that’s another topic. The future of that is another topic. But they were really serious with that project.
Robert O’Haver: [00:40:09] No, I agree. That’s why they developed that app for mobile. And I don’t know how that’s doing right now. Okay. Question number two, there is more need for schema markup because Google’s algorithm has gotten so good at understanding content types. There is no, I’m sorry, disregard that. Let me say that again. There is no more need for schema markup because Google’s algorithm has gotten so good at understanding content types.
Fernando Angulo: [00:40:36] Believe it. I can go on with a story about that. I remember in the Nordics, in Norway, Norwegian is a very difficult language to understand for anyone. But if we go a little bit down off Norway, we have Sweden and Finland. Finnish, the Finnish language is really, really complicated. You have like 55 characters for one single word. And that’s really, really difficult to pronounce. And for Google, if you’re not putting in the schema on those languages, Google is really far away from understanding what the meaning of that is. So for those languages, for Finnish, Hungarian, or Mongolian, that’s something that you need to use in order to make Google understand: the better the content and the context of the results that you want to push there. I was actually talking with Norwegian SEOs and the results that they have. Google has a better understanding of the content because of the schema markups. So you need to have that there. Imagine if that’s English, it’s even better. We have so many different sentences, so many synonymous in English that you can use. So it just makes things easier for Google. They’re going to be really happy about it.
Robert O’Haver: [00:41:58] Yeah. And you sometimes reap the rewards from it quite a bit.
Matt Weber: [00:42:03] Yeah. Yeah. Good answer. Great answer. Okay, Fernando. Number three, this is a big one. I hope you’re sitting down. The option to run a Google account manually will go away within one year. And everything will be automated.
Fernando Angulo: [00:42:15] Believe it.
Matt Weber: [00:42:16] Wow. Wow. Tell us why you think that.
Fernando Angulo: [00:42:19] I remember a couple of years ago in one conference, I don’t remember where exactly, but it was a Google employee saying that for the visible files that they’d had for the last eight years, they had a team checking those links manually. I cannot imagine the pain that they suffered because of the quantity of visible files with all those links, with all those web sites…so the thing is that they say we have fired all the team. Right now, it is an artificial intelligence algorithm that is checking all the incoming inquires about visible. So if you send something to Google, you can see that you are not waiting anymore, the six months or a couple of years, for our reply. You will be waiting only 24 hours to 36 hours for a reply. So they changed that team. Doing that for the manual actions is not that crazy thing to think, you know?
Matt Weber: [00:43:29] A couple of people will shake their heads. Yeah, that’s true, that’s a different point. Yeah. Good stuff. You made a couple of people shake their heads, good stuff. Let’s do our Search Talk Live tattoo. Fernando, what’s your best piece of advice? Your most succinct piece advice that you would give to our listeners based on today’s show? And remember, it’s got to be short and tattoo-able.
Fernando Angulo: [00:43:48] Well, advice, or slogan, or a phrase?
Robert O’Haver: [00:43:51] Either one.
Matt Weber: [00:43:52] Could be either one, yeah.
Fernando Angulo: [00:43:55] Yeah. Well, I have one. And I really love this one. If I’m going to do a tattoo, I definitely will do this one that is very SEMrush. It goes like this, “Work hard, party harder.”
Matt Weber: [00:44:08] Work hard, party harder. Is that the anthem at SEMrush?
Fernando Angulo: [00:44:14] Oh, yes. You can see it in different rooms, and the parties at SEMrush are epic and legendary.
Matt Weber: [00:44:22] Ok. We’re going to need some visuals with that one, I think.
Fernando Angulo: [00:44:25] Oh, we have an Instagram full of those pictures.
Matt Weber: [00:44:29] Oh, I now have reason to follow SEMrush on Instagram.
Robert O’Haver: [00:44:33] So Fernando, I want to thank you for being on the show. It’s been fantastic,”lots of great content information. I think there’s a lot of good nuggets for our listeners. And I want to thank you for being on the show.
Fernando Angulo: [00:44:44] Thank you very much, both of you. It was a really good time for me, and it was really useful, I believe. And for me, it was a pleasure to be with you guys.
Robert O’Haver: [00:44:53] Thank you so much. All right, guys, it’s been another episode of Search Talk Live. We’ll be back in a couple more weeks. Have a nice day.
Matt Weber: [00:45:00] Thanks, everyone. Thanks for listening.
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