QuickShot 004: Modern SEO - Information informed by Psychology

Welcome to a Hubshut's Quick Shot. Quick shots are brief conversations in and I have in between our regular episodes. Enjoy. Anybody talk about SEO this week, right? My client. Yeah. It does come up and I try not to give too many opinions or advice because I'm just not really that informed on the SEO space anymore. I feel out of touch. So I have a few conversations like this every week and one of the things that I have told customers is does it feel natural, right? So like often when they'll see or they'll see a competitor they'll say, "Oh, hang on. Why are they ranking like this?" Right? And so there's often clues. Like if you look at their website and they've created a page for every single suburb or location or where they are with the same content or slightly different content. Now if they're in that location, great. But if they're not, like does it make any sense to do that? Just things like that. All looking at backlink profiles. So a lot of a few of our customers have SCM rush and I think it does a backlink profile check. And a few that we've actually seen lots of toxic links. And then so when you follow them through and you have a look, you're like they're often shocked to know at the kind of links that they're getting that are irrelevant. It could be a, let's call it could be legacy like they were doing, they were doing some sort of search optimization with some people that were buying links. So often I'm just say my advice is create great content and share that content, right? And find authoritative places to get your link, right? And there's still people who contact us today. I think someone said me and you are something on our site on our hub shot site where we're linking off some way that was broken and they're like, oh, he's a piece of content, which is perfectly all right. That's another strategy that people are using. But I'm always telling people understand what people want. So talking to another salesperson of that that sells houses, right? One of the things that he said to me is that people want to educate themselves. So they don't sound stupid when they talk to us. Buying a house is a big, big decision, right? You got to think you've got finance, you've got where the block or where you're living, do you want to knock it down, do you want to rebuild it, do you want to what sort of style do you want? Like people have a journey with education, understanding, knowing what to do. And it was really interesting because I've never heard anyone tell me that is like someone not wanting to be still stupid when talking to you. I was like, oh, that's really interesting because you probably don't want to because you probably want to know and be educated after ask questions. So you get the best possible response. So they've got really gone on a journey of creating content about understanding about, you know, especially in the building industry. Like people are like, oh, no, I don't want to tell them that. I'm like, why not? Because at the end of the day, you're going to have to tell them that anyway, like why are you trying to hide it? It's a very good qualifier or disqualifier of people that they want to work with. Like, are you going to be too hard or are you going to be my ideal customer? So you kind of get these feedback loops along the way. Like when people, when they talk to people, they know, oh, is this someone I'd like to work with? Are they in the area? Are they not in the area? You know, are they going to be hard work? And so that's always really important. And I think like content helps people make that choice. So I think I think about what content we're creating. First of all, the toxic backlink profile. Yes. I don't know if it even matters these days. I think Google just ignores them. I remember we used to back in the day, we'd be creating dissident file files and all of it was so we were so worried about it. Now we're like, pretty sure Google just ignores all that junk anyway. But when it comes to content, the problem I see is knowing what content to create that's not going to be just provided via AI tools. Okay. So you might provide a really informative article, but if they can get that answer from chat GPT or an AI overview, then I'll kind of click through to your site. Okay. The AI tools basically gobbled it up and produced that for them. How do you actually create content that they'll actually want to visit your site and engage with you? So that's a question. I think your comment about people not wanting or people wanting to appear informed when they talked to you is really insightful. We all know from social people always virtue signaling and all that kind of stuff as well. And it makes sense that they'd want to do that when they're meeting with you if you're a service provider and their potential customer, they don't want to feel silly. They want to look informed because they also don't want to get taken for a ride or you think they're dumb and take them for a ride. You'll see this in industries where there are a lot of chunky players or a lot of sharks or that kind of, you know, we used to work in the solar space for a while. And there were some really good quality providers and there were some sharks out there just ripping people off. And people wanted to be really informed so they didn't get ripped off, make sense to treat them with respect so that they can be informed. The other thing I wanted to mention around that kind of status, you know, people don't want to appear dumb or that we, I got feedback. I don't know if this is true or not or whether it's like, but we got feedback from when we were sharing, I was sharing a daily tip every day. And they're often those super simple, really basic. The thing that struck me was someone said, oh, if it's really basic, I don't give it a like because even if it was helpful, it kind of shows that I didn't know something really basic. And yet if I shared a tip that was kind of complex or looked kind of sophisticated, it would get heaps of likes. And so even on social, people, they're not going to share a basic tip because it makes them look like, oh, I'm basic. I'm not, you know, I'm only, I didn't even know that kind of thing. So there's this real sensitivity you've got to have with providing information so people can consume it in a way that they don't feel like they're giving up any status. Where am I going with this in? People sign up for our daily tips email because they want the daily tip but they just, yeah, that kind of thing. I think it is providing value but we've got to be sensitive to how they feel it makes them look. And that's psychology. It's not information, that's psychology. 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