How To Build The Perfect Site Architecture with Kyle Roof (Ep. 187)

Key Takeaways

Hey, Authority Hackers. Welcome to this week's episode of the Authority Hacker podcast. Mark is still on the honeymoon somewhere in Bali sipping cocktails with no clue about how much of a havoc I'm causing into the company right now. But, him leaving is not an excuse to stop the podcast. And today, you're in luck because we brought Kyle Roof, one of the most popular guests of 2019 to talk with me about site structure. If you don't know him, Kyle is a bit of an on-page SEO genius. He's actually the only person that was ever de-indexed by Google for on-page optimization. And he's also the mind behind Page Optimizer Pro, which is an on-page tool that a lot of people use and get good results with. And he's also founder of IMG, which stands for Internet Marketing Gold, which is a community where he shares um his single variable test results, which made him quite popular in the industry, among other things. There's other things going on. It's a full community there. So, it's going to be interesting because site structure is a topic that confuses the [ __ ] out of most people. When you read Facebook groups, when you look at the questions, etc., I feel like the same questions pop up all the time. So, in today's episode, I tried to round up the most popular questions that people ask about site structure. And Kyle and I have the challenging task to try and make them clear for you. So, let's get started. Hey, guys. Welcome to the Authority Hacker podcast. So, today we don't have Mark, as I said in the intro, but we have Kyle. Welcome back, Kyle. It feels like you're like a regular now. Well, it does two times make me a regular? Yeah, I guess like most people never did three interviews here. So, I guess this is like two times is the most anyone else other than Mark and I has ever been on the podcast. So, I guess I'd like to hit like three or four, and that way I can set a record that might not be broken. Yeah, I Yeah, I think it's going to be hard to beat to beat that one. Well, I'm sure I'm sure you'll come back. Just just send Mark on a holiday a bit more often, and I'm sure I'll ping you again, you know. Yeah, actually what I realized I I have not spoken with Mark on the podcast. It's only been you, so Yeah. I mark standing is that how this works? I It's kind of like I I usually pick the more nerdy like SEO topics, and he picks more like the business side of things because that's actually how it works in the company. So, we try to assign the topics to like what we're best at, which which is why that happens. And you know, there's one thing that's real is every time we do a podcast, the day before there's a core update with Google. So, is there some kind of conspiracy here? Like, did you know anything about this? That's actually pretty funny. Um no. Actually, what's interesting though is that uh shameless plug for IMG, we predicted it on Saturday. Yeah, I saw it, actually. Yeah, Tech Gubitosi has developed a early warning system tool, and it looked like a big update was rolling on Saturday, and then Google confirms it on on Monday there was a core update. That was actually really cool to see. Yeah, it's I mean, it'd be nice to like see if you guys can repeat the prediction, but that's really impressive on its own because it's they're like really unpredictable. It's not like they have a calendar or anything like that. Uh it's like, you know, I asked people like, "What do you want me to get to ask Kyle?" And then everyone was like, "Oh, tell us about the deal update, etc." I'm like, "Guys, it's been 6 hours. I don't think that's and I know it all. It's like you must know what's going on right now. You know exactly what to I'm like, "So, it's like anything to say? Otherwise, we can just keep and actually jump on site structure." I have one small thing to say that actually my team is going to share I have in the group is that four of our four or five of our larger clients are in financial or law um or some kind of blend of that. And what's really interesting is you can see a drop in impressions uh in search console about 1 to 2 days before, and then all of them at the same time on the 11th ping back up. It's a interesting little trend line where maybe as the as they're preparing for the update, um URLs start to fall out of the SERPs or keywords start to fall out a little bit. They're reprocessing a lot, and then I could see some movements over the past two or three days as well, like definitely. Um I It's They change the SERP layouts as well. So, they change the SERP layouts on desktop. So, it's like um that could play a bit as well, actually. Like, they they put the icon like the mobile, but like they might have changed other things they don't mention, so. Yeah. Um like since there's like a gazillion SERP layouts these days. Uh anyway, this is not the topic of the podcast, even though that's what everyone wants to know about. My plan is to actually use this podcast on our site structure blog post. So, like let's just do that. Um and I want to talk about site structure. And I You know, when I was preparing this podcast, I was trying to think like who's going to be interested in this podcast. And I kind of have like two plus one kinds of people. So, the first type of people I had was people who are starting new sites. Like, they want to know how to structure it the the best way. It's usually the best time to start thinking about it, I think. But, I'll ask you about that a little bit later. Then the second type of people is people who have sites, and their site is like messy as [ __ ] Like, you know, you've built your site, you have hundreds of pages, and it's a freaking mess. And then you're struggling with Google, and you're like, "Well, maybe I should work on my site structure." And the third type of people is people who already do everything right, but they're kind of like the kind of OCD people that need everything to be absolutely perfect all the time. So, they're probably listening to that podcast. So, we'll probably give them a few questions for these people as well. Um so, that is the kind of the three kind of people that I think that will be listening to this podcast. So, I've kind of like broken down the questions per type of people. Um but before we get started, you know, we all use like different ways of like mapping out a site. Uh how do you map out your sites? Like or how do you like draw the site structure you want to build or change or anything like that? Like, what tools do you use for that? Well, I I think of really more as a a spreadsheet more than anything. I don't have a fancy tool that I use. But, um I like to compartmentalize um my sites by target pages and then the silo that I'm going to use to support them. And so, for me, I don't care too much about the overarching site structure with some caveats, you know, especially if you like if you're doing local and services, and there's some things I think you should do. But, really I don't care too much about the overarching structure because I'm really focusing on on sections of the site. And if I get those right, then I know that I'm okay. Mhm. So, I personally use I I actually use Dynalist you most of the time. I don't know if you know that tool. It's just a bullet point thing that you can do any unlimited bullet points for notes. It helped me like actually plan site structure for new sites. So, that's personally what I use. Um my problem with spreadsheets is that essentially like when I want to go deeper, it's it's kind of hard. I mean, I guess you do the vertical silos like that, but I You know, when you want to do sub sub sub sub parts or something, and you want to go deep, it's a little bit uh it's a bit annoying. No, I'm with you. Yeah, no. I don't know that there's great I would prefer a visual tool, but then I've played with some of those, and they get real messy in a hurry once you have a page site that's more than like 20 pages. Yeah, it's it's quite tricky to map site like internal linking, etc., overall. And that's why I wanted to ask you because it's like I Yeah, I don't have a special. I wish I did. I wish I could look and here it is. No. You know, a lot of people assume that like we we we we have like some kind of magical solution for some stuff. And it's like, "No, we just struggle like everyone else." And that's it, you Um How like the question I wanted to ask before we start on these three kind of people that I mentioned is how important do you think site structure is for a site's rankings? Like I'm trying to put it on a ladder, right? Like, we have like external links, and then we have page title, and then we have all like where does it fit in the ladder? Like, how important is that, you know? Well, the URL itself is very important. Um for a ranking factor, I put the URL in the top four places to put a a target keyword. You know, with the meta title, H1 in the body, in paragraph text, and then in the URL. Those are probably the four uh and they remain for quite some time, the four most important places. So, uh in the URL is an important thing. Uh how you have actually physically structured your site, I don't know that that's necessarily a ranking factor until you get to points where you're harming yourself, where you have folders that are 404s, you know, or you've got you've decided that this page that you want to rank, and it's a very important page for you, and it's like six folders deep into your site because you did like uh a year month day, you know, category subcategory subcategory target page. Like, I don't know that Google's ever going to find that page. And if it does, it's how much budget is left for Google even how much can it crawl. So, I think more than anything with site structure, you can harm yourself more than helping yourself. I think it's how it usually goes. I don't think it ultimately matters until you get to the point of harm. I see. So, but like so, basically what you're saying is like there's kind of like these difference between hard silos, which is like this you're like built in the URL the your site structure is built in the URL, and you have these soft silos, which are essentially built you only with internal linking. That's right. And and what you're saying is essentially doesn't really matter what you have. The problem is with hard silos, let's say you have you built a small site of 20 pages, and you built hard silos, and then you want to go like three levels deeper as you build a hub, then it becomes quite complicated, and it like actually hurts you because these pages are so deep. Whereas, if you had a soft silo, that would not happen. That's exactly right. I think there's a certain point where you should you should decide we're not going to go any deeper than this, and then, you know, your your structure should then you should make accommodations for it after that. Try not to go farther. I would I really hate having a page that I'm trying to rank that's really more than three deep, you know, dot com slash whatever slash the page I'm trying to rank. I really If it's it's something that's important to me, I try not to go any deeper than that. So, do you ever build subfolders on your sites anymore? Like, is it something you recommend at all at this point? Oh, they exist cuz we have a lot of um sites that are WordPress. So, that's kind of by default. Usually, it's how I mean, you can do the URL structure like the permalink. You can just like start with post name, and then it's like you don't have any like Personally, when I build sites these days, like there's no um subfolders except for things like landing page, for example. So, I'll have like {slash} LP {slash} whatever, and I'll just no index my all my landing pages. So, if I do PPC or whatever, then all this stuff doesn't get I'm with you. Yeah, that's how I agree to do it. One of the thing that people don't often or there's something that they don't realize is that uh a lot of CMSs tie the URL structure to how the nav menu is going to look. Mhm. And that's a fiction. You can have You don't have to have categories and then also a nav menu. You can create that for the users' experience. And And for humans to to navigate a site, it does make a lot of sense for them to have um uh a structure where they see a category and then they see its subpages. But just because it lives that way in the navigation, doesn't mean that's how the URL structure actually has to be. Yeah, I agree. It's like basically you can do whatever you want. And I mean, one thing that has really changed the game for for me as well in terms of how I build my sites is actually uh Elementor Pro. I don't know if you've played with that. Not Not too much, no. But they allow you to take over your WordPress category pages like as a normal page. So you can actually You don't have to break WordPress. You don't have to do like dodgy redirects of your category pages, whatever, because you have it in your slugs or something of your post. You can literally take that one category page and build a proper hub page there. And then uh it it's It's changed the way we build sites a lot. It's removed a lot of glitchy or like shitty stuff that was We were using behind the scenes like these redirects, like these all of these etc. that allowed us to build like a cleaner site structure that was bypassing the default WordPress, which is really not that nice. I mean, a category page page on WordPress by default has like 10 posts and has the pagination and all of that. It's kind of [ __ ] to be honest. Yeah, no, I'm I'm with you. I like that a lot. It's an internal linking cluster [ __ ] That's what I called it to the staff, I think. Um but um that might be the big hack of the whole show right there. I think I think that should be a technical term. I think we should add it to like a some SEO wiki or something. Um Big hack of the show. Um uh one thing I wanted to know as well is like for people who are starting sites, should they worry about internal like not internal linking, site structure right from the beginning or is it something that you can take care of later in your opinion? Well, I I think if you have the opportunity to to get it clean to start with, that's what you should do. Um usually what happens is people start and they have a site that really doesn't matter. There's only 20 pages on the site. And then once they get to 100 pages, they're like, "Oh my god, I I don't even know how to handle this anymore." Um but if you can make some decisions earlier on on on how you're going to approach it, but probably the biggest issue is the people, you know, writing a or building a website is like writing a book. You know, and and sometimes you just don't know what direction that book is going to go until you start doing it. And so you actually might have to build out some of the site and then realize this is a mistake. And if you can kind of maybe then course correct um on how that site is going. But that you know, that I think that's kind of part of the problem is just it's one thing to be able to plan it, it's another to really know what the site's going to end up being. And in most cases, I don't think people do. The thing is like you know, you start a site and some parts of it are going to be successful and some are not, right? So like I start a site and let's say I start five hubs. And there's like one that's usually going to take off and do really well. And the four others are just going to like kind of like either be average or kind of [ __ ] And then well, we like then you gain relevancy for these sub silos in the eyes of Google. Basically, Google's like let's say you're talking about I don't know, like green socks, blue socks, whatever. And that green socks takes off. And then it's like in the eyes of Google, you become an authority for green green socks. So it makes sense to write more about green socks because every time you write about it, you just end up ranking really fast. You don't have to do a lot of work. Uh there's a lot of incoming links to your pages about green socks. And And we had that for like for Health Ambition. Like at some point like we were ranking for anything apple cider vinegar we would write about because we wrote about the skin care routine of Scarlett Johansson that was using that. And it got so many links. And then And then like we would write anything about uh apple cider vinegar, it would just rank. It was like it was just kind of funny. We would It was really good. And so And that's the problem with hard silos in my opinion is that um if you go in the direction of of these kind of like lengthy URLs essentially and then you realize that that one sub silo Well, you know what? It makes more sense business-wise to build 100 pages on that one sub silo and kind of ignore the rest of the site for a while. Then that's when you end up with these four five folders deeps kind of kind of things because it was like one blog post that did well. And you're like, "Well, I need to create all these subpages and support content and all of that." And it becomes a massive mess in my opinion. So I guess it's a it That's why site structure is good, but it's also why uh planning site structure is good, but it's also why it's good to not do physical silos in my opinion. Yeah. Uh I like to avoid them. I mean, that I I don't know that it's it's a necessary ranking component. Is the guy going to be like, "Oh my god, I've got physical silos. I need to change them." Absolutely Yeah. You know, don't Don't do that. You know, like I'm going to You're You're like You're like basically flipping a coin every time you change the URL, right? Oh, that's exactly right. You don't know if Google's going to love it as much as it used to. Um uh That's often You know, that's often what comes up when you're when you you're at that point, okay, we've gone this far. Now do we need to change everything or should we um keep it as is and and deal with it? And the decision I think you have to make is is what do you stand to lose? Yeah. Uh if you have pages that are on page one and they're ranking well and they're bringing you ROI, uh there's really no point in changing that URL. You know, like you you I think you stand more to lose than to gain. Uh but if you're not ranking whatsoever or you're stuck on page seven, you're losing nothing. So that would be a good opportunity then to to switch things up. But otherwise, um you know, the the the there's windows there. So you you built out the site a bit and you decided, "Well, we probably need to change that." Then you have to decide what will you lose. Um Can you Would you change part of the site but not the rest of the site? Let's say like a part of site is doing well, so you're like, "I don't want to change it." And this other part is not doing well. And you're like, "Should I change that? Should I start introducing discrepancy within my site in terms of URL structure?" I would do that. I would I would really do is I would actually try Sometimes you have the like it's a real coin flip on if we should or should not change. Can you change a few of them? Can you change a few of them? He just change a few pages on the site and see how they perform. A lot of people think of things as as light or dark. We're going to do all or nothing. And it's like, "Well, you don't have to do that with a website. You can you know, it might take a little bit of network. It might not be WordPress out of the box, but you can probably set up where you could have different structures for different things and then make do small changes, small adjustments and see if it horribly impacts your pages. And then you're like, "Well, now I know." Yeah, fair enough. I've never tried it, but one of my considerations was actually to duplicate your site, change the stuff and redirect a nickel your original site to the duplicate site, see what happens. And then just remove the redirects if it doesn't work. But I I haven't tried, so I'm not going to recommend people do that. It's a little bit risky. But it's a bit softer than the 301 redirect, I think. It's not a bad way to do it actually, now that I think about it. I I would I think it would probably work pretty well, but that's one of the things like you know, like we talk about on shows like don't do this. Done. It was something you care about, don't do it. Yeah, it's like that's why I said I don't recommend it. Like it's like it's just like something that on paper does make sense, but it is a big gamble if you have a site that makes money. So be careful with this. Um one one thing I want to say as well is like a lot of newbies will listen to this podcast and be like, "I need to work on my site structure." And the problem My problem with that is kind of like the same problem I have with page speed is that people like literally haven't figured out how to generate content or how to get links and start working on site structure. I'm like, "Guys, what the [ __ ] you know?" Um what are things that you think people should sort out before they worry about site structure? Well, you have to have your target pages mapped. You know, like these This is the page that I want to show up in Google. Like that has to be a concept that you've come to terms with and saying, you know, okay, that this is going to be my primary keyword for this phrase. And whether it's an easy one or a difficult one, I don't think that matters too much because if you properly optimize for a particular phrase, you will win you start to win secondary terms where even if you never win that primary, you will you'll still win a lot of secondary. So choose those target primary keywords and their home. And I think once you do that, that'll give you a good idea of your structure. You know, like it's like, "Okay, these are the pages that we actually want to rank. These are the ones we need to focus on." You can probably start to build out from there. The next thing I'm going to do is then my supporting content for those target pages. And I'm going to determine what that is. And this is kind of how the the site continues to build is by based on a target page, that primary keyword, and then it's supporting content. Content that's specifically chosen to support that target page. And then you can build out I think from there. But see, I think to your point, at some point you have to get content up. You know, a beautifully structured site with nothing on it isn't going to do anything. I'm sure you've had that before, right? People come to you and they're like, "Oh, I need to work on my site speed etc." And you go on the site, there's like three pages. Um and you're like, "No." Well, yeah, that gets into the I've done everything and nothing's working. And you go to the site and Yeah, it's a four-page site. I I think this is This is my problem as well on my marketing content. It's like, you know, like people need to like, you know, throw some shiny object at people so that they keep engaging with people's content. It's like These are things that you take care of after you you figured out your basics basically. And I think it's important to repeat to people because I I see that mistake a lot. Um so you kind of like explained essentially you reverse silo concept. I actually was watching SEO Fight Club before that podcast this morning so that I can catch up on all your theories on site structure and everything. And yeah, you you explained that quite a bit. I linked the video. I can't remember which episode, 19 I think I've seen. Yeah, episode 19. I know that just because everyone's like, "Hey, well, how tell me about that?" I just watch episode 19. Yeah, okay. But like you explained the you explained essentially this reverse silo that you briefly explained right now which is essentially that you know most people kind of like build this like a pyramid but you focus first on the page that you want to rank and then based on that you brainstorm support content. Can you define what support content is and what is not support content? Support content these are terms around your your topic. Questions that people would ask that they have. So if you're selling a particular product this would be questions like you know does this come in black blue or green you know or you know can I use this in the winter or you know do you guys ship to I mean they can be very mundane questions like that that things that people would ask about a certain thing. The example that I give in workshops is like if I'm trying to sell ski packages in New Zealand a great question is like which are the best ones for families. What's the for search volume when you write about these or like how do you essentially pick the questions? I find them from people also ask. Mhm. And if you put a people also ask into keyword planner it's going to come back with zero as search volume which I find really amazing because somebody has actually already asked it so there's no way for it not to count you know. Right. Like somebody I'm going to guess more than one person has asked this and that's how pinged to be relevant enough. So I'm answering those questions people have those questions. If they show up there or you can usually tap into like a niche forum for your for your whatever you're selling or your product or your service or whatever. If somebody's taking the time to write in a forum that question that means they've searched it. And that's how they searched it. So if you can answer that question and you can find the ones that are most engaging like people like I have that same question too or I did too and then I found this. That means people are searching for those things. I love those for supporting content because you'll probably win it with the long tail phrase. That's just getting it in you know your your meta title and your H1 and then just answer the question. And then at that point you're probably going to start getting traffic into your silo which is probably one of the best things you can do because a silo is being engaged that it's getting traffic and then people are linking to it organically. Now you with your internal linking structure you set up through your silo you're getting juice flowing up to where you need to go. And one of the overriding principles is if you're selling something on that target page nobody's going to link to it. Yeah. not organically. Unless your product has like really good reviews and like you know like eventually you can instruct them I guess. This saved my life you know but other than that like those things aren't getting but if you answered a great question about it people do link to that. Mhm. You know or to going to ask like what do you get like a lot of links to these kind of like tiny questions type posts Yeah. Well they're easier to get people to link to so whatever type of outreach you do. If you say like hey I noticed that this is important to your people I answered these questions over here and then however you're negotiating your links from there but you can often get those types of links going to those things. They make they make for much better organic link possibilities. And it makes people a lot more amenable to getting into a situation where they might link to your site because you're not asking them to link to a page where you're selling something. You're linking to something that actually may be beneficial to their audience. Fair enough. I mean the thing is like we've done kind of similar stuff with like Shotgun Skyscraper. Mhm. That's that's what we do. But you're you're aiming for like essentially low volume low competition queries that answer questions. Whereas kind of like the method to find Shotgun Skyscraper topics for us is to actually use keyword difficulty in Ahrefs because it's only based on on external links to pages that rank on top. So it's like it's the only thing they look at like they didn't really think a lot about the keyword difficulty but it's quite nice to find these topics because then it gives us a lot of link opportunities but I'm quite curious of like how many link opportunities you find for these tiny keywords. I couldn't give you numbers but Yeah We have a full we have a full-time link builder and I don't really handle that part of it. Okay fair enough. yeah but I mean that's that's what that's what we do. I mean that's the whole strategy is that often what we'll do so we've got our target page and let's say we've got we're going to focus on getting three initial supporting things out to them. One is going to be something that we think we can get links to whatever that might be. That could be a shotgun skyscraper type thing it could be an infographic it could be a video embedded it doesn't matter. Whatever going to be used to actually for our link outreach the other two things are probably going to be those longer tail questions. With the idea that they probably rank within a few days. You know and then then we've got something that's supporting our silo that's on page one page two in a matter of moments because it's a long tail phrase that's being answered. So then when people search for it we actually might start getting traffic into into the silo. It's kind of like that passive link building side of things which is quite powerful like we've had a lot of info keywords rank and like it's not a lot of links but like you know a small post like that can collect like three to five links a year but they're they're really like not a lot of work to do like you can have hundreds of these on your site and if you have a site that has a lot of these adds up matter in quite a lot actually and it's a lot of like inbound and you do not have to spend resources on getting links once these are ranking it just happens basically. So yeah I can see that definitely. How many you do you do? I'm sorry I'm doing a little case study on from the Doug Show Live the golden keyword golden ratio Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Golden KGR right keyword golden Yeah yeah yeah So I I found I found seven that that match it or whatever and then I launched them with lorem ipsum. Mhm. I did this three days ago. I've got three that are already ranking in the top 100. Wow. Okay. three days. So it's actually a fun little case study. What's that? Are you getting traffic to these pages? Not yet they're like on page five page six somewhere in there. But I'm going to I'm watching it as like it's just a little fun little case study I think it's interesting a lot of people talk about it. But it's like I'm much more on like the harder data side of things so that's why KGR feels a little bit light for my taste of picking keywords. Like I like to look at clicks rates and things like that and and it's like but I I've seen people get results with it so it's like you know hands up let's see what happens I'm curious. Yeah that's right man I just want to see what happens see how it goes. Because it could be when you think about the things you're going to throw into your silo what if you did two people also ask one keyword golden ratio and then one thing that's meant for links and I think you've got an SEO campaign. Mhm. That was actually my next question. How how do you how do you decide like how many of these do you do and like maybe like looking at the main keyword you're trying to rank etc. I'm sure you kind of like judging like how much resources you're going to have to put into this. Like how do you decide about that? It's really more from a practical sense on what you can manage in a month and so three is usually what we do. Just it's an easy number to manage because you've got a lot of moving parts to these things because you have to manage content writers have to manage if you're producing something that's going to be used for links you have to then work on the outreach and have to so usually three is a number that we can handle. We'll do a set of three. If we have a little more if we have more resources or more budget we might take that to five. And then you also have to think about client approval because we're all client side on things so there's there's a lot of moving parts and so three to five is probably what you can reasonably manage and then we'll do them in those sets. So we'll launch it we'll see how that goes we'll see if they rank if they're getting traffic if it's the effect we have and then do another set of three. And just kind of keep going. I tend to like so for our sites I tend to do bigger silos now. I tend to do like 20 pages or so. Yeah. I would say 20 is like usually what I do is I throw a silo of 20 articles. Mhm. Maybe you'll have like five skyscrapers or something something that's like really meant to bring in juice into that. And it's kind of like big thought out so that the other pieces are like contextually linked to from these pieces. Sure. And I throw it and I'll just like wait six months. And then see what happens after the outreach is done and go back to this be like am I making money and if I am then usually I expand that silo from like 20 to like 100 pages or something. Like I'll order like four exit or something. Well something you can do if you have the existing site that has pages already you can find the ones in Ahrefs or any tool that you like that have accidentally gotten links. You know they accidentally have traffic and then use those to jump start your silo because then you can put something I know what we're doing on Authority Hacker right now actually. Like literally like last round of content updates I went for pages by links and then I just we did brainstorming topics from these pages and then you just like you have these contextual links. You can put exact anchor text as well on your page and it's like often you do okay on medium keywords from these. You're niche editing your own site. Internally we call these we call them repurpose pages but if they have links coming in we call them power pages. One of the first things I want to do is find power pages that are not being utilized correctly. And I don't worry about the other links that are going on in it I don't sweat that too much but what I try to do is the first link that's going to be on the page I want to go into that target page. Mhm. You know so when I'm repurposing things I try not to I don't want to mess up too much of whatever's going on in there. I don't want to make sure that first link is going to my target page and then I want to make sure I'm getting links going to my other silo pages. So do you think the order of links on the page matters? Like if the link is like low on the page it matters? I do and so for that reason I want to make sure that my first link on the page for something that I'm specifically doing for a silo. You can have a lot of different pages on your site for a lot of different purposes but something that I'm consciously dedicating to one target page I want to make sure that my first link is going to that target page. Okay. And how many how many internal links would you put on a page before you say it's too much? Like let's say like I'll take an example on Authority Hacker right. So we have that page that it's I don't know how it's doing with these updates so I don't want to say where it's ranking right now. I'm going to look it up right now. Oh my god. Why do we do this on a live show? Somewhere somewhere on the we we've been for a long time somewhere on page one for like athlete programs for example. Um and I can jump-start a lot of pages from that page. Um especially because as a lot of things. Um how many is too much? I don't know that it's a number. So you're you're you're talking about those So I think these are slightly different things. You're talking about a page that you're using a what would you call it a hub page? How do you define that? Yeah, it's like I mean it's something that hasn't necessarily been a hub page hub page initially but has slowly become one. Become a hub page. Sure. Then I then you know what I I don't worry about what how many links that has because a hub page is a hub page. It's just there to to pass juice. It's a blog post, right? It's this is a blog post but it's like it's just starting to link out to more and more things as we produce content, right? I don't think there's a number there. It's just whatever's reasonable and practical. That's how I would treat that. Um something that I'm really consciously saying I'm creating this piece of content, it's going to answer this question and it's going to support that target page. I really want to limit that. I want one link to my target page. I want one to two links into the silo depending on where it's sitting. And and I really want to limit from there. Mhm. So that you don't dive into because if people don't know like the original formula of page rank is essentially like water in vases, right? The more the more holes there is to other pages, the more it divides between the page is. That's right. And for a long time people were doing what's called page rank sculpting which is essentially no following internal links so that you would follow the page rank to the pages you want. But now Google actually makes page rank disappear through no follow links. So I I haven't tried it but it does seem like page rank sculpting doesn't really work anymore. No, I don't think in terms of you're trying to no follow things internally. Yeah, but if you internal links obviously works, I guess. Yeah. If you don't link any just internal links basically. Yeah, yeah. So I mean you can self-sculpt in a way that I mean I think page sculpting is is something that that's a naughty term. That's where you're you know that's where you're trying to as well, yeah. where you're trying to follow or strategically no follow within your site with the idea of blocking juice. But making an a decision I'm only going to link to two things. That's I mean you can consider that page sculpting but that's not not that's not naughty. Every every big company does that like every Fortune 500 companies that does SEO like has active thinking about their internal linking for sure. Um what do you think about navigation links? Like do you think they count as much? Do you think they count at all? Um what's your stance on that? I would imagine they count for something but I I I I've stopped stressing about them. Uh you just let them happen. Let them be so that people can get through your sites. Uh as I focus on the the virtual silo rather than a physical silo, I'm really just worried about the links that I have in my body content. And then just however the site's going to happen just I think just let it happen. Now I say that and then somebody's going to show me some sidebar that's got you know, 8,000 links in it for some reason I said you could do whatever I I you said I could do whatever but that's absurd. Like don't be absurd. But um just a site should happen organically in a sense of like this this makes sense, you know, we're we've got these navigation things for these reasons so that people can find this content. Um I'm worried about that for humans. After that the the stuff that I'm worried about for Google and for rank purposes are the only stuff putting in the body. So I don't stress my nav bar, my sidebar, my footer. Yeah, I was going to ask something like related posts for example. It's not really in your footer. It's not really in the navigation. Where does that stand? Like is there If it's in the body, I think it counts for the body. Um that's where like a silo post can you can make them look like related posts. That's what I do actually. It's just just just you've personally curated it. You you can see that on Authority Hacker. If you pick a category, you will ask actually see only posts from that category and you will see the posts that we're trying to That's exactly how you should do it. That's why like using a plugin unless you can really customize it can be problematic because what they'll do is they'll start sending links out to other categories. I really want to keep all my focus in on on that one silo that one category if you like to think of it that way. Um and then they'll often those links will start to start linking all across the site and I don't want that to happen. Eventually it becomes like you don't control your like you might as well not do your internal linking cuz like you get like a leak of like 10 links at the bottom of this of this Exactly. And you have no control over it, I guess. Um but yeah, like we do that as well. So same like we use Elementor post templates so you can actually like you can literally just redesign your site like with Elementor. Like you build a whole page template and just takes over your theme for that. And it just takes your body content from WordPress and just throws it in a common area. And and yeah, took something that looks like related posts and then we just manually curate it per category usually and that works pretty well actually. Um yeah, okay. So I had a question. So now we're going to jump into like people starting new sites etc. Um There's kind of like two ways of starting a new site, right? There's there's one way which is trying to find as many like low competition keywords as you can and essentially like be like, well, it's going to be easier to rank with the lower authority sites and kind of makes sense. Uh and then there's the other school which is essentially building relevant silos and sometimes when you build relevant silos, it also means that you will like you kind of need that parent topic that is a keyword that you have very little chances of ranking for as a low authority site but you might still decide to do that for the sake of building that coherent structure of your site. Um what's your take on it and if you had to start an affiliate site today, which one would you pick? Oh. Um I don't think I didn't see that one in the the pre-question. Was that on the list? It is it is just I slightly elaborated, okay? Um It is for people starting new sites first sub point if you check that. Uh this might sound like a lame answer but on the first one I'm doing both. I'm I'm building that page that I might not win. You know, I'm building that page out because I know I'm going to win secondary keywords. Just and if you if you're not sure what I'm talking about, look in search console, do it by page view and then look at a page and you'll see it's ranking for hundreds of keywords. Many of which don't exist on the page. That's because Google is identifying this is what this page is about. These are the keywords it can rank for. So when you choose your primary keyword, your target keyword, you can win all those secondary. So even if you don't perform well on that one, you can get a page that is very successful that has a lot of page one terms, a lot of great impressions and traffic and clicks and ROI because page is ranked for a lot of keywords. So I do that and then though I do like the idea of finding those longer tail quick wins and that's what turns into my silo content so that I can do that and get those quick wins, get that initial ranking but then they all funnel up to the page that I'm ultimately trying to to sell something on. It's kind of the approach that I like to take on that. Um I think that works. What niche do I want to get into though? Is that the next part? No, no, no. I don't I'm not I'm not going I'm not going like as I'm we're just saying talking theory here. Um usually usually the way we we do this actually is like we kind of find these like uh the keywords that will bring us to break even. Like usually we start a new site, we maybe hire like a full-time writer. Maybe like a part-time link builder and like our editor is going to spend like six hours a week editing content. Let's say like that's the amount of resources we're throwing to this. Let's say we're like $2,500 down per months from all expenses including tools and everything. And so the number one goal we have for affiliate sites is actually break even. So we're like, well, if we can keep this running, it doesn't cost us anything then we're happy to like play for the long run in that niche. Um maybe that should change with how volatile Google has been lately but whatever, that's been the way we've been seeing so far. Um and so I usually try to find these like really easy affiliate keywords that I think will make me my money back. Um and usually these days these are VS keywords. Like that will be like uh comparing two products etc. Like these are can find 700 to 2,000 search per months VS keywords in many niches on high paying products and and the thing is like I would not just write about my VS keyword and link it to my home page. I would rather take these keywords that I know will make me money and kind of reverse engineer like the whole silo all the way back to the main topic of my site. And so that means that in the process I will most likely build four, five I I don't want to call it parent pages because that like gives you the notion of hard silo but like you know, pages that are above that will likely link to these so that I can create these 20, 30, 40 uh VS pages that I think will make me my money back. And um I'll try when I do my VS keywords to angle them in a way that I can skyscraper them basically. Um So That's usually the way I do that actually. But it's it's That's I like to ask people because I think everyone does this slightly differently like the the start at least. Uh in the end everyone ends up with the same site but like at the beginning not everyone has the same site. You know, if you're making an informed decision on things getting to that break even point, uh you know, what's a click-through rate going to be for a whole site? It's going to be 1.5 to 2.5% probably. Yeah. Uh somewhere around there. Maybe 1% maybe maybe you got to get a 3% Like if you you know with these VS pages, like it can be like you know, you can get 20% click-through rate on an affiliate offer for for these kind of keywords. Sure. For the for that one page. I'm thinking like of in in total across everything on those pages that work, the pages that don't, you know, you you could probably assume a 2% click-through rate for for rough numbers and then you can get some volume ideas. You know, so we've got this primary, these are the secondaries that we could win, these are some longer tail ones that we could win. Combine all of that search volume. Do 2%. That's how many clicks you're going to get. What's a good conversion rate or what's a normal conversion rate for an affiliate site? It really depends on the niche. Like you know, some niches are going to be like 40%, some niches are going to be 5%, you know? Sure. So, go on the lower end and call it a 10% conversion rate and look at your cost, and then you can see how much traffic you need to get. Yeah. You know, in order to That's how we do that when we pick a niche basically. That's exactly what we do when we pick a niche and we actually call all the affiliate managers and stuff and like collect stats from them and do all that. Now, usually when we get into a niche that's the amount of work that gets into it. It's like that's how people like, "Oh, you know, starting a new site every 2 weeks." And they're like, "Ah, it's actually quite a bit of work to do it properly." And um but yeah, that's exactly how we do that. And so, like you do that based on the site structure you've planned basically. So, that's kind of an it gives us an idea of like where we'll be. And usually we kind of do what I mentioned for the silos. We throw something for 6 months and then well, if we have full-time staff, we'll keep them writing. But uh we kind of like start new silos to like seed them and see which ones are taking off and which ones are not taking off. Uh and then just bring them back to the ones that have worked once once we have like proven the market basically. Um but it's Yeah, I think I think for example I think my Diggy does something completely different. Um which is why I wanted to ask you actually. Um when you start a new site will you still go with your like four pages rule, which is essentially your money page and like three three um supporting articles? Yeah, I think of it in those terms. Like, that's how I can roll it out. Uh you probably if you're starting a brand new site, you probably want to get as many of those target pages up as you can. Mhm. Uh to begin with. So, you might focus a little bit more on that and then come back through on the supporting content in like the following month perhaps. Uh cuz you know, you at some point you have to you have to get those those pages on that can make you money. Um so, getting if you're just starting out, maybe I'd I'd instead of doing like one target and three supporting, I might do four targets and then come back and hit my supporting. Yeah. And then like see where they land and then kind of after a few weeks and then after that be like, "Okay, like this has a chance if I add a few Exactly. And then you can spend money where you actually might make money on that. Hey, this target page has taken off. Let's support it now cuz we might get it to page one real quick and then that's going to fund this whole site. And I think that's like a something that if people listen to, like I want them to pick up on this properly is that we essentially throw as little resources as possible to something to see where we land and to actually then get an idea of like how well we can do. If I start throwing a silo and every page is like number 50 on Google uh like 50 or less, then I'm like I'm done. Like, if I for example, if I started a hosting silo, like a hosting review silo on the toy hacker, most likely it would not do well and most likely um I would abandon it and I would just like focus on something that's maybe making less money, has like but I have higher chances of actually getting rather than like um you know, going for the big play essentially spending like hundreds of thousands of dollars and 2 years of my life to get some hosting keywords. Yeah. You know. Um and I think that's something that because a lot of people are looking for hard rules. I'm sure when people ask you questions, they are looking for hard rules. They're like, "Oh, how do I do this? How do I do this?" etc. And I like that everything you tell me is like, "Oh, I do a little bit of this and I see how it goes and then I I just based on this I do that." And I think that's what beginners need to pick up on because I think that's that's the way most people that are more advanced do things. Um but it's quite it's something that you gain with experience, this ability to deal with uncertainty. And I think when you're starting in this industry, it's extremely frustrating because it's not an exact science basically. It's like there's an exact algorithm that you will never figure out and then you'll just have to do your guesswork, right? You have to figure it the successful people are probably 80% successful or 70% successful. And in that, what they start off with and and what they're trying to actually ends up working, which is a Yeah. And then there's a percentage that there's 20 to 30% that's not going to do anything. Yeah, 100% even more than that. Maybe more. Maybe more. So, yeah. Uh but like yeah, but like people like take the feedback of failures as well and actually improve from that. And I think that's how people grow in this industry as well. And I think uh I think it's something to that people have embraced failure that have done this for a long time. I'm sure you had plenty of failures in this year and we had many and many people I can't stop failing. Yeah. I don't mind anymore. Like, it's kind of like it's uh you you get to a point where your ego just like doesn't mind anymore cuz it's happened so many times that it's it's funny. Um one thing I wanted to ask you for new sites is category pages cuz we mentioned it earlier, but you didn't really tell me how you do things. So, how do you do category like how do you handle categories {slash} let's say hub pages on your site? So, like uh like the category pages you're talking about um the the generates from WordPress based on I've done these posts and I've categorized them and now I've got that page. I don't worry about that page too much. Um uh if I'm feeling like it's it's causing problems and maybe tag pages sometimes can cause problems with WordPress sites, I'll I'll no index them. I'll no index and follow. Uh and I think that that will probably take care of any of those things. If I If I really don't want that page to show. Um but ultimately, I don't sweat it too much. Uh I've not run into any problems with category pages personally, like outranking something that I wanted it to rank. I have seen tag pages do that and that's kind of annoying. Um because they really don't convert I think at all. They look weird in the SERPs and Um I can't believe that like WordPress is like so old and and it still looks like that. And like the search is still complete crap and categories are I don't know. So, I don't I don't really worry about those too much. Now, a hub page, you know, something that I'm creating where um uh I've got particular topic and then I've got links going into my site. That that's that's kind of what a hub page concept is, right? Or that's how you define it? Yeah, I guess a hub page is like a page that's like, you know, covering a topic and then linking out to all pages related to that basically and There's some nice ways you can do those uh so that people would actually link to it. You know, where you you've got a whole it's it's you know, like a might look like a resources page where you can come here and you can get This is the place where you can come and get to all forms of resources. Uh people do link to those pages. You can get actual links to those and then so it's instead of like you've got your silo where we're building links in, it's going to a target page, you've got this hub page and it's linking out to all the others. So, you are getting that form of of of link juice flowing through uh that particular page cuz people do link to them. So, I like to think of those as a separate thing outside of any kind of silo structure. They're on their own um and they're navigational that they get through my site, but then they're also educational or or some form of resource that people would actually link to. Is how I like to play with those. Yeah, I like to actually make them blog posts these days. Like actually it's funny. Like literally this morning I published a blog post on the toy hacker that's exactly that. Uh it's like list of affiliate niches. It's basically like we've done like a bunch of research on a bunch of niches and then there's a giant list and just like essentially it's a hub page that's here to like navigate people and get links. And Yeah. uh passing juice. Yeah. So, like that that's all I use it for. I don't really worry about it sitting in a silo structure. I don't really care where it sits on the site. Uh but ever link build these pages? Like, would you would you like do guest posting campaigns to a page like this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We do that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Uh yeah, a list of um you know, uh how do I cancel my cable company? You know, so you get a list of top cable companies, how you actually cancel, and then you've got links going to your different services that are better than their services. That sort of thing. Yeah, okay. So, and then you would just guest post them. And then you try to put them for a keyword usually like some kind of like semi-relevant keyword. Um You know, actually I haven't done it too much where I'm actually trying to rank the hub page for anything. Not intentionally. I'm trying to Usually what I'm I'm trying to do is uh maybe something else would rank, something that I'm linking to. But I'm just trying to get it as a as a place that's just a resource for people to put link for me to put links to things that give good answers to questions and then the juice drives in that I can spread throughout my site. So, the reason I try to rank them actually is because I mean, that's why I make them articles now because like it's easier to rank. Um but the reason I try to rank them is for the the same reason you're trying to get your support pages. I'm trying to just get passive link building coming to these pages as well. Yeah, yeah. And um you know, it's like it sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But um it's it's something that I want to give 6 more months before I'm like highly recommending or something, but that's kind of what we're trying basically. Um Anything else that I didn't ask you about site structure for new sites? No. Um but only last one would be you got to start. I I so many people uh should I start with this niche or that niche? Should I do this or that? Just do one. Just do it. Just go and do it. And I would actually What's that? You can fix site structure later anyway, I think. Yeah. I would also mention if you're just starting out, I would not and I mean when you're going to build an affiliate site I wouldn't do my my heart's passion on my first one. Mhm. I would do something that I wouldn't mind if I just burned it down completely. And I would do something that I'm I'm interested in because obviously you're probably going to do your content writing to start or a lot of it. I would at least make it an interesting enough that you don't mind writing about it. Um but I might try something that I don't care so much about so that I learn so much on that over the course of a year. So, that when I start my second one, I feel I'm in a good position to do that. You gain all that knowledge. And then your second one, which you really do care about, I think will be much more successful. And then you've got the passion with the knowledge that you gained on that other one. I agree. It's like your first site is not going to be You can do okay with it. Um but you always have regrets and it's like something that like people that haven't done this for like many years don't realize, but like when your site's aged, there's there's a lot of regrets that are difficult to fix. Um on things that you've done, on branding, on again like URL decisions and things like that that you just can't go back to and it's too much of a gamble to go and change. Um but at the same time, if you had to do it over again, you'd do it completely differently. Um so, you may as well make these mistakes on the site you care a little bit less about uh than that. It's like I like to give that example of that affiliate site called pickmytoilet.com that has 100,000 visits per month or something. I don't I didn't check recently. Maybe they got hit or something because, you know, Google. Um but uh but uh but yeah, it's like I'm like you can pick a niche as stupid as like toilets and still make basically a full-time income. So, you can start with something like that and eventually do something that you you care a bit more about. For sure. For sure. Uh actually, it would be kind of fun to actually get some passive income out of that sort of a concept where uh your education is paying for itself. Yeah. Uh uh it's it's fun as well. Like I like actually getting in a niche that we get into as well, like learning something new. And uh yeah, it's it's I think it's the best way to live that lifestyle, basically. It's not like it's you know, the problem is uh you can get into high-paying niches and doing that. Like you can get into like personal finance and like start YouTube and like do that kind of stuff and make really good money with affiliate, but it's a fun way to build sites as well. So, I would say I agree with you. Start with something, make it happen, and then you'll learn a lot. You'll you'll fail a lot, but you'll learn a lot, and then you can do something a little bigger next time. Yeah. Um let let's go over people that have existing sites and it's a mess and they need some help. Um so, like it there's nothing better than putting ourselves in the shoes of these people. So, let's say we have a WordPress site that's essentially, you know, the 2020 WordPress theme and 200 blog posts, and all I've done is I've looked for low-competition keywords and I've just been writing for that and I bought uh articles on Fiverr, and I have 200 of these on that site. It gets 25,000 visits per month, but it's a [ __ ] mess and I should be getting four or five times that. What should I do? Well, it would be great to have a 25k a month mess, you know, on on traffic cuz you're just outside where you can do like advertising, right? What do you need about 30k? I mean, 25k you can get on media buying, actually. And as well, you get 10,000 as well. So, that's a really decent mistake. Um what I would start to do uh is is and this is just my own So, as I discussed how I set up sites, um you know, I've got target pages. That's the thing that I'm trying to rank for. So, what you probably need to do is identify what is a target page. And it could be one of those 200 blog posts. Just because it's a blog post doesn't mean it can't be at the top of its own silo. You know? Um again, with the virtual silo concept, pages and posts don't matter. So, you could have a one of your You can probably identify like, "Hey, these are the ones that are bringing me the most traffic." So, what I'm going to do is I'm start to virtually restructure them by taking some of these other posts and then kind of shifting them as my supporting post for that target page. So, you don't need to change any of the actual physical structure. It could be a complete mess and that's okay. Uh I'm going to start to reposition the site virtually by changing my links in my body content. And so, I'm going to start to Internal linking work. Exactly right. So, I'm going to start to break those 200 up and I'm going to say, "These are the 10 target pages that are bringing me the most traffic. And now these guys, they aren't bringing me as much or little at all, but they're relevant to that. Now I'm going to start interlinking them into my virtual silo and support my target pages. And then what I might do at that point is maybe filter in some links into those supporting uh pages and then see what if you can start to get a real benefit out of it." Cuz I bet you will. I bet you'll see those main ones all start to move up. I think your keyword base will grow, which is the more important thing. The number of queries that your site is ranking for will expand, and that's the sign that you've done it correctly. You know, if you've been stagnant or you only got this many keywords that you're you're ranking for, and you can see this in search console, you should see those numbers grow, and then you know you've done it right. Uh and that's how that's how I would approach this type of situation. So, let's say you've brainstormed these silos and you essentially done some internal linking work. Um there's going to be a number of pages that essentially fall out of these silos, and you feel like they're kind of like on their own, they're orphans, and you don't really have plans for them. Maybe you don't make money from them. What do you do with these pages? Like do you Do you get rid of them? Do you just leave them alone? Do you rewrite them? I leave them alone. Uh I think pruning a page is the last thing I want to do. Uh maybe it's a drastic measure if you realize like, "Hey, I've got this other page, and I can see a little bit of cam cannibalization with this guy." Then I might prune him, but otherwise, there's going to be some point where you can use them. And uh I'm not a fan of pruning sites for the sake of pruning. I know I've seen some examples where like Moz says they did it, and Brian Dean says he did it, but I'm going to guess that you're not getting 300,000 plus visits to your site a month, where maybe that it could actually be beneficial. I think those were very edge cases where they were able to do that. I agree. uh so, I I I don't I'm not a big fan of that concept to to go into your affiliate site and do it. Okay. I mean, I'd leave them as is for now. The thing as well is like what when you all content ranks from for really tiny keywords, at least. Like even if they're like they they get almost zero search volume. And the thing is, because you do appear for these tiny keywords, there's kind of like that off-chance of these passive link building thing that we talked about where you might actually just randomly get a link to your site. And uh and I think you know, if you have a lot of pages like in this case, then it actually can be a decent amount of link growth over the year or something um if the content is not hurting. I think that's not a problem. I think the one case where I would recommend that is maybe if two pages are like, you know, very close in in topic, then then merge them, basically. I agree. Um how about homepage linking? Like um what what's your Like is links from homepage important? And what would you recommend people do in terms of interlinking from the homepage on your sites? Uh usually, if you're just getting started, the homepage is the one that's getting all the links because you can build like citations to it or, you know, maybe you built uh a round of web 2.0 like branded web 2.0s that that kind of get your nap going and pointing in. So, that's the one that's probably going to get the most juice initially just by default. Uh so, if you're in a position like where you're just starting out uh or even if you're then kind of trying to clean up a mess, if there's a page that's really important to you that's internal, I would get a link to it on the homepage. And let's say you have identified You know, in that 200-page example, let's say you've identified uh these are my 10 targets. You know, these are the ones I'm going to go after. Why not have a little blurb about each of those on the homepage? And you can do that in in ways that look nice. You don't have to make it gross. Um but like these are the main things on our site and you know, this is what we're trying to do. You can have a little blurb when you link in, and then you do get a homepage link going to your uh to your target page. Yeah. We we do that quite a bit as well. I think I mean, even when you do guest posting, right? Like guest posting very often, at least in the byline, there's going to be a link to your homepage. Uh and so, if you've been running guest posting for a while or your site's been around for a while, like this page has the most links of all your site. About if you had like one or two blog posts that really took off or something, and it happens. Yeah. But like I like to link these hub pages from the homepage as well. So, you know, like you have your you have your homepage and it links to that hub page that links to like 20 or 30 pages below. And I find it's like a nice flow of that link directing juice that goes to the homepage, basically. Um okay, cool. Um Uh would you implement all changes at once or would you do gradually? I think you kind of answered the question, but like let's see. Low and slow. Like you you want to see how it works. You know, I've seen situations where someone like had all those They had the 200 posts, and then they changed them all, and things just went You know, and then they're like, "Now do I change back? What do I do?" And it's like, "Oh my god." You know you're you know you're you know you're you're in for 6 months when you when you like do a big drastic change that didn't go well. Like you know, like you kind of have that purgatory period where like even though you fix it, your site never really completely recovers. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So, low and slow. Low and slow. Yeah, it's it's funny how how um Google doesn't kind of like restore things faster uh for site that has earned trust in the past. I find it weird, to be frank. Um for a new site, sure, but like, you know, you were ranking this page here. Okay, it was off for 2 weeks, but it goes back to where it was, and it still takes 6 months to go back to where it was or something. Um I'm very um very curious on why they do that. They probably have a good reason. Um that's all my questions for site structure. Anything we didn't talk about that I should have asked and I didn't do my homework correctly. No, I think that was pretty exhaustive. Um Uh a whole other thing you can get into is like how to do services or local pages or stuff like that, but that might be a whole other talk. Yeah, I think that's a little bit of a different It's more like local SEO, etc., which kind of like follows its own rules on top of classic SEO rules, I would say. Um I had a question, actually, from Mark Jenner from uh Authority Hacker Pro. It's not related to um site structure, but I think it's quite interesting. Basically, you are known for doing single variable testing, which is essentially picking an imaginary keyword, building 10 pages on 10 different sites that target this keyword, and changing them a little bit, and using that lorem ipsum, just to see um what factors seem to be coming on top um with uh with as little um external factors as possible so that you can isolate them, which is why it's called single variable testing. Um and Mark Mark Jenner essentially said he likes this a lot, he finds it interesting, and essentially that it's the best we've got. But um I think Ted, when we asked him to do the the predictions for 2020, he mentioned that there's this kind of like co-factor thing where essentially like for a factor to take effect, you need another one to also be validated or something. So, what's your take on that and how do you think that can be tested? Well, we can test that. So, there has to be a point where things and using like Ted's types of tools, you can see which factors seem to pair. Mhm. And so, that's where a correlational uh test that he that he runs, we can see that. We can start to identify these two are are linked. You know, they're they always ping together. And so, what we can do is then isolate those. We can start with one and then add the other. So, in that test environment, they all get factor A and then the say the number five result or whatever gets factor B as well and then we see if we get the movement up and that's how you can then play with co-factors within within the a single single variable model. Cuz the how you eliminate the situation is that all of the test pages have that first variable. And then maybe needs to go the other way. So, you can run it the other way and see if Okay, we'll start another test basically that like confirms it. Exactly. So, yeah, so even though that may or may not be true. I mean, that's something that we're playing with and that's a pretty exciting idea and would explain a lot of things within SEO about like hey, I did all these things and they didn't work and then maybe that you were missing that one trigger if you will for that particular niche. So, that's actually something that we can play with. The problem with single variable testing is that it's it's a long-term play. It's a lot of work. It's it takes a lot of resources. It's not easy fast to do which is probably better for all of us really. You're the only one doing it. Exactly. It's better for me. Yeah, it's probably right. All those things can be overcome for sure. Is there anything you Did you guys like stop testing with these co-factors? Is there like one interesting thing that you can let us know about this? Cuz obviously you guys been playing with the idea etc. Like is there like what gave you the idea? Like what made you notice it? And maybe like what was Uh I can't take credit for that at all. Uh there's a guy named Lee Witcher. He is killing it in in testing right now. He um He's actually going He's our lead tester now in IMG. So, he's overseeing it and and doing all the peer reviewing of the test. Um but he found the the the number one factor. Do you know the number one factor in SEO? Uh probably like search intent. No, it's the it's the existence of a factor. So, what you can do But um it's better to have something in a signal area than nothing. Mhm. So, the concept is you can look at the the top ranking pages for something and let's say they all average they have placed something in approximately 150 factor areas. It's the it's the ones that you are missing are the ones that are affecting your rank. And so, the people that have the most things in it you can think of it in the negative. It's the non-existence of a factor is a ranking factor. I see. And he found the number one factor. He found the number one factor. He found the number one factor. basically. It's better to get a partial check in there than to have nothing. I see. So, you need you need to compete on all 150 factors. That's right. So, what you need to do is look and see or have a method to count how many factors are being hit in my niche. Now, how many factors are the sites that are winning what are they actually doing like across the board? So, not just some of those big ones but even getting into some of those smaller ones and then you can then start to optimize according to all right, we need to get these these things in to to match the number of factor areas or signal areas that they're optimizing. Yeah, fair enough. And I can imagine for different niches it's quite different to be honest. Like especially say the EAT stuff etc. Like that's when it would probably start kicking in actually. My favorites, you know. I I thought you were I thought you were going to say that that was the number one factor. No. It's like I mean it's like I'm I'm warming up to the idea that it might like they might have like a very primitive way of checking this out. But yeah, I'm still It's like I don't know. I see a lot of sites that have a lot of credibility just going up and down like everyone else. So, yeah. Um okay. Well, I think I think we're done with this podcast. Thanks for all your info. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for being super open etc. It's been great. Uh you are over at PageOptimizer Pro which is a page optimizing tool that people can use. You can put your URL, your competitor's URL, essentially see these factors that you should be optimizing for. And you are also founding member of IMG which stands for Internet Marketing Gold. So, you guys can go and sign up there. It's a free community and you guys have a paid member with a paid membership with a test etc. Uh so, yeah. Thanks for joining in. Next time Mark goes on a holiday, I guess I'll call you back, you know. Perfect. I'll be there. Anything else that I forgot to say before we close it up? that's it. People People ask how can they get a hold of me and it's in IMG. You can post, I'm there. So, yeah, let's we can have a chat there. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining and for the listeners, see you next week. Bye. Bye. All right.