Predicting SEO Success using AI with Nicolas Garfinkel

In this episode, I sit down with Nicolas Garfinkel to explore the future of SEO through the lens of predictive models and machine learning. 

Key Takeaways:

1. The Importance of Data in SEO: Nicolas emphasizes the need for data-driven approaches in SEO, highlighting how relying on intuition alone isn't enough in today's rapidly changing environment.
2. Predictive SEO Models: Nicolas introduces Kixley, the first predictive SEO tool that uses machine learning to forecast the impact of SEO strategies on rankings and traffic.
3. SEO Strategy for Different Scales: The episode discusses how SEO strategies differ for small businesses compared to large enterprises, particularly in leveraging data and statistical models for decision-making.
4. Local SEO Optimization: Practical tips on optimizing local SEO, including the importance of Google Business profiles, customer reviews, and addressing schema markup.
5. Future of SEO: Insights into the future of SEO, where machine learning and predictive models will play a crucial role in optimizing and prioritizing SEO tasks.

Listener Action Items:

1. Optimize Local SEO: Update your Google Business profile, encourage customer reviews, and ensure your website includes your physical address to boost local SEO efforts.
2. Incorporate Data-Driven SEO: Begin integrating more data and analytics into your SEO strategies to prioritize efforts that will have the most significant impact.

Connect with Nicolas Garfinkel:

• Kixely
• Linkedin

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Transcript

An SEO Crystal Ball? Predictive Models w/Nicholas Garfinkel

[00:00:00] Nicholas Garfinkel: It's one of those things where it's hard to justify up front initially. But if you trust the process and you give it enough time, like you start to see the rewards. 

[00:00:08] Welcome to the third season of the simple and smart SEO show the podcast dedicated to empathy driven brand building SEO. I'm your host, Crystal Waddell. I leverage my obsession with user experience to help business owners just like you optimize your website with confidence. Thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:25] Let's jump into another great episode.

Introduction to the Podcast

[00:00:28] Crystal Waddell: Welcome back to the simple and smart SEO show podcast. I'm here with Nicholas Garfinkel.

[00:00:32] And we are talking about all sorts of things today with SEO. 

[00:00:37] A look inside of analytics and how things work and how things are going to work in the future.

[00:00:42] You're definitely going to want to check this out. But Nick, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Nick's Journey into SEO

[00:00:47] Crystal Waddell: Tell me your relationship with SEO. How you got into this universe.

[00:00:51] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah. There's a little bit of rebound. I started my career. Actually this internship for the Franklin Mint. 

[00:00:57] Which I don't know if you've heard of it before, it was really big back in like the eighties and nineties. And yeah, they sold coins and cars and things like that. And so I came on as like just an intern, helping them out on, day to day marketing stuff.

[00:01:09] And ended up realizing there's a huge SEO opportunity. And read SEO Moz like every single day. And every single article I could. And would read things and apply it and read things and apply it.

[00:01:18] And it was just, it was a blast. And throughout my career, then, if there was opportunities to apply and use SEO. I did. And over time I shifted into big tech. I spent about 15 years between Vimeo and Amazon and eBay and Microsoft doing anything from analytics to product to marketing. 

[00:01:34] And then about a year and a half ago decided it was time to start my own venture and started this agency and got back into SEO and paid search. 

[00:01:41] And all these other things. And just, I find it so fascinating. 

[00:01:44] And I've been reading about it ever since, and that I'm a big analytics person. 

[00:01:47] And felt, there's a lot of data that's missing from the SEO community.

[00:01:50] So I'm trying to find ways to inject that back into the community. 

[00:01:54] Yeah there's stuff we're building and there's stuff that I'm going to be working on over the next couple of months as it relates to SGE to try and provide, Data and analytics of what's going on and why it's happening.

[00:02:03] Crystal Waddell: Okay, so I got to back you way up like your second sentence. 

Early SEO Success at Franklin Mint

[00:02:06] Crystal Waddell: You said that you were working for the Franklin Mint and you saw an SEO opportunity. 

[00:02:10] What does that even mean? Did you know about SEO? Were you working in SEO? Or is your job something different? 

[00:02:16] Nicholas Garfinkel: So it was something different.

[00:02:17] I don't think anyone expected me to come in and do SEO at any level. At that stage in your career, all you're doing is trying to learn as much as possible and have an impact. 

[00:02:25] I think that's like everyone's like early on is I just want to do good. I want to do good. And I think I stumbled across some articles about, how to rank higher in Google.

[00:02:33] And I was like, Oh, that's really cool. That sounds like that'd be really valuable. 

[00:02:36] And Like every intern, I ran back to my boss and I was like, we should do this. And they're like, sure, let's do it. And so, read a bunch more articles realized, oh, like all the, there's no, all the page titles and meta descriptions are all, they're not optimized.

[00:02:48] And basically spent like two, three weeks just updating page titles manually one by one. And rankings improved and organic traffic started going up. And I'm like, this is really cool. This is really cool. And so that, that's how it started. And from there, I was hooked. 

[00:03:02] Crystal Waddell: Yeah.

[00:03:03] And what did your bosses say when that started to happen? 

[00:03:06] Nicholas Garfinkel: They thought it was cool too. They're like, how do we do more of this? How do we, how does it go? How do we do better? Like I was like 15, 20 years ago. 

[00:03:12] Crystal Waddell: That's like the best thing in the world though. And it's like, how do we do more of this?

[00:03:15] That's when you know, you've really, done well. Okay. 

Challenges in Current SEO Tools

[00:03:18] Crystal Waddell: And then you said that there's lots of data missing from like current SEO tools, and what are you talking about there? 

[00:03:26] Nicholas Garfinkel: So I think as a as an industry, we have to rely a lot on what Google tells us. And so Google, I remember just a few months ago, Google came out and was like, links aren't the number one thing anymore.

[00:03:37] And it led to a rash of people saying links don't matter. Links don't matter. And there was articles everywhere about that. And there was a whole big thing. And that's subsided now. 

[00:03:45] But we're at the mercy of Google, right? And we don't know what's important and what to work on. And, should we improve site speed?

[00:03:51] How much of a business impact is that gonna have? 

[00:03:53] Or, should we fix our internal link structure first? And it's really hard to answer those questions because we're just going off guidance. And our own general intuition. And with Google's algorithm changing so often. 

[00:04:04] It's even if your intuition and experience about something that happened five years ago for a site you helped that may not even be relevant anymore.

[00:04:10] And so there's a lot of kind of doing all the right things, knowing it will eventually work. 

[00:04:15] But there's not a lot of like data driven, statistically, if I do this, I know the impact is going to be this. And so therefore I should do it. 

[00:04:22] And I've seen some studies that have come out. That kind of help infer some of those things. And I would love to continue to see more.

[00:04:27] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. So I totally agree with you. Everything kind of seems like, falls under the best practice umbrella. And eventually you'll see some sort of uplift or whatever. 

[00:04:36] But is this what you've done with your tool is create something that actually provides data insights to what's working?

Predicting SEO Impact with Machine Learning

[00:04:44] Nicholas Garfinkel: Exactly. So what we've done is we actually train machine learning models on your data, your website, your competitors, all the rankings. 

[00:04:52] And so we're able to start to predict some of that stuff. And so what we do is it can predict things like if this changes on your site, then this will be the impact in Google.

[00:05:00] So we've almost reversed Google in a way. And so now with our clients, what we can do is we can say, Hey, Okay, you want to improve site speed? This is where you're at. Here's some benchmarks. And if we hit it, this is what our predicted impact will be to all your keywords and all your rankings. Or even like internal link structure, right?

[00:05:15] If you make these changes and it generates these additional internal links to these web pages, this is what will impact it or won't impact it, right? 

[00:05:22] That's what we've seen as well. It's okay, like we want to make this change, but the data suggests that actually we shouldn't. Okay. And so we're just not going to make it right now.

[00:05:30] We know it's a good thing to do and we will do it eventually. But there's other things that we've predicted will actually have an impact. 

[00:05:36] Crystal Waddell: Wow. So that is so helpful, like with prioritization. 

[00:05:39] Like to actually know, okay, this is what you should focus on now to get the most movement forward. 

[00:05:45] Now, have you guys gotten to the point where you can actually predict revenue increases?

[00:05:49] Like what's going to actually increase conversions and money in the bank? 

[00:05:53] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah. So we, there's a few different ways we can approach that. The way we've approached that as we do two things. 

[00:05:58] So, if we can predict where you're going to rank, we can predict how much you're going to get. 

[00:06:02] Because we can say if you're, ranked first, you're going to get 33 percent of click throughs. Or, if you're ranked ninth, maybe you're getting a half a percentage.

[00:06:08] So once we're able to estimate the total amount of traffic, we can figure out how much that traffic is worth. And one way we do it is we look at paid search as a proxy. 

[00:06:16] And say, if my competitors are going to pay 5 a click for that, Then I'm going to, then I'm going to claim that traffic is worth 5 a click.

[00:06:23] So now we can type back to real like business value and say, Hey, this is a 70, 000 opportunity. 

[00:06:28] And if you're a more sophisticated brand or you have a huge paid search budget, you can use your conversion rates and revenue numbers from paid search to figure out how much that traffic's worth on the organic side.

[00:06:37] We've even had a conversation with one company. They're a fortune 500 company. 

[00:06:42] What they want to do is they said, Hey, we have all this money we're spending on paid search. Tell us which of these keywords you predict we can rank in the top three. So we can stop paying Google every day for that, and just get it organically.

[00:06:52] So there's a lot of really cool things that people can do with this. Once you put the data behind it, understand what can, where you can rank and how you can rank. 

[00:07:00] Crystal Waddell: Yeah, I love how you reverse engineered that because that's another, question: what is the SEO value? What is the value of this work that we're doing here?

[00:07:08] But to, Like you said, tie it back to PPC. It's super smart. And a really fun way to look at it. And something that people already know, so you can attach it to like their prior understanding of how PPC works. And then give SEO, it's, value too. So I think that's pretty cool.

[00:07:25] What about with the AI overviews though now? 

[00:07:29] There's been this impact the last few years of like featured snippets? And those showing up higher in rankings. Like how does this take into consideration like all the other SERP features? 

[00:07:41] Nicholas Garfinkel: So that's going to be the next frontier for us.

[00:07:43] Everyone in the community has known for a while. This is likely the direction Google is going. We weren't sure how exactly they were going to implement it. And it's I think it's a mixed bag in terms of what they've implemented and how happy people are with it.

[00:07:54] But I think for us, that's that's the next stage. 

[00:07:56] Is not just predicting where you can rank, but also starting to help people understand how you can actually show up in the AI summaries and what you can do to improve your chances there. 

[00:08:05] And me and my team over the course of the next month are going to be doing a bunch of statistical analysis to help people understand just what's even happening in that space.

[00:08:12] Yeah, I think the SERPs are always going to continue to change.

[00:08:14] Crystal Waddell: I think that's going to be neat. If your company can come up with a way to share with people how to show up there. And have the statistical stuff to back it up.

[00:08:24] That's going to be pretty sweet. 

[00:08:25] Nicholas Garfinkel: It will be. It's a colossal undertaking. We may not even be successful. But, I think that's the next place where we can provide a ton of value in a, giant ocean of unknown right now. 

[00:08:34] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. 

Balancing Technical Skills and Business Insights

[00:08:35] Crystal Waddell: So did you become a developer? Is that what you consider yourself now?

[00:08:39] What kind of technical title do you have? 

[00:08:41] Nicholas Garfinkel: I think throughout my career, I've always worn a lot of hats. So I can code. I love analytics, doing a bunch of data science work myself. I love the product side of things. 

[00:08:50] My previous role, I led the product organization at a data insights startup.

[00:08:54] And I've done the marketing side of things. So I'm a little bit of a, I can do it all, which is a good thing. 

[00:09:00] But also a bad thing because it's hard to keep focused. But, that lack of focus helped me develop Kixley. And a number of other really cool initiatives inside my company.

[00:09:07] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. So when you do the data analytics and stuff, it's, are there certain tools that are available to the average Joe that you can use to, to analyze data? 

[00:09:17] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah. So it's, there's varying levels of complexity, obviously. 

[00:09:20] But you can get really far with just Microsoft Excel. Or Google sheets, depending on, which, which house you, you support. 

[00:09:26] But just that alone will get you really far as you get more sophisticated.

[00:09:30] Okay. You're probably doing things in SQL or at least using SQL to summarize the data. 

[00:09:34] And then Doing a bunch of the last mile work of analysis in Excel and visualization. 

[00:09:39] Eventually you'll upgrade to something like Python or R where you're doing it in more of a programming language. And that gives you a lot more access to some of the more rigorous statistical packages to help you do that at a higher scale.

[00:09:51] But I started my career just in Excel and SQL. 

[00:09:54] And you can do a lot of incredible things with just, Curiosity in some time. 

E-commerce Data Analytics Tips

[00:09:58] Crystal Waddell: Tell me something incredible that I could do statistically with my Shopify store. What's like it may be a common e commerce data analytics thing I could do.

[00:10:08] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah. I think one of the things you could do is look at, first conversion rate by different products. 

[00:10:12] And try and understand, there's certain products where people are visiting it and the conversion rates are really low. They're not buying, they're not adding it to the cart. 

[00:10:19] And maybe that's a good indication that you should spend some time improving the descriptions or the product titles.

[00:10:24] You can search for your products, see what else shows up. 

[00:10:26] Create a spreadsheet of all the pricing. And then you can also start to visualize everyone's pricing versus your pricing alongside the conversion rate and get a sense. Maybe that's driving some of your conversion down.

[00:10:36] You can look at things like from an SEO perspective, I look at all the landing pages or which products are natural landing pages. And which ones are not. 

[00:10:42] And try to figure out why those are performing the way they are and maybe spend time on the ones that aren't performing well to figure out, okay, what can I do from an SEO perspective?

[00:10:49] Is it, the product title that I need to fix? Things like that. There's so much fun stuff from an email perspective. I'm assuming you have abandoned cart emails and things like that. 

[00:10:57] Starting to run AB experiments with subject lines to see, Hey, which subject line leads to, the best open rate or the best click through rate, things like that.

[00:11:04] And then if you want to get really sophisticated, you can start cohorting your users and say, Oh, here's my my, repeat customers. And these are my new customers. And when I send this email to my repeat, I see this open rate. But when I send it to the new ones, I see this open rate. And start to figure out how do you treat each one of those populations differently?

[00:11:19] Because as a marketer, you need to talk to people the way they want to be talked to at the right time. 

[00:11:23] So those are a few things I would think about. 

[00:11:26] Crystal Waddell: Yeah, that's interesting within the backend of Shopify, it actually has cohorts.

[00:11:31] And I never knew what that was, got the gist of it, that it's like a group of people that.

[00:11:35] Purchase a product during a certain period of time. 

[00:11:38] But I sell a product that's more a one time thing. And say you had a son who graduated from high school. 

[00:11:45] That mother or father might purchase my product for that son or daughter when they're graduating high school. And then maybe come back a few years later for the next child.

[00:11:53] But for the most part, it's like the one and done type situations. Is there any analytics that can Match up with something like that. 

[00:12:01] Where it's I don't have a lifetime customer value that I'm shooting for as much as I am, just that initial cart value. 

[00:12:10] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah, so I think in a scenario like that, so when I talk about analytics, there's the quantitative side of pure numbers. But there's also the qualitative side that's equally as important.

[00:12:19] And so I'd say in a scenario like that, probably the first thing I would do is go install one of those, click trackers, whether it's, Microsoft clarity or hot jar. The hundreds of other ones that are out there. And just watch what people do. Because I find that is so impactful to understand, like, why didn't they, why did they bounce off my page in two seconds?

[00:12:36] Like, where did they stop viewing my page? And start to figure out, like, where are people falling off and generate a bunch of hypotheses? 

[00:12:42] Go write down. I think this, I think that and then try and run small tests to validate or experiment against those. So you might have an hypothesis that people don't really understand what I do.

[00:12:50] So maybe you try it. Changing the hero image and text there to talk a little bit more about what you're doing and why you're doing it. 

[00:12:56] And then go watch those videos again and see that people actually get past that and now they're, halfway down the page and falling off and then you go fix the next part.

[00:13:03] I think that could be a really really helpful venture for you as you're trying to, improve your conversion rate and make traffic more valuable. 

[00:13:09] Crystal Waddell: Yeah, absolutely. 

Importance of Customer Insights

[00:13:10] Crystal Waddell: And incorporating storytelling is, just been a huge part of what I've learned over the last year. And what we talk about on the podcast.

[00:13:18] And so, just understanding what the customer is trying to do has really helped me understand like how to tell the story of our business. 

[00:13:27] So we had somebody come on and talk about Microsoft clarity. 

[00:13:31] Those tools, they seem so helpful.

[00:13:33] But at the same time, I haven't dove into them either. It seems like there's just so many little strings that you can pull on with SEO and related stuff. 

[00:13:42] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah, it's just incredible. There's so many opportunities to connect with your customers to understand how to tell that story better. 

[00:13:48] Whether it's using hot jar and watching them move around your site, whether it's emailing all your previous customers and asking them for, 15, 20 minute interviews.

[00:13:55] So you can learn a little bit about why they made those decisions. Surveys, like any bit of information you can get from your customers or prospects is just, it's just gold. 

[00:14:03] Crystal Waddell: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so let's get back to keyword stuff. 

Keyword Research Strategies

[00:14:06] Crystal Waddell: And I'm so glad that we did talk about that because on this show, SEO is just, one part of a bigger picture. And so I'm glad that we're tying it into, business outcomes, our customers, their journey, all that type of stuff.

[00:14:20] But what actually gets them on the page is like, Keywords, right? To a certain extent. It's it's not all about keywords, but it keywords do still play a role. 

[00:14:32] How do brands find keywords to write content that actually ranks? And drives the traffic that they need? 

[00:14:38] Nicholas Garfinkel: So it's hard right now.

[00:14:40] I think the tools out there give you some indication of what's going to be hard to rank for and what's not. And what I always do with my clients is I'll actually create a spreadsheet and, one axis is these keyword difficulty scores. 

[00:14:51] You can get at any of the SEO tools out there, whether it's Ahrefs or Moz or SEMrush or what have you.

[00:14:56] And then on the other axis. I use basically that combination of, traffic and CPC to create that kind of traffic value. 

[00:15:03] And what I'm looking for is valuable keywords where the keyword difficulty is low. And that's typically one way to like start that process. 

[00:15:09] There's a lot of talk in the SEO community about things like keyword clusters and semantic search and things like that.

[00:15:15] And that's all really important, but sometimes as a business, you just need to get to the basics and say Hey, that's low hanging fruit. I'm going to go tackle it. 

[00:15:21] So I would say that's one of the best and easiest ways is generate a big list, figure out, look at the keyword, definitely scores, and then go from there.

[00:15:28] As you get more advanced, you start thinking about, how do I build entire topical clusters of content that all interlink with each other to improve my chances. 

[00:15:36] But sometimes again, you just got to start at the foundation and really just focus on what are the easy wins and just take them.

[00:15:41] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. And one thing I've thought about too, is is there a tool That does that for you where, you identify the low hanging fruit, but then it tells you, okay, these are your internal linking instructions. 

[00:15:54] Is there, has anybody created anything like that? 

[00:15:56] Nicholas Garfinkel: There's a lot of really cool content tools out there that do stuff like that.

[00:16:00] And they help you understand. Hey, all your, everyone who ranks in the top 10, all their contents, a thousand words to 1500 words. 

[00:16:07] And they all talk about these topics and things like that. So there's a lot of good tools out there. There's none. I think I'd recommend on your podcast for people.

[00:16:15] If you go search or something like that you'll definitely find some things. 

[00:16:17] But I think there's different levels of SEO and sometimes looking at those tools can almost be overwhelming for most people. 

[00:16:26] Good content, you need content. Do right by your customers and the people reading it and, you'll get rewarded.

[00:16:32] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. Jamar Ramos, who was on the show, he talked about customer optimization and we were talking about the fact that like you could have an increase in revenue and an increase in traffic and then also have a decrease in like the domain authority metric. It is like, how is that possible?

[00:16:50] Like you're doing everything you're supposed to be doing technically, or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then all of a sudden your income goes up, but your authority on the internet goes down. 

[00:17:00] And he called that like the customer authority effect, like you're doing right by your customers.

[00:17:05] And that's why you're still winning, even though, some of these internet measurements say something different. 

[00:17:11] What about the difference between like how, Keyword research is approached by small businesses, which, are the entrepreneurs that you just spoke to in terms of just keeping it simple versus large enterprises.

Understanding SEO at Scale

[00:17:23] Crystal Waddell: Because I always hear people talking about this thing at scale. 

[00:17:27] And I'm like, what is that scale? What does that even mean? Is there like a minimum requirement for it to be at scale? Because I just, I don't live in that world. So I was just wondering if you could share that with us.

Enterprise SEO Advantages

[00:17:38] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah, there's just huge advantage for enterprise businesses in the SEO world. One from just a domain authority perspective.

[00:17:45] Google tends to favor larger brands because I think the risk of showing low quality or, low quality content or spammy content is much lower.

[00:17:53] But also they just have so much data. There's so much data there for them to be really good at. Data driven about what keywords to go after. 

[00:17:59] They understand, how they rank and where they rank and what type of keywords they can rank for. And because of that, they have this huge advantage where they can apply statistical modeling to figure out, what, how they can rank for it.

[00:18:09] So that, that's what Kixley was predicated on is this notion of, hey, I can build this model to predict where we're going to rank. Because they have all this data behind it. 

[00:18:17] So I think for them it and it becomes a much different game, right? It's how do I rank go from rank 5 to rank 4 rank 3 for this term that searched millions of times a month and, worth a million dollars, 10 million a year in search traffic. 

[00:18:30] I think back in there, that's when you start thinking about, semantic search and related terms and things like that try and figure out how do I optimize this one piece of content. 

[00:18:39] Because moving one position is going to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for my business.

[00:18:43] Crystal Waddell: Wow, that's crazy. I wish that moving one position would generate hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

[00:18:48] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah, we're all in the same boat here. 

Competitive Keyword Research

[00:18:49] Crystal Waddell: So here's here's the thing that I was wondering You were talking about competitors. 

[00:18:53] And I don't quite understand like competitive research or competitive keyword research.

[00:19:00] Like, how can we do that? What do you look for when you're analyzing? Like what's the most important things to look for? And then what are the kind of the mistakes to avoid? 

[00:19:09] Nicholas Garfinkel: So I think the easiest thing is there's a lot of great tools out there. I always talk about Moz, Semrush, and Ahrefs, because they're the three big ones in the space. But there's a lot of other tools that do this. 

[00:19:18] But they basically crawl the Internet trying to figure out who's linking to who and what pages exist.

[00:19:23] And so they do a really good job at estimating what keywords websites are getting and what traffic they're getting. So I think the easiest thing to do is go, plug in your competitors to those tools. And look at what keywords are they ranking for that you don't rank for. 

[00:19:36] Because if they're in the same space as you and that's driving them traffic, and these are competitors where you rank in similar rankings on other terms. 

[00:19:43] You probably can rank in similar terms that they're ranking for.

[00:19:45] So that's a good opportunity to find keywords where maybe you're not ranking. So that's one way to do it. The other thing is go search some of the terms that are more valuable to you. 

[00:19:53] Where they rank ahead of you. And try and compare your content to their content. What are they doing that you're not doing?

[00:19:58] And again, it goes back to this. Like I have hypothesis based approach of what are these ideas you have? What are reasons you think this is happening? And then you go test them, right? 

[00:20:05] Okay, I'm going to this month. It looks like my competitor has all their category pages, like a three paragraph description of, What this topic is and why it's important under all their products.

[00:20:15] So maybe I should test that and see if that impacts it. So I'll go and do that and then I'll wait a month or two and see, Hey did that numbers move? And while I'm waiting, I might go run another test at another part of my site. 

[00:20:24] I think just like trying to find people who are doing it better than you in your own space and try and emulate some of their work to see if that helps move the needle.

[00:20:31] Crystal Waddell: Okay. 

Category vs. Product Pages

[00:20:32] Crystal Waddell: When you think about like product pages versus category pages. 

[00:20:36] Is there some sort of best practice in terms of which one you want to rank or focus on ranking or is one more likely to rank than the other? 

[00:20:46] Because I've seen some stuff lately about category pages that I was like, I didn't really know that before.

[00:20:51] Nicholas Garfinkel: I just think that the nature of category pages. From an internal link perspective, right? You're going to have all your high level pages, like your home page is always going to point to all your like core service pages or category pages. And then those category pages are going to then link out to products.

[00:21:06] And so if you think about your page authority, domain authority, the home page is linked to by every single page on your site. 

[00:21:13] That's going to be Google size, the most powerful page you have. And then all the category pages you have, again they're all in the navigation bar.

[00:21:19] So every single product you have is going to be linking to those pages. While a product page, like you really just happen to be a category pages and a few other products linking back to it. 

[00:21:28] So I think like this notion of the internal link structure is really critical. And the category pages have the benefit of getting a lot more of those internal links.

[00:21:35] That said it depends on the search term and how your website is set up. So it's not a, one size fit all best practice, I would say, but that's how I see it. 

Mega Menus and Link Authority

[00:21:44] Crystal Waddell: What about like mega menus? And if we're just look at e commerce. If you've got these huge menus on your homepage, does, how does Google know that, which has the most.

[00:21:55] Like a higher link authority? When there's just so much on that page? 

[00:22:00] Nicholas Garfinkel: So that's an area where I, again I don't think there's enough like research in the SEO community about that. So there's a bunch of hunches people have, right. And there's this idea of years ago it was about keyword density, right?

[00:22:11] Like how many keywords can you stuff in the page? 

[00:22:13] I think it's something along those same lines there where, if you have a page linking to a thousand different pages. It's not going to, it's not going to pass as much link equity as a page that links to 10 pages or five pages.

[00:22:23] And so that's how I see it a little bit. There's also a lot of things that Google's come out with around how they're able to detect, what's in the nav bar and what's in the primary headings. 

[00:22:32] And Now they're saying like, you don't even need to use headers because they can just understand what the bigger text is and for the importance of the page is relative to that.

[00:22:40] I think anyone who can answer that without the data is probably, shooting from the hip a little bit. 

[00:22:45] But I think that's, as a community, it's where we're at in a lot of places. 

[00:22:49] Crystal Waddell: Okay, that's really interesting. 

Local SEO Strategies

[00:22:51] Crystal Waddell: Okay how can local businesses optimize their keyword strategy for local SEO?

[00:22:56] And do you think it's as important for local businesses to focus on this? Versus businesses who might sell, nationwide or globally? 

[00:23:04] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah, I think there's a huge advantage for local businesses. Especially if you're in the service business or something like that. 

[00:23:10] Find an attic installation company near me. Or, company in Maple Valley or whatnot.

[00:23:15] I think Google does do a good job at identifying local businesses in the area. And trying to surface them and Google maps and things like that. 

[00:23:21] I think the biggest things they can do is one, is make sure their Google profile business profiles is updated, it's targeting the right terms. 

[00:23:30] Getting your customers to leave five star reviews. I think that's a really strong signal for Google in terms of trusting small businesses. If I was a product manager at Google and I was thinking about how would I know if this random service company has a lot of authority and trust?

[00:23:43] You'd look at reviews is probably the first and foremost. You can't really look at who's linking to them, because they're, how many small business owners or random service companies are trying to get links on the internet to their site? It just doesn't happen. So I think a big one is the Google profile.

[00:23:57] Another one is making sure your address is on your website. 

[00:24:00] If we get you could use things like schema dot org and make sure all the right schemas there. So Google understands what you do and where you are and things like that. But at the bare minimum, just have your address on your website.

[00:24:09] So Google understands where you are and linking your Google profile to your website is obviously another big one. 

[00:24:15] So I think those are the easiest things people can do. 

[00:24:18] Outside of that is, is, a few hours once a week, just writing a blog post about your craft. 

[00:24:23] If you're a person who does fireplaces, maybe it's something like, how to keep your chimney clean. 

[00:24:27] Or, top five reasons, the smoke comes back into your house. Like whatever those might be just write some content there.

[00:24:34] Crystal Waddell: Do you think that business owners think like, why should I write content for my business when there's so much already out there on the internet? Is that something that ever comes up?

[00:24:44] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah, I think so. And I think there's a reason for it is. Google needs to find ways that trust you, right?

[00:24:49] And if you're a one page site that just talks about what you do and things like that, like there's not going to be a lot of trust there. Not a lot of signals for them to determine trust. 

[00:24:58] And so you might be writing this content and never ranked for those specific terms. But you'll be building all this quality content that's linking back to your homepage.

[00:25:06] And so now when people search, HVAC company near me, Google sees you as more of an authority in the space. 

[00:25:12] It's one of those things where it's hard to justify up front initially. But if you trust the process and you give it enough time, like you start to see the rewards.

[00:25:21] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. 

Future of SEO: Predictive Models

[00:25:21] Crystal Waddell: Based on, the data that you guys have at your company and your experience from working with so many large brands and companies in the past. 

[00:25:30] What do you see is going to what do you think is going to be part of the future of this optimization life.

[00:25:36] Nicholas Garfinkel: I don't want this to be like a self serving comment. 

[00:25:39] But I think it's starting to use more machine learning and predictive models to help inform what decisions we need to make as SEO professionals. I think if, if Nike hired me tomorrow to go do their SEO for them, the first thing I would do is come up with a plan of, Hey, here's all the things we're going to do.

[00:25:54] And these are the months we're going to do them. 

[00:25:56] And as any SEO person would, and then the hard part is trying to understand which of these things actually move the needle. And. We don't really know. We're guessing, right and it gets really hard when they when you say I need engineering resources and they say you want me to take away my engineering resources from this product or feature a thing we're building? What's going to be the impact of you know that one specific thing? 

[00:26:15] Fixing the internal link structure on the site or optimizing the site speed and a lot of people can't answer that.

[00:26:20] And so, I think people starting to use more models and things like that to predict what might happen, that feels like the future for me. And so that, that's the path we took our product down because we just feel that really is the next frontier. 

[00:26:33] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. 

Introducing Kixley

[00:26:33] Crystal Waddell: So your product, then. 

[00:26:34] Are you B2B and work with companies to figure this type of stuff out?

[00:26:40] Or do you work with SEOs who are working to figure this stuff out? 

[00:26:46] Nicholas Garfinkel: So our company right now, work with other businesses that help them internally. But we're building this product now, Kixley to open it up to SEO community. And people, in house or an agency. We have a provisional patent on this because we, it really is something that we think is unique.

[00:27:01] And so we're excited to get it out and I think we're a few weeks away from actually launching. It'll be pretty exciting for us. 

[00:27:06] Crystal Waddell: Awesome. Okay. So just to clarify, can you tell everybody about Kixley and who it's for and how to get it and just that type of information?

[00:27:16] Because I know you said it's not going to be available for a couple of weeks or a few weeks, but by the time this podcast goes live, it may be out there. So who should run and get it? If It is available. 

[00:27:27] Nicholas Garfinkel: So when we talk about Kixley is the world's first and only predictive SEO product out there. There's not a single predictive SEO product out there.

[00:27:35] There is, someone reached out to me. Let me know. Give you a shout. Anyone who's doing SEO at a company that, has over 100, 000 visits a year or can attribute at least 100, 000 in value to their SEO traffic. I think it's a slim dunk. It just makes too much sense for them, right? Because at that scale, This model is able to identify 3 percent wins, 5 percent wins, 10 percent wins that, are meaningful to the business as it gets smaller, it's a little bit harder to justify the cost because it is really expensive on our side to run. I would say anyone who's working on a big website, who's trying to figure out. You know what the next step is to optimizing their website or growth leaders or CMOs who are trying to figure out, is this SEO investment even worth it?

[00:28:15] Should I be spending 300, 000 a year on SEO or 500,000 or 800,000? 

[00:28:19] And, they're not able to forecast this stuff because nobody really can without sophisticated models that can do stuff that, that we're doing. 

[00:28:26] Crystal Waddell: Yeah, I love the models and I'm loving like chat GPT and there's a Python expert GPT that I've been using.

[00:28:33] And so I'm trying to build my own thing for Pinterest. I've been thinking about it for years, but there's always been like these steps of the process that I couldn't quite bring all together. But now, with these large language models, it's possible, so I think it's so neat that you're doing that.

[00:28:48] Where can people find you?

[00:28:50] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah. So they can go to Kixely.Com. 

[00:28:51] Right now it's just a splash page, over the next week and a half that's going to be changing. 

[00:28:55] So they can go to Kixely.Com to, to check that out. They can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Nicholas Garfinkel.

[00:29:01] I'm sure there'll be a link in the podcast or something. And otherwise they can email me at Nicholas at mindfulconversion. com. And I'm always happy to respond there as well. 

[00:29:08] Crystal Waddell: And so what's mindful conversion dot com? 

[00:29:11] Nicholas Garfinkel: So we first started an agency about a year and a half ago to help fund a lot of the product development that we've been doing.

[00:29:17] And that's all these products we're building are under the umbrella of mindful conversion. 

[00:29:21] And it's largely just a digital marketing agency and analytics agency that does everything from paid search to SEO and conversion rate optimization and, whatever else our clients happen to need.

[00:29:30] Crystal Waddell: Yeah, I love it. So that you're seeing a holistic picture. And I think that's just so important. That's what we talk a lot about here is just like this holistic nature of optimization that it's no longer just, SEO or CRO or PPC or whatever. And social media, all that stuff.

[00:29:45] It's really an integrated effort. So I always love, talking to people who have a hand in it. And all of those things, in a pulse on what's happening in digital marketing. So thank you so much, Nicholas. 

Podcast Wrap-Up and Final Thoughts

[00:29:57] Crystal Waddell: I appreciate your time today and just talking shop with me. 

[00:30:01] Nicholas Garfinkel: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:30:01] Thanks for having me on here. It was a blast. 

[00:30:03] Crystal Waddell: All right, guys. Go check out all of Nick's amazing stuff. I'll link to it in the show notes and I will catch you next time. Bye.