For other parts of the series:
Beginner’s Guide to Link Building in 2021
Beginner’s Guide to On-Site Optimization in 2021
Transcription from Rev.com – please excuse any grammatical, syntax, and spelling errors.
Paul Warren:
Hi, I’m Paul Warren.
Ryan Klein:
And I’m Ryan Klein.
Paul Warren:
And this is another episode of SEO is Dead and Other Lies. Ryan, it’s a great day. I’m sure you’re doing well, we’ve already talked about it. I’m doing great. We have a lot of really great stuff to cover today. So let’s cut through the pleasantries and get onto the goods.
Ryan Klein:
Okay. Yeah. No, BS. And I know that you’re in SEO mode right now and you can’t wait to talk about it more for the next 30 to 45 minutes, right? Especially on a Saturday, on a Saturday.
Paul Warren:
Turbo SEO mode, for sure.
Ryan Klein:
So let’s preface, this is a part of the series. It’s technically, it’s a four part series with the first part, being a preface for the three part series that was proceeding it. It’s the SEO 101 series. It’s for the understanding and practice of search engine optimization, as we know it here February 15th, 2020.
Paul Warren:
The center for the understanding and practice of SEO and understanding this.
Ryan Klein:
How are the kids supposed to get into the school? How are they supposed to fit in the school?
Paul Warren:
What is this an SEO building ants? Oh God, I love that movie so much.
Ryan Klein:
Now, you got to watch it again.
Paul Warren:
All right, so what are we talking about today, Ryan?
Ryan Klein:
We’re talking about content. As we know, the three main pillars we’re going to be talking about are content, link building and onsite optimization. Today is content day because we want to build the foundation. That’s why we’re starting there.
Paul Warren:
Today, it’s SEO content 101. Let’s begin.
Ryan Klein:
The content series, is now that’s broken down into four things that we’re going to talk about today and you can correct me if I leave out anything but content before we talk about keyword research and what to write about. Content can be created by you. It can be contented by someone else. It can be-
Paul Warren:
Something else.
Ryan Klein:
It can be created by something else, is a perfect way to say it. AKA spinners that have become quite sophisticated over the years.
Paul Warren:
Or AI. We’ll call it that.
Ryan Klein:
Or AI, I don’t personally use anymore, but we did for quite some time. And then the fourth one is just grabbing old content and we’ll talk about each and everyone one of them. So by the end of this, you know how to approach content or you can try each of them and see how it goes.
Paul Warren:
Let’s start at the very beginning.
Ryan Klein:
So let’s start with what in the world are you going to write about, and you want to reference our hot sauce and technically chili website, because I got the chili-
Paul Warren:
Oh yeah, I forgot we’re doing that.
Ryan Klein:
And also, I want to say to you, if you miss some of the video series, I have already uploaded some videos on our YouTube channel that are going over a lot of the basics prior to even where we’re at right now. So we’re talking about how to find a good domain, how to register it. And all the things that Paul said that we were not going to discuss. And I said, “Well, I’m going to at least do videos, so people can see it.”
Paul Warren:
There’s just no stopping. You just do whatever you want.
Ryan Klein:
Like I have all the time in the world to do it, but da, da, da.
Paul Warren:
Wait to take the initiative.
Ryan Klein:
You got it.
Paul Warren:
Okay. So let’s just dive in. You let’s say you want to have a website about something and I get this question all the time. I want to start a website, right? Well, one, let’s say you’ve picked something that you’re at least interested in, which we all suggest that you do, because if you’re going to write the content yourself. It doesn’t even really matter, if you’re going to come up with the content, you want to have some general idea of what you’re talking about or some interest in it. So it’s not terribly, terribly boring for you. But let’s say you already picked that, and for us, we’re going to pick hot sauce as our example here. I need to get kind of inside the head of like a searcher, right? Like what are the things people are looking up about hot sauce that I could write a page about and have content that they might visit or purchase something from. Like, how do I kind of make a funnel with that?
And so there’s a lot of tools that you can use to figure out what people are searching. There’s a lot of tools that I’ll suggest things to you. I like to use SEMrush. It’s a pretty cheap tool. I think there’s a free trial period, anyways. If you want to just kind of get your feet wet and like get a bunch of content real quickly and then cancel it. You can definitely do that.
Ryan Klein:
Yes.
Paul Warren:
But it’s a really, really good place to start, right? So you kind of can start with like the overall general keywords that you want, like how to make hot sauce, and then it’ll suggest to you, and it will give you the monthly search volume in whatever country that you’re in, whatever country you select actually. And it’ll tell you what it’s going to be on a monthly basis. And you can kind of use that to judge what you should be writing articles about.
Ryan Klein:
Sure. And I think that it’s important for people to definitely keep in the consideration, actually keywords and topics that are going to get traffic, while we don’t want to stymie any creativity or a passion project. Like we don’t want to tell you what you shouldn’t write about at the same time, if you’re writing about a bunch of random stuff and you might enjoy it, it probably won’t get traffic. So it’s just important to support it with data maybe to start. And once you get rolling and you start to get traffic qualified traffic, maybe you can kind of like branch out, but it’s important to know, like where’s the volume going to come from. That’s why you have to-
Paul Warren:
That’s a really good point. Like often, you’ll see this at larger companies, where someone that doesn’t know that this is how any of that works. We’ll push like, hey, we need to have an article with blink about this thing. Right? Like it’s important, but if no one’s searching any of those terms or they don’t really refer to it that way, because they use more relaxed jargon in like whatever industry that you’re in, you’re going to rank really well for whatever the terms are, because no one’s going to try and rank for that. But if, no one’s looking it up and clicking through your site, it’s like, it doesn’t really exist. And you just wasted a bunch of time on nothing.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it reminds me of when I used to do a lot of content. When I was starting out in SEO, I was basically a content writer pretty much half the time. And I’d write about very specific things. And I search the keywords I was optimizing for. And I was number one all the time. And because it was so specific, it’s like not that hard to make it happen.
Paul Warren:
Just because something has a low search volume, don’t let that discourage you necessarily from writing a topic about it. There’s tons of things that have like very limited search volume. But if you get, when someone’s looking for it and they find it and they get the answer they want. They make a purchase from it because there’s not a lot of other sources out there for it. Right. The way it’s referred to, since this is a 101 episode here, right? There’s long tail and there’s short tail keywords, right? Short tail, think of it as just stuff that gets like a crap ton of searches. It doesn’t convert super well because people haven’t really refined what they’re looking for. So a long tail, is really anything that’s kind of over three keywords long that people might type into Google. And so it’s very, very specific.
So type in, I don’t know, Audi A8 for sale, right. It’s going to give you a bunch of different areas. It might not narrow it down to like the city that you’re in, but if you’re like Audi A8 for sale in Winter Park, Florida. Well, there’s a little more search intent behind that term. Right? So even though there’s way less people searching it, someone might be like looking in that area. Or if it’s like Audi A8 for sale in Winter Park, Florida under $3,000. That’s like a super purchasing term. Don’t let that discourage you. But you, what you want to really do is kind of have a mix of both, but we’re going to break down sort of how you focus on that.
Ryan Klein:
Do you want to do some keyword research?
Paul Warren:
Right now?
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. I have Ubersuggest up, which seems to be owned by Neil Patel now, which is your favorite thing that’s probably ever happened. So you mentioned SEMrush, which is great and also includes volumes suggestions. And then I think what’s awesome about SEMrush too, is you can go to existing websites and you can see how they’re optimized. What kind of keywords they’re optimizing for already. And it’s going to be able to tell you how they rank and what kind of volume they’re getting and even what percentage of their traffic is projected from those keywords. So SEMrush is freaking awesome for keyword research for both yourself and looking at other websites that you’re kind of aspiring to be, or you’re kind of modeling your website after. Because you’re always going to be aware of your competition no matter what you do.
So for Ubersuggest and Answer the Public, it is my understanding that they both do a very good job at kind of understanding all the suggestive search that Google’s giving out for specific keywords. And then just kind of laying that out in an easier manner to analyze.
Paul Warren:
Both of them are freemium. Ubersuggest you only have one or two searches or something within it now, before you have to pay. I mean, they’re great little tools and all. I would suggest if you’re actually really serious about it, going to the next level and getting a tool like a SEMrush or Ahrefs which is another great tool. Ahrefs will show you questions that people ask as well and like the search format. What they asked them. And what about like the search volume is around those things. So it’s just a good way to like kind of plan your content out.
Now, before we dive into like how to actually get content, I want to talk a little bit about how you kind of want to structure your content. You got to think about it as like each page that you have written should represent kind of a unique topic. And then other pages can be like subsections that sort of like break off from that topic. That can be very specific about it. What you don’t want to do is like have one page with like everything on there about that. Just because one, Google only recalls so many keywords and so much stuff on a page anyways. But two, think about like your user, like how much are you going to invest in like reading like an 8,000 word page, right. It’s just like a lot to scroll through to find like what you’re looking for. So you kind of got to keep in mind, like people’s attention spans are like kind of short. Especially when it comes to like looking up information on the internet and they’ll move on to like the next website, very, very quickly to find what they’re looking for, like right away
A great way to sort of describe that and think about it is like, if you’ve ever been on YouTube and looked up like how to, videos about stuff. And if you look that up, you probably immediately look at like the length of video for each of those before you click on it. And if something’s like 15 minutes and it’s not like a 15 minute thing, I’m trying to fix, it’s like a couple of minutes or something. I really don’t want to click on that. Right. Like I want like the information when I want as quickly as humanly possible. So sort of think about that when you’re approaching, like writing articles. So not too short that it’s useless and Google’s not going to get value out of it, but not so long that like a human being is going to like hate looking at the content and trying to like comb through it to find what they’re looking for.
Ryan Klein:
I’m all about getting straight to the point. I don’t even know at what point the evolution of recipes online have gotten to where they’re at, but they’re freaking infuriating. Where it’s like, I just want a recipe for like carbonara sauce. And all of a sudden it’s like this anecdote about my grandma’s from the old country. And she used to make-
Paul Warren:
You have to scroll down through like crap, like so much crap.
Ryan Klein:
It’s like seven images. It’s four anecdotes. It’s talking about the ingredients. It doesn’t even talk about the portions. You literally have to go through two thirds of the page before you can get to what you’re looking for. I do not think that is the best user experience. I don’t care what people say.
Paul Warren:
No, I hate it. I totally agree with you. I don’t understand it. I think, that’s one of the victims of like Google updates where they’ve written more and more content to try to like appease the algorithm.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. I blame mommy blogs. And then therefore I blame mommies. I blame you mommy for making this really tough for us to just get-
Paul Warren:
You did it, you finally blamed your mother? You did it.
Ryan Klein:
My mom’s a big listener. And is yours. So I blame the mamas.
Paul Warren:
That’s at least 90% of our downloads. So I love you, mom. Thanks a lot. I want to put that out there.
Ryan Klein:
I don’t want to get too far off, but like, I definitely want to make a point of like the actual topics and kind of just like honing in on them. And then sometimes you’re going to be talking about multiple topics on a page, because if you find like a question that you can answer, no matter what. In like 150 words, it shouldn’t really be a page, just 150 words. So there’s going to be times where you ran a long form article or a page about three or four topics and you can optimize accordingly. And so, for example, I’m looking at Answer the Public’s hot sauce. I’m seeing a lot of great questions. It has 171 questions. And most of these are just like, this is amazing content fodder right here. It says, “What hot sauce is gluten-free.” I’d never thought about that. What hot sauce is keto, what hot sauce is keto friendly, which hot sauce is good for you. So you can start talking about like, what are the dietary influences or aspects of hot sauce. And just be like, is keto friendly? That’s kind of specific, but keto, gluten, sodium, like that’s all like one cohesive topic.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, absolutely. I think, one way to visualize it, it’s sort of like spokes on like a wheel. So think about it as like you have one kind of main subject, like a short tail keyword that’s like kind of encompassing and then smaller articles sort of branch out from that. Right. So you could be talking about all these different hot sauces and stuff and how ketos like a big thing. And then you can link from that to an article that’s specifically about keto. Have some recipes and stuff in there. And so just thinking of it as like kind of things that just branch off logically, if there’s enough content or I had a page that’s like 500 words and it’s like useful, then you should probably write a page for it.
Ryan Klein:
And then one thing also for consideration, this is something I’ve seen a trend in content that’s really taken off. I think in the past few years, I have just seen this much more than ever, and even Answer the Public has it, is comparisons. So now I’m seeing way more like versus than I’ve ever seen before, like popping up in like searches and keywords with volume and search console. Like hot sauce versus salsa, hot sauce versus pepper sauce, hot sauce versus buffalo sauce. Like people search comparatively more in the past few years then I’ve seen before that. And I think that might even come to play with like voice search too, to tie that in?
Paul Warren:
Yeah. And so going to voice search too, pages that are just like questions and answers do really well in voice search, there’s a different markup for it. All that means is like a little bit of code that you can put on the back end of your site that tells Google, it’s a question, and this is the answer for. It tells other things too. So if you have like an Amazon Alexa, and you just ask it a question, it’s coming through the internet, it’s like its own databases that it’s crawled to like find that answer. So that’s an entirely different type of content or you can have kind of related, but unrelated subjects all at the same time. Like a related topic, but like subjects that could be unrelated about it within that topic. Right?
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. And we’re talking about succinct answers to things, we’re talking about the attention span of people decreasing less than a goldfish. Amoeba, I’m talking about amoebas now, not even goldfish.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. Guidelines for making hot sauce. There’s a lot of guidelines in there. One of the questions could be like, “Oh, well what should the pH level be for like a longer shelf life for my hot sauce?” That’s a good question you could have on there. Another one could be like, “Oh, well how hot should I cook the sauce at? What should be the temperature and the length of time?” So like that’s all something that could be combined on one page, right? So they’re slightly different topics, but they’re all about the same subtopic. Kind of think about it like that. All right.
So I think we explained this as much as we can, you kind of have to learn how to do it a little bit on your own and get your own vibe and see what’s like working and out there and like the rankings already. So once you’ve kind of gotten what you want to write about how do you get the content? So let’s delve into that, Ryan.
Ryan Klein:
Okay. Finally, we’re at it. So this is a passion project, which we would recommend this would be. We see it, we don’t love the prospect of people typically taken on projects where they know nothing about the industry or the subject. They’re just in it for the money. I get it. But it’s going to make your life a little bit more difficult, especially if this is like your first project. If it’s a passion project, something you’re knowledgeable about, something that you’re genuinely excited about, we recommend the starting point to learn best practices and be able to expound those best practices. Other people eventually you work with is to write the content yourself. That is the first way you can do it. So how do you do that?
Paul Warren:
The most time consuming by far?
Ryan Klein:
How do you do it? You write it. How is it done?
Paul Warren:
That’s it.
Ryan Klein:
In a word doc or directly into WordPress.
Paul Warren:
That’s pretty much it. You just write the content yourself in a word doc, edit it, make sure everything’s okay. There’s a lot of tools you can use to make sure that you’re not writing things improperly. Grammarly is one of them. It’s pretty cheap. I suggest getting it. If you’re going to write your own stuff, but it’s just kind of doing the work yourself, right? Doing the keyword research, write an article about it, putting it up. I don’t think Ryan and I do much of that anymore.
Ryan Klein:
I do on occasion, but it’s getting tougher and tougher just because I just don’t have the time to sit down, nor the patience to just be busting out articles and blogs all the time. So I certainly haven’t written a piece of content for a client in like the past eight years, but I still do blogging for my own stuff here and there, but yeah, it just makes it tougher. And another way you can kind of create content too, is if you just absolutely hate writing. Especially for clients, when I work with lawyers and their time is so finite and they can’t set aside time to write blogs about God knows what. Sometimes I’ll suggest maybe even doing videos so we can repurpose that. If you’re out and about taking a walk, you would want to do like a voice memo. There’s plenty of transcription services that can transcribe things that are off the top of your head into text that you can use.
Paul Warren:
And like some people are great at speaking about subjects, but terrible writing about it. Right? So it’s just an easy way to kind of get that information real quickly. So yeah, or a great place to start and you can go and spend like Fiverr or whatever. Actually, I think it’s built in, within Google’s, not Google Sheets, Google docs. It will translate the spoken word into written word, as you’re saying it. So that’s a really free, easy thing that you can use.
Ryan Klein:
use. Yeah. You can do it on Fiverr. We actually like using Rev. We haven’t transcribed something in a bit, but they’re pretty spot on. In addition to that, like if you write very stream of consciousness like me and then you don’t want to edit it afterwards, you could possibly find someone to edit your work also on Fiverr. And then we’ll talk about editing it, as well. When we talk about the next way you can get your content, which would be to essentially outsource it.
Paul Warren:
So if you’re outsourcing your content, which if, you’re doing anything to a medium size amount of content, I would suggest doing this. There’s a ton of resources. The most used one, I think is going to be Upwork. It’s a great website. There’s just tens of thousands of contractors on there that do all kinds of different services, SEO included, but writing is one of them. And you can kind of set your jobs based on the length of time. You can pay by the hour. You can pay a set amount for, per article, if you want. You can give bonuses, if they do a really good job, there’s different pricing levels depending on like the writer and the experience that they have. But it’s all really easy to manage. And what’s great about it is it goes into sort of a holding account until everything’s approved between you and like the contractor at the end of it.
So if, they’ve done a really poor job or they stole a bunch of the content and they just gave you something that’s completely plagiarized. You don’t have to give them your money if you’re not happy with it. And Upwork really tends to side with the people that are posting the jobs over the actual contractors on there. So it’s a good way to like safely do it.
Ryan Klein:
Upwork’s great because you can actually put like the face on the writer too. And a lot of other places where you kind of just buy it, blogs or articles, it’s just coming from a random pool of writers. You don’t really know them. The great thing about Upwork is they’re kind of like contractors, working with you, they’re not really working for you. You can work with someone. I’ve had plenty of situations, I work with someone for like six months and then they just are like, “I’m done.” They just quit. And then you’d never hear from them ever again because they’re contractors and they can do technically whatever they want. But in the meantime you build relationships with them. I typically correspond with them on Upwork itself or Skype. They tend to like pick up on your feedback. You can develop them to write more in line with like your tone and style.
Like Paul was saying, there’s tens of thousands of them. Meaning that even, if you like are talking about hot sauce. I wonder if someone can write like really expertly on hot sauce. It’s like, yeah you’re going to search by keywords. And then you’ll realize that there are people in there that can write about food. They’re food bloggers. They’re talking about like, eCommerce. People will write about anything on there. Sometimes they’re in the States, if you prefer that.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. You can set the country that they’re in as well. And if they’re native English speakers, if you need something written in a different language, you can find people on there that’ll do that for you just fine. It’s an invaluable resource. It used to be called oDesk back in the day and they merged with another company and it became what it is today.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, it was oDesk and wasn’t there one other?
Paul Warren:
Yeah, it was something else, but check it out, Upwork. I can’t recommend it enough. I’m not getting any money from Upwork for saying this. I just generally use it and I love it.
Ryan Klein:
Losing money. [crosstalk 00:21:01] Upwork really is great. And you can get writers, like you’re saying also probably maybe per article or hourly. It all depends. Yeah, definitely check that out.
Paul Warren:
Yeah.
Ryan Klein:
There’s different ways of paying for content. It’s going to be, per hour, per article and then per word. So Upwork’s being that it’s for pretty much any freelancer you can imagine. And we’ve used it for developers and VA’s and SEOs and content writers. So it’s always going to be hourly or project basis. So there are more places that are specifically for writers. One of which that I don’t personally use as much anymore because the quality isn’t there for me anymore. But I did use Textbroker for a long, long time and that’s per word.
Paul Warren:
There’s also a bunch of like one off SEO service websites, like Legit or Conquer that you can go to and have things written very cheaply. I don’t know how much of it’s written by a human, but you can have stuff done on there. If you kind of want some unique stuff done. There’s going to be varying price points. For me, for a 500 word article, if it’s not something that’s highly technical. I usually shoot for budget of like $30 for an article. That’s like the level of writer that I want. So they’re going to be like a natural, English speaker, probably have like a college education. And it usually takes around one to two days to like turn out an article or something like that.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. I can definitely speak on the price is being for different quality levels. So if you go on like Textbroker and you want something that’s probably going to need some editing and it’s going to really hit the topic on point, like you expect. You’re probably going to spend about 10 or $15. Once you start really getting where you don’t have to make edits or give too much feedback, $30 sounds pretty reasonable. And then one last place, I know a lot of agencies use, to talk about sometimes pretty complex things, but you’re talking about writers that are thoroughly vetted, thoroughly tested, pretty outstanding articles is Verblio, but you’re looking at closer to 60 to a $100 per article.
Paul Warren:
And think about this too, the more technical subject matter. So if, you’re talking about like something financial trading Someone kind of needs actual experience to talk about it. Like educatedly, is that a word, educatedly? I don’t think so.
Ryan Klein:
Sure.
Paul Warren:
To talk about it, well, you are going to have to pay a lot more for it. So it’s definitely you pay what you get for it. Like you can get a five dollar article, but it’s going to be trash.
Ryan Klein:
And it might even be plagiarized, which we’ll be talking about at some point.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. Well, let’s just dive right into that right now. So let’s say you’ve gotten a bunch of articles back from a writer and they all look great. Right. But what you want to do is you want to go one step and you want to check that to see if they’ve stolen it.
Ryan Klein:
I believe that the standard, at least in my circles is Copyscape.
Paul Warren:
Copyscape is a great tool. I think it’s free for the most part. Right?
Ryan Klein:
I pay for it. I do such huge chunks of content at a time.
Paul Warren:
Yeah.
Ryan Klein:
We’re doing bulk and we’re not typically doing bulk for content from freelancers in house at all. We’re doing it for other content that we’re also going to kind of mention in a little bit. One cool thing that Copyscape does too, is that we use it … There’s a way for it to pull in an entire site map for a website and it’ll pull all the links from the same app all at once. And it can basically do a plagiarism check for an entire website pretty easily.
Paul Warren:
You might be asking yourself, well, why would I even care about any of this at all? Well, one, you can get sued if you steal other people’s content. More so for images than anything else I’ve seen, but it’s still something you want to be cognizant of, stealing other people’s content. Like they tend to not be very, very happy about that. Number two, usually won’t rank well at all. And you can get Google penalties from that.
Ryan Klein:
And so if you think you want to build your whole website by just copying other people’s pages, but then giving them attribution like source and link into them. Like sure, I guess technically that’s fine. But those pages will never rank for crap. Because you’re not the original author.
Paul Warren:
You’re not going to do well. It’s just not [crosstalk 00:25:08].
Ryan Klein:
It’s not going to rank for anything. Google knows better than that. They know that like yeah, sometimes content is like lifted and put here and there, but they’re just not going to award like anything to that page whatsoever from an authority standpoint.
Paul Warren:
Let’s talk about another way of doing this. And this is a kind of important if maybe you have a giant website with thousands of pages and they’re like directory pages, right? You don’t want to pay a writer to do it. So there’s a lot of ways to automate that process and to do it through AI tools and like content spinning. So there’s a ton of tools out there. I don’t know if I’m comfortable, even just suggesting one, just because there’s like so many. Ryan, what was some of the ones that you used in the past?
Ryan Klein:
Really? I used about three in the past that were pretty terrible until I got to WordAi. I don’t spend anymore. I did in the past, it’s been awhile, but WordAi was pretty good.
Paul Warren:
WordAi, I feel like it’s almost the standard. All of these tools, and they work with varying degrees of quality. What they do is you put in keywords that you want, and then it searches through the internet for different websites and it pulls in content they have about it. And then it arranges it in such a way that it reads like a normal article is written. There’s a ton of them and then it’ll spend that information. It’ll spin like the words in it so that it comes out unique. A lot of times when you spin stuff, if you don’t spend time setting up like spin tags, which basically say like, anytime this keyword appears use this keyword or this keyword or this keyword instead. To give different variations, if you don’t set it up, right. It’ll read like a machine wrote it, which doesn’t read very well at all. But if you do it right and you take the time to set it up correctly, there’s not a big difference between that content and something that the human being would write.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, I don’t think there’s ever a substitute for a person because the spinner is a lot of like rearranging the sentence in a different way. Instead of like, my dad went to the store, it will be like, the stores where my dad’s going. Do you know what I mean? It’s kind of how it does it.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, it’ll be structured, like it’ll make sense, but it wouldn’t be necessarily like how a human would structure that sentence, that speaks that language. You know what I mean?
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, not really.
Paul Warren:
It’s almost like if you were taking a test for like a foreign language and like they were testing you on like the grammar and sentence structure and stuff. And you’d like got enough to make a C, it would be like that.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. So it does a good job, like swapping out adjectives a lot because adjectives are oftentimes interchangeable. The verbs it’ll do a little less often because that can get a little weird if you do a wrong verb. So you remember one time it was killed and then it was murdered, which that’s not an appropriate switching out of a verb because killed couldn’t be by anything and murdered, I think is specifically a human being killing another human being. Which is kind of like implying something very specific. So verbs, not as much. And then I think it tries to avoid nouns as much as possible.
Paul Warren:
So one of the tools that I’ve used in the past for this is called Kontent Machine, with a K, for the content at the beginning. It’s a pretty cheap way. I mean, you got to understand, you can create a lot of content in a really, really short amount of time. I’m talking about like a minute. You can create like a 500 or 600 word article with the keywords that you want in it, in like less than a minute. And then you can take that article and you can put in the spin tags that you want and you can create 20 other articles off of that topic very, very quickly.
So for like the price of maybe like $40 a month, you can make almost unlimited content. That’s going to be unique. It’s not always going to read well, but you’ll be able to have it. And depending on what type of website it’s going on, not necessarily like your main website, but like if you have other websites you use for link building, stuff like that. It’s a really cost efficient and very, very fast way to do things at scale.
Ryan Klein:
I think it’s important to preface, like this is not your marquee content. This is not like your homepage. These are not like your main pages.
Paul Warren:
I would bite the bullet here and pay the extra to have a human being, write it for like my own main website. There’s a lot of other things that it’s not that important. Right. People always think of like SEO spam as being like really awful and terrible. And you don’t want humans to read it, but the vast majority of the time, like no humans ever going to read a lot of that content. If you’re doing it this way, you just want it to be legible, makes sense. But at the end of the day, Google doesn’t know if AI wrote it or not, for the most part. All it sees is like, it doesn’t understand context. It just understands keywords. And certain things that go into its formula. What’s the word count for it? How many links are in it? How many keywords are in it? Things like that. It’s not a human, it doesn’t know things yet. The AI isn’t there yet.
Ryan Klein:
I mean, websites still get the manual reviews. I don’t know how much anymore happens here and there.
Paul Warren:
It’s pretty rare. I feel like.
Ryan Klein:
I mean, there’s just a gazillion websites. It’s just not that easy for their QA team to like be checking everything manually. But yeah, as far as like spun content, you’re talking about link building, absolutely. If you’re doing like eCommerce maybe like in some situations I think that maybe some spun content is good for like a little bit extra, bulking up like a few pages here and there that open up with actual content. But these aren’t articles I would suggest doing front and center. Like oh, I want people to read these necessarily.
Paul Warren:
And what’s interesting about Kontent Machine, it’s not the best one by any means. The best one that I’ve ever seen. It’s more costly, but as SEO Content Machine with a C. But then when I was talking about Kontent Machine with a K, the front page of it is actually endorsed by a former SEO, otherwise guests that we had on. Do you know who it is, Ryan?
Ryan Klein:
Atkinson.
Paul Warren:
No. He probably has used it before. Matthew [crosstalk 00:31:05]. That’s right, he’s top of the page.
Ryan Klein:
Twenty-five percent chance right here.
Paul Warren:
He is top of the page, for referrals on their. Kontent Machine is one of the best content generators on the market. It is a huge time and money saver, helping to setting up link campaigns. A quick and easy painless process.
Ryan Klein:
But yeah, he says specifically link campaigns. So he knows where that content is going.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we should preface this, is that depending on how you’re using the content. Use things that are like automated tools like that, for things that are going on a website that you want human beings to actually read. Might be the best way of putting it.
Ryan Klein:
I would say like, there’s a one thing that you could do is if you want to kind of create like placeholders. So like you create a lot of these pages, it’s kind of like partially spun content. It’s not the best content. And then you start to get traffic to them, but the traffic doesn’t convert. You’re like, “Okay, now I have to rewrite it.” I could see that being something.
Paul Warren:
Let’s mention one other way to find content that Ryan and I have done in the past. And that is through the Wayback Machine. And it’s a very easy and simple process.
Ryan Klein:
I’m showing everyone in our video series, so this is perfect.
Paul Warren:
All right. So since you’re doing a video on it, Ryan, why don’t you walk everyone through the process.
Ryan Klein:
If you aren’t familiar with the Wayback Machine, the Wayback Machine is basically a website dedicated to having indexed as many websites as possible on the internet at different stages in their lifetime. So basically you can go on Wayback, put in a URL, and it’s going to have basically timestamps of that website periodically since its existence. I don’t really know its background. I don’t know if it’s a not-for-profit or what the angle is. It’s like Wikipedia. But basically you’re able to go there and you’re able to pull up websites that existed 5, 10, 15 years ago. It may not exist to this day and basically navigate through that website as it existed, maybe in like 2001, 2007, and just go through it and see what it was like when it was built in a crappy HTML at the time. But there’s just content that still sits on there. They wrote articles and pages and blogs back in the day, and they’re not really being used and you can repurpose them and you can revitalize it for your own use.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. And it’s not actually live on a website anymore, this way at all. So there’s no penalties from that.
Ryan Klein:
And it’s certainly plenty of content that people spent a lot of time creating back in the day. And the copyright says 2003, and it’s been expired for 17 years and you basically grab it and then you put it through Copyscape and see if someone didn’t beat you to the same idea. And then if it’s good, then it’s good.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. So it’s honestly the easiest way to find content because it’s already written and you don’t have to write it yourself. And it’s very easy to find. You just have to find the websites that don’t exist anymore that have that content on there. So that’s a whole other episode that we can get into on how to do that. So stay tuned because we’ll actually probably walk through that at some point.
Ryan Klein:
You mentioned too, so when I started grabbing this content, I manually did it. I had on one screen, I had the Wayback website and on another screen I had a Microsoft Doc. Once I got sick of doing it myself, I outsourced it to my friends overseas. And then they’ve been compiling hundreds and hundreds of articles, but Paul, you’re also aware of a way that we can approach it where you don’t need a human being to do it at all. You can just scrape it, when you give it the appropriate URLs. Right?
Paul Warren:
That’s correct. Actually, there’s tools that you can use right now. That’ll scrape it based on keywords. And it looks to see if the URLs still existing and stuff too. One of the tools I use for that actually is a SEO Content Machine. That’s actually built into it. So you can do that really easily.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. This is pretty comprehensive overview of how to get content varying from perfect to free. No one’s going to complain about free content, but yeah, this should definitely set you up to have hundreds, if not thousands of blogs and articles and pages for your website in a relatively painless amount of time and the costs that you may incur for this kind of project.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. I think we’ve covered pretty much everything that we wanted to do on this episode, but I’m excited for the next episode, because I think we’re going to be talking about link building.
Ryan Klein:
We’re going to be talking about basic link building though.
Paul Warren:
Basically.
Ryan Klein:
Not basically not the crazy [crosstalk 00:35:34].
Paul Warren:
I’m not going to give the super advanced. I’ll let you know about it. I’m not going to tell you how to do it? But we’ll give you some knowledge, at least that this is a thing that exists out there for link building, anyways. But we’ll give you the Google way of doing it, which actually, I guess the Google way of doing it is to not make any links ever. Now that I think about it.
Ryan Klein:
No, it has to be all natural. It’s the Yelp way. Google is inspired by Yelp. Yelp is, don’t ever solicit for reviews, you should be able to get them all on your own, which would probably all amount to being just a bunch of negative reviews. So just let it happen. Same with Google, just a bunch of [crosstalk 00:36:06].
Paul Warren:
Yeah, definitely. I hope our listeners got something useful out of this. We haven’t really done like an SEO 101 podcast in a while, but things always change in SEO, sometimes by the day but this should at least set you up for success if you’re starting here in 2020 doing SEO for the first time.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. Hopefully it’s a good refresher for our loyal listeners, they’ve been listening since May of 2018. Yeah, before we know it, it will be two years. Hopefully, we’ll have a lot to show for it.
Paul Warren:
Oh my gosh, we’re coming up on it.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, yep.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, yeah. But we also want to thank all of our listeners out there, we really appreciate you guys tuning in. If you have any questions at all, we love answering questions from listeners. You can hit us up at SEOisdeadandotherlies@gmail.com. We respond to that pretty quickly. I check that multiple times a day. You can also leave a comment on our YouTube channel, which is also SEO is Dead and Other lies at YouTube, whatever it is. Just go to YouTube and type that in. You’ll find it.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, yeah.
Paul Warren:
And then we also have like a pretty active Facebook. So if you leave us a message on there, I’ll get back to you pretty quickly as well. But we love hearing from you guys, if you’re interested in being on you have a unique story you want to talk about or something in the SEO industry you think you could share with other listeners out there. We’re happy to talk to you about that as well, and be sure to like, share and subscribe anywhere that you see SEO is Dead and Other Lies. And you know what, if you’re writing an article about the top 10 SEO podcasts, damn it, you put us in there.
Ryan Klein:
And then, leave a review. We could use a couple more. We’d appreciate it while we’re at it, while we’re doing things for us, when we’re doing all this work for you guys, hook it up, right?
Paul Warren:
Yeah. We got a positive one just the other day. And I appreciated that. [crosstalk 00:37:49].
Ryan Klein:
Paul, it was like the first thing you texted me today. You said, “Dude, we got review. It was really good.”
Paul Warren:
I think we got a positive review on Apple Podcasts, but we really appreciate our listeners and we don’t want to ever really have sponsorships or anything like that. We want to keep this content like free and useful just because we’re not working for the man.
Ryan Klein:
No, never have, never will.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. That’s really, our goal is just to provide good stuff for like the community out there, for you guys to use and help your rankings. So we appreciate all you guys.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. And then absolutely, I mean, that can be exemplified more than the visual component that’s being put together in YouTube to support all this content as well. That we’re doing in the podcast.
Paul Warren:
Yeah actually, I think we might go to a video. I think we might go to a video podcast format in the future.
Ryan Klein:
Because you like Rogan a lot and he’s a cool dude.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. I’m just trying to be Joe Rogan.
Ryan Klein:
I’m not just trying to be one of the first podcasts of all time.
Paul Warren:
All right. Well thank you guys so much for listening and be sure to tune in for the next episode, where we’re going to be covering SEO link building 101 and giving you a lot of useful tips.
Ryan Klein:
Yep. Looking forward to it.
Paul Warren:
Well, thank you so much. I’m Paul Warren.
Ryan Klein:
I’m Ryan Klein.
Paul Warren:
And this has been another episode of SEO is Dead and Other Lies.
Ryan Klein:
Bye. Bye.