This is Stephan’s podcast appearance about Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Expert on the Garlic Marketing Show.

Back with the Garlic Marketing Show. I've got Stephan Spencer here. He is an incredible SEO expert. I've known him for a couple of years. Has lots of success. Been doing this for a long time. Written books on it. You know, worked with some major companies. Stephan, thanks so much for being on the garlic marketing show.

Hey, thanks, Ryan. It's great to be here.

You know, it's fun. I like to nerd out on SEO. I think SEO is a lot of fun. It's a lot of, it's scary. I want to talk to you about trends, and I want to talk to you about hiring an SEO person because I think that's one thing I see for people, both agencies and just internally, trying to figure out SEO search engine optimization. Before, let's talk a little bit about what you do. And you have a couple of success stories to share with us, right?

All right. Sounds great. So I've been doing SEO ever since it was just in its infancy before even Google existed. I was optimizing for search engines like InfoSeek and Alta Vista.

And that was the mid-nineties. So I think of SEO as a place where you can tinker and kind of poke and prod at the black box and figure it out, reverse engineer it. So I love doing that sort of thing, and that's what really appeals to me about SEO. It's a science, right? You can figure stuff out. You can have hypotheses.

You can test those hypotheses and see if they hold true or not. I invented an SEO platform, a software as a service, back in 2003 that I ended up selling along with Microsoft. My company in 2010. So, that was a really big win. There was a lot of serendipity and synchronicity there to make all of that happen. So, I was being paid on a pay-click or cost-per-click basis for SEO. And who can figure that one out? That's like a printing machine for cash. That was pretty awesome. So, we were charging 15 cents a click for organic traffic. We also have clients like Nordstrom and Zappos who use our technology.

We actually ended up generating more annual revenue from that technology platform than from our consulting services as an SEO agency— so that was fun. In recent times, I've been focused on helping clients who are doing something important in the world, doing good, and making a difference, and not so much trying to collect the big brands.

Yes, I've worked with brands like Sony, Chanel, Zappos, CNBC Bloomberg Businessweek, Best Buy, Bed Bath Beyond, Quicksilver, etc.

But that was really my ego, and trying to keep my ego in check these days. That said, I do have probably the biggest book that you've ever seen on a marketing topic, and that's this one right here. It wasn't enough to have just a big book. This is an insanely big book at 994 pages. The Art of SEO is soon to be in its fourth edition. We're working on a fourth edition right now, so stay tuned for that. That's the third edition I just held up, and I have a couple of other books coming up. With O'Reilly as my publisher as well, that is not SEO related, although kind of tangentially.

So, Google Power Search is all about how to find stuff on Google, market research, and all that. Then, there is Social E-commerce, which is really about driving online sales through social media marketing. So, that's a little bit about what I've been up to. As far as a case study you asked about, this is a fun one. So, I donate quite a bit to worthy nonprofits. I'm on the board of a nonprofit called Impact Network.

They build and operate schools in rural Zambia. And every year, I donate to an SEO audit, a full-scale one that's valued at $35,000. I actually charge that. It's not just a rack rate. That's really what we charge, but I donated that completely for free. And the top bidder on Caridy Buzz then gets that audit. We put in as much time and effort and quality of producing that deliverable versus a cash $35,000 audit. So, there was this one winning bidder a couple of years ago, other world computing, OWC, at Macsales.com, which is their website.

They've been around forever since. Well, their website's been around since the 90s, early 90s, and yeah, they won it, and they did a fantastic job, and they were so blown away with it. They got so much ROI from it. Seven figures in ROI within two months from that audit that I did for free, but they paid less than $35,000 for in order to, you know, which then built a school in Zambia and had yeah, multiple, well, just a lot of revenue generated for me in the process of, you know, after the fact, doing a free audit for them that they were really impressed with and then generating millions and millions of dollars in, ROI for them. So, that was a fun case study. That was actually all written up in a case study on my website. So, if you go to Stephanspenser.com and then go to results, there's a section for case studies in there. And OWC is one of them. 

That's awesome. That's awesome. And, so tell me a little bit about, you know, that process. What were those things that you found right away that had that much revenue for OWC?

What often happens with a very large website, especially one that's been around for a long time, like decades, such as with OWC, they have a lot of cruft, a lot of old obsolete content that is still in Google and still on the website. And it's just not doing anything for anybody. There's a technique that is super valuable for that kind of crusty old website, and it's Content Pruning.

If you think about a website being kind of like a tree, if you have a lot of dead branches on that tree, the whole tree looks kind of unkempt and sickly, right? So, each web page is like a branch on the tree. And if there are blog posts from 2007 announcing that in a few months, you're going to be at a trade show or whatever, that's not useful content. So the more of that you can clean up, get out of Google's index, even if you want to keep it in an archive on your website for whatever reason, but you want it to not be cluttered up, Google's, search, results and index, you can no index that content. I'd say probably just remove it altogether if it's obsolete content.

Why would anybody want to access it anyway? It would go back into the archives of 2007 blog posts. Right. So, that content pruning initiative really paid dividends. There are plenty of other things that I and my team found from a technical standpoint, misconfigurations, and just you don't know what you don't know in terms of SEO.

If you're not in that world and you're doing application development for a website, you don't know what the implications are of choosing a particular, you know, JavaScript, framework over another or some particular WordPress plugin over another and the settings that you said, et cetera.

And when it comes back to that content pruning piece, you know, how would someone do that themselves? I mean, you know, cause there's a lot of people that have ten-year-old websites. What would they decide to get rid of content versus updates? 

Anything that is no longer relevant to the conversation today. So, if you're announcing some new update to, you know, some software that you're selling, and that's 15 versions ago, it's irrelevant. Nobody cares. If it's talking about a new trend that's no longer new, it's some old trend that we've far exceeded with other trends, let's say that I was writing, back in 2007, about a new search engine.

Could this be the Google killer? We'll see. And then it's out of business, right? Delete it. Just delete it. Get rid of it. You might've spent hours doing all sorts of research on it, but nobody cares. It's no longer valuable. So, it's hard to separate out the effort and the emotion and everything and your kind of ownership of it.

So, you might want to pull in a third party or at least somebody who's more at an arm's length from the situation and say, yeah, I don't know. I don't think this really matters anymore unless you're just kind of, I don't know, more disassociated, not disassociated, but kind of able to disconnect from that content and look at it from a more neutral point of view.

So it needs to be,  valuable to today's conversation and ideally for the future as well. I don't spend much time writing content that I don't believe will be relevant in six months or a year's time. I have real trouble covering new versions of tools and doing big exposes about a recent Google core update.

Because what about. Next core update, and the core update after that, etc. Like, do we really care about the, I don't know, mid year 2017 Google update that happened? Like, that's old news. So, focus on evergreen content and content that is really valuable. It is not just a positioning play, like adding value.

You know, something I do that's a North star for me before I sit down to write anything before I end up on a podcast, whether I'm being interviewed or interviewing somebody else for my two shows for Marketing Speak or Get Yourself Optimized, whether I'm on stage speaking at a conference. I always think to myself, am I going to reveal light?

How am I going to reveal light? And I have that intention of revealing light, and that just changes everything. It's just it's for me, a North Star. 

That's great. And you know content has changed a lot, you know, as you're recommending this with OWC and everyone else, you know, how has your, I mean that North Star is great, but how have you shifted how you're writing content and length and type of content and What additional pieces you're putting in there.

Yeah, it's not about the frequency of content writing; it's its quality. If you're going to invest time, let's say every week, to write something, make it valuable enough that it stands head and shoulders above all your competitors, even indirect competitors who are writing about that topic. What some SEOs refer to as skyscraper content is like a big skyscraper against the skyline of a lot smaller buildings. You stand out. And if that means that you only write or publish, let's say, one blog post every few weeks instead of three blog posts a week, It's better. It's much better. And it's not about the length.

Some people are saying, well, you know, it's no longer about 800 to 1,200 words, which is the sweet spot for an article. It's really more like 2 to 4,000 words these days. That misses the point. It's not about word count. Google is not rewarding word count. They're rewarding, or the algorithm is rewarding depth. How surface level or how deep and comprehensive do you go in that content piece?

There's a concept in SEO called LSI keywords, "Latent Semantic Indexing" is what it stands for. You don't need to know about it because Google's not even using that algorithm in its rankings. But, the concept is valuable that if you so think of an LSI keyword as just a related topic if you're going to write about lawnmowers and you only cover the surface level stuff and you never mention any of the tangentially related or closely related topics such as landscaping and weed whackers and, grass and lawns and, clippings and horsepower and writing versus push and all that, then it's not a very valuable piece of content and the AI at Google is able to ascertain that.

So that's, really, I think, one of the key things to think about is how comprehensive I am going with this content piece. And really map out what those related topics or LSI keywords are so that you hit it. You just have to stand out from all the other stuff out there and figure out what a good hook is. Something that is so enticing that it's irresistible for people to click on and continue to read. You know, just don't do the clickbaity stuff of a number six, which will blow your mind, and it never does. You want to underpromise and over-deliver, not over-promise and under-deliver like most clickbait you see, but make it grab you and grab the reader all right, so a hook that is creating a curiosity gap.

It's something I feel the tension like in my body, and I want to relieve it by reading your content because if I only saw the headline and hopefully you didn't give away the punchline in your headline in your title so that they are enticed to click to read that article, and then you keep them hooked the whole time you didn't give away your punchline or your the big payoff right away.

You keep adding value throughout the whole document—also, no big walls of text. Nobody likes reading that, like taking a transcript of a podcast episode such as this and just dumping it onto a show notes page. It is not valuable, not user-friendly, and not engaging. And thus, it's not going to do well in search. Versus, turn that transcript into something that it feels like a long-form blog post.

You've inserted a lot of images in there that are not just gratuitous, useless images. You know, if you're going to pull from stock photo sites, have a caption underneath each stock photo that you add. Have at least two or three. Metaphorically relevant to what is being discussed and not just, you know, some sort of nonsense where two guys are shaking hands or something like that. Nobody gets any value from that. You know, and insert pull quotes as well as click to tweets. 

Not every soundbite is click to is tweetable. So those that aren't, but you want to make it stand out, feature it as a pull quote and a bigger font size over on the side. If you want to see an example of that any of my episodes for the last seven years on either of my two shows, Marketing Speak or Get Yourself Optimized. If you go to either of those two websites, MarketingSpeak.com or GetYourselfOptimized.com, pick any post, Any recent or old episode, and the entire library has been treated this way. 

And they rank. They really do so much better than just the short-form show notes. Here's, you know, five bullets of what we're talking about in this episode. Here's the bio for the guest, and here is his or her socials and website. That is thin content. Don't do thin content. Google doesn't like thin content that looks like dead branches or really weak branches on your tree. And you want a really healthy, strong-looking tree.

Well, that's a lot of great information. So, you know, that said, you know, I talk a lot about video is important, but you know, how video is incorporated into your website, everyone has a different opinion on what's working, what's not, where to incorporate it, how to incorporate it, put a full video in there, put micro-content, what are you finding as best practices right now on incorporating video?

Yeah, so I think in terms of you have two search engines you're addressing here with your video content. One is Google, of course, and the other is YouTube, which is actually the number two search engine by query volume. So that's a very important search engine. You don't want to neglect it. Let's say that you have a podcast episode such as this, and you embed, for convenience for the user, the YouTube and player video of this episode on the show notes page. I do that for convenience and for the simplicity of it for our listeners. But here's the downside. It doesn't count towards the watch time, and the view counts from a rankings perspective on YouTube. So, you might get a lot of traction with people watching and engaging with your content.

Including the video on your website, but none of that is helping you with the YouTube algorithm. And if you really care about that, then you would drive people from the show notes page to a YouTube page with that video and actually make it part of a playlist and drive people to the playlist with that video being the first one on the playlist for them to watch. So they would maybe end up walking away from the video after getting close to the finish of it, and it might play on for six more hours before they come back.

And, like, that's six hours of watch time you just got from that user, which looks really good to the YouTube algorithm. So you, it is kind of a, you know, competing. You've got some competing needs here in order to come up with, I think, the right solution. Do what is best for the user and just know that, you know, kind of karmically, it's going the right way for you. Right. Don't do stuff that you think is a little bit against the user's best interest because you know it's a super clever thing. Do stuff that adds value and, like I said, reveals light and know that you're being looked after from upstairs. 

Oh, that's great advice. And, you know, and it's interesting because it's like that back and forth between what you do? What's better, and where do you want to send people to? Where you want to get people going? I mean, I think YouTube is a great strategy, but of course, you want to keep people on your website, and it's a back-and-forth that you need to understand Be doing, just like SEO in the old days of keyword stuffing versus not keyword stuffing, which is pretty much gone, isn't it?

Yeah. Well, that never worked well. It never worked well. It might've worked with a lesser search engine like info seek or something like that. But, Google, it never worked well. Keyword density was never a thing. That was valuable. It was more about keyword prominence, having the phrase at the beginning of the article versus at the end, like, Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you this whole article was about whatever. 

Right, and even just looking at the gaming techniques that are used today, they still end up torching your website, so you gotta be very careful about who you hire. To help you with your SEO because they're probably not going to tell you well, this is a gray hat or maybe even black hat, but I'm gonna do it anyways because I think I'm gonna get you a short-term result, which will mean you'll work with me for the rest of the year. And, you know, it might burn your site to the ground in a couple of years' time when Google catches up to it, but we probably won't be working together by that point. 

Like they're maybe, you know, gonna do that, but not narrate it like that to you. So you gotta be very careful. Buyers, beware when you're hiring SEO services; if they're building low-quality links, that may work in the short term. And that's a big maybe because Google's really sophisticated when it comes to ascertaining the quality of things like links and content and, yeah, all that sort of stuff. So, I'd say just aim at being squeaky clean and do your due diligence on hiring the right SEO person or company or building your own team. Yeah. It's a very painful thing to dig yourself out of a hole. It's much better to do no SEO than to do a sketchy SEO.

I love that because I tell that to people all the time, and they're like, well, so and so told me this, and they could get me in this ranking real fast. And, you know, when we don't, we do a lot of YouTube SEO. Still, I'm always like, I pretend like I'm sitting in front of Google because it's, you're battling against 26,000 of the smartest people in the world whose one job is to make sure that searches, it has high integrity. 

Do you think some 17-year-old is going to be able to outsmart Google in the end? As you said, it causes more problems in it than it helps.

So, how do you hire? You know, I know you helped us, you created a document, and we can go to Marketspeak.com/garlic on hiring and find the right person, but let's talk a little bit about how you decide who's the right person. to help you with SEO or how the right team to help you with SEO? 

Well, I have a seven-step process. I call it the SEO Hiring Blueprint, and that process includes doing some proper vetting of them and having them jump through a few hoops before they even get to the interview. Once in the interview process, then you're going to have some trick questions that you're going to ask that they're not going to realize are trick questions, but you'll know there's only one right answer. You don't have to be an SEO expert, you just work off of another cheat sheet that I have called the SEO BS Detector.

And with those two documents in hand, you'll hopefully, most likely, end up with a really qualified client. An SEO person or company is working on your stuff.

So, let's start with the vetting process real quick. If you wanted, let's say, an SEO employee, you want to make sure that person has some attention to detail. Because if they don't, you know, whew, they're gonna, it's gonna be like a bull in a china shop. It's just a simple mistake of, let's say, moving the development site to the stagings.

 So, let's just take, for example, the simple mistake of moving the development site to production and leaving the disallowed directive in robots.py. So what would happen is that the new version of the website would actually prevent Googlebot from crawling the entire website, and it would drop out of the search results.

So that's not good. And that happens, you know, that's just a hypothetical scenario. Hopefully, it will never happen to you, but it's the case where the developer doesn't know what they don't know about SEO or misses some details. So, you want to make sure that you're hiring the right person who has that attention to detail. This part of the process is critical to weed out the folks who have no attention to detail or don't pay attention. A simple thing you can do is just ask them to put a certain thing, a title, in the subject line of the email they send you. 

Or you could ask them to complete a problem-solving riddle, something along the lines of if there's a policeman, a child and a convict on one side of the river, and they need to get across the river, and there's a boat that only takes two people maximum at a time, figure out how to get everybody across without leaving the convict you know, by himself or, the child with the convict, by themselves and, you know, just show your work. Okay, and if they don't bother, which most people will not bother, they'll just say here's my resume, and it'll be just a boilerplate thing that they send out to everybody like delete. I'm not even gonna bother responding to that. 

My team will be reviewing these, not me myself, but it's a great way to screen because if they're not following those simple directions or, let's say, you put into the instructions to have a to leave a voicemail and two-minute voicemail describing what intrigues you or entices you about the position in the company. And that's the way to start the inquiry process. Do not email. Do not send your cover letter and everything. Just fill it out, or just, you know, send it and leave us a voicemail. Another thing that you can do in the process of the interviewing is to ask trick questions that you know there's only one right answer to.

For example, you could ask about keyword density since we talked about that a few minutes ago. You could say, well, what's the best keyword density to aim for? And, of course, the only right answer for that is keyword density. Are you kidding? That's never been a thing with Google. Or you could ask something like, you know, about meta keywords. Tell me what your process is for optimizing the meta keywords. And hopefully, they know that meta keywords never count in Google. It was never a positive ranking signal, and so they state that's the case. Instead of, well, they don't really matter as much anymore as they used to. We don't spend a lot of time on it.

Like, anything other than, what? Meta keywords? They never counted. Anything other than that is a wrong answer. So then you can, you know, gently escort them out the door. I had one scenario where I was interviewing, doing a second interview of a head of SEO candidate for a client of mine. And this was a few years ago. I also asked what their favorite SEO tool was. The guy answered Majestic SEO. At that point, my spidey sense, you know, was all tingling because I knew that something was up. He was referring to the Majestic tool as Majestic SEO, and they rebranded it several years earlier to drop the SEO part. It's just Majestic.

So I'm going to start probing, right? So I'm like, oh cool. I like Majestic as well. What metric is really important in Majestic? Right, and I just keep quiet, and I wait for him to answer, and he answers as I expect him to with the word AC rank, which was deprecated several years prior along the same time as when Majestic rebranded. So, this guy has not been in the tool for years. 

AC rank was deprecated and replaced by two metrics, trust flow and citation flow, and I got him. Now, this would require some advanced knowledge of SEO in order to conduct that kind of interview. But you don't have to have that. I created the cheat sheet for you, the SEO BS Detector. So, there are about a half dozen questions. Just weave them into the interview process. Do it just really cool, nonchalant. And yeah, see what they do. See what, see how they respond. And that will help guide you into whether you're hiring the right person or the right company.  

Wow. And it's nice, you know, it's nice to know that those are great questions, you know, once, do you have any tests once they get going and how do you get them trained and how do you know they're doing the right thing?

Yeah. So if you properly onboard them and give them access to great training. For example, if you want them to learn technical SEO, I have an online course on SEO auditing, how to use Google Search Console, and how to glean actionable insights from GSC. All that sort of stuff is in that audit course. So you give them access to certain training, and then you're going to have to pay them for that time.

Who wants to do that on their own time? Somebody would have to be really internally motivated. They probably want to work for themselves rather than work for you if they're that motivated. So, pay them for the time they spend doing the training. Have them do a little training test project or something, applying what they learned. If you're an agency, service provider, or marketing firm, and you have clients rather than give them a client, that's kind of a high-stakes situation. 

Donate some SEO services to a nonprofit. And have that person do some SEO for that nonprofit as a test project or, you know, kind of with the training wheels on sort of situation. So, you want to make sure that they can apply what they learned in a safe or low-stakes environment and not just passively learn and take notes. So they got to apply this stuff. Then, I would also give them opportunities to show that they're hungry and to upscale and expand their knowledge across other areas.

For example, if somebody is doing video editing for your company, give them the opportunity to learn YouTube SEO and how not to game but how to take advantage of opportunities with the YouTube Recommendation Engine. There's lots of great training, for example, from Evan Carmichael on that sort of stuff. I'm sure you, Ian, have tons of great training materials on that topic as well. So give them access to that stuff if they want. 

And even send them to events like conferences, VidSummit, if we're talking about, YouTube SEO, if we're talking about Google SEO, well, there's, you know, so many of them out there, like everything from MozCon to Brighton SEO over in Europe to, yeah, lots of options out there. And, yeah, I would give them a lot of independence and allow them the opportunity to be proactive.  

That's great advice. That's great advice. And, you know, I love the fact that you have these courses. You're an expert. You've been doing it for years. I know this is going to be super beneficial to a lot of our audience because people have been asking me about it.

And I don't have any SAO courses. I just have the basic, my basic, like, you know, Learn the basics of SEO so you know how to speak it a little bit for business owners, but not this high-end technical SEO. Now, when it comes to, you know, hiring and training someone, that is fantastic. But if someone wants to hire you, what is the process for working with you? Obviously, you're very selective with clients since you were doing this for so long, and you have a $35,000 audit. What, how do you work with you? 

Yeah, so to work with me, well, I have a team, all right, so it wouldn't be just solely working with me, but working with my company. A typical retainer for a month-to-month engagement is $15K per month. We have clients who are paying more than that, and we have some clients paying less than that, but they aren't getting to work directly with me. 

They're paying less than that. They're just working with my team. You know, they're all vetted and trained, and they're awesome at what they do. But work with me to get me involved in the engagements, 15K a month and up. We also do one-off projects like SEO audits. As you heard, that's 35K. We do offer some coaching. I don't really offer that publicly that much, but 5k a month for coaching with me is what we charge. That is, for an hour-long coaching session per week. So that's how you'd work with me and my team. My agency website is netconcepts.com.

All right. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Yeah. So, if all this, online marketing, SEO, and YouTube stuff intrigues you and you want to get a free university-level education in it. Just go to MarketingSpeak.com, which is my online marketing podcast. There are a ton of great episodes on SEO with experts in different subject matter areas in different areas of SEO and YouTube. I am one of the awesome guests on that podcast. I also have a personal development podcast that's got a lot of great stuff on biohacking and spirituality and everything that GetsYourselfOptimized.com.

Then, I have my agency website, Netconcepts.com, and my personal website, StephanSpencer.com, and my socials. You can find me on Twitter, SSpencer, Instagram, StephanSpencer, and, yeah, all that good stuff. All those different, social channels, I'm on all of them. It's my team, though. They're doing all the heavy lifting. I have no idea what I'm tweeting because they're doing it for me, but yeah, it's good stuff, so.  

Awesome, Stephan. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it.

It was a pleasure. And, yeah, you're doing great stuff in the world. You're revealing light. And I'm sure your tribe really appreciates you. I appreciate you too.  

Thanks. Thank you all for being on the Garlic Marketing Show and for joining us on the garlic marketing show. That's been eyeing garlic. Make sure to check Stephan out and follow him. And I mean, it's an amazing educational resource on his podcast. So make sure to check him out and let them know you saw him here.