Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Kyle Roof, Co-Founder at High Voltage SEO and PageOptimizer Pro

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Kyle is responsible for the development and implementation of all SEO techniques used by the SEO agency High Voltage SEO and the SEO tool PageOptimizer Pro. Kyle is also the co-founder of Internet Marketing Gold, a global community of SEO professionals who test and prove cutting-edge SEO techniques. Kyle has dedicated nearly a decade of his life to SEO testing. He has also published the results of more than 400 scientific tests he has conducted. Over the years, Kyle has developed and fine-tuned a method to test whether single variables are ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. This method was officially granted a patent in January 2020 (US Patent #10,540,263 B1) Kyle’s SEO techniques and discoveries are followed by many SEO professionals and business leaders, he has been featured in many respected publications and is a regular speaker on SEO and SEO testing at conferences throughout the world.Learn more: https://www.pageoptimizer.pro OR http://www.kyleroof.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-kyle-roof-co-founder-at-high-voltage-seo-and-pageoptimizer-pro

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Kyle Roof, who's the co-founder at High Voltage SEO and Page Optimizer Pro. Kyle, welcome to the program. No, thanks for having me. Nice to be here. Hey, I'm looking forward to talking with you because I know that digital marketing and visibility online and Google is so important.

And SEO and optimizing pages is super important. So I'm going to see what you do and how you do it. But get it started with your story, what's your background, and how did you get into digital marketing in the first place? Well, in a previous career, I was a lawyer. And I did what most burnt out lawyers do. I moved to South Korea to teach English to children. Oh, yeah, of course. It's an A to B career move.

Actually, what I was just doing was taking a sabbatical, and I was just like, I'll just take a year off. And my wife actually was also an attorney. She's a trial attorney as well, also quite burnt out in our one year in South Korea turned into five. And while we were there, we started a company with a pre-in business partner. And we had to build a pretty complex website for that company. And I realized that I had a very strong team with me. And I could start kind of got the bright idea of general contracting websites. From there, I brought my brother into the company.

And because he does web design development, I got the bright idea of going to India and opening up a company there, which we did. And then we were told we're going to get a shakedown from the police. My brother answers the door. I'm actually not there at the time. I'm the U.S. It's the police. And they say, we need your business papers. And he gives them the papers.

And they say, these are the wrong papers. And he goes, okay, how much do you want? And instead of asking for the bribe, they throw him in jail. Oh, okay. So now he's talking to the chief of police. And the chief police goes, look, these could be the right papers. I don't know. You have two choices.

One, you leave town tomorrow. Two, you sit in jail and wait for the magistrate to come and the magistrate will sort it out. And he goes, when does the magistrate come? And the chief of police goes, I don't know. Oh. I think I'll leave town tomorrow. So goodbye. He runs back to the office.

He grabs what he can. Our employees have fled because obviously they don't want to be involved in this. And we start hemorrhaging clients. because we have nobody to service them. My brother says, look, I can take these four clients because he does web design and development. I don't code. And we had just started doing this thing called SEO. And we had some clients and really for me to pay the rent next month. I had to learn SEO that day. And that's basically what I did. I learned SEO. It turned out I wasn't bad at it at all. I did not want to go back to web design and development nor India for that matter. And some twist and turns from there. But basically I ended up, I put out my shingle and started doing SEO. I met my business partner and then we started at the agency, a high-holdage SEO. And now we have offices in Phoenix, Berlin, Melbourne, and we just opened one in Jamaica. What a cool story from the burnout lawyer to the teaching English to getting your cage rattled in foreign countries to starting a firm on the

fly. That's huge. And you know, one thing when you said you had to learn SEO in a day, that was a lot of information and fast learning, but I would suspect that you felt like you were drinking out of a fire hose then and probably to a certain extent since then because SEO changes constantly. There's the rules that change and what works changes. So you're always having to learn and up your game, right? That's true. There is a lot to it that does change. One thing that I learned, though, is that when you think about, if you're thinking about

everything in Google is a bell curve, you know, if there's that like 70% in the middle and maybe you've got 15% on either size, that's 70% of the middle states relatively the same in spite of all of those changes. Because that's the core part of Google. And it's not cost effective for them to change that part. They change mostly the parts on the fringe areas. And so if you can identify some of those things that consistently work and you continue to do those, then you can kind of tweak what's on the edge, you know, in those areas.

But it really comes down to kind of consistently hitting the basics and keeping an eye on those things to make sure they haven't changed or changed too much. And that really simplifies the process because some people would be like, you know, Google's so huge. you stay on top of it. You don't actually have to stay on top of all of it. You need to stay on top of that little portion that, you know, works and just continue to grind on that. Well, isn't it true that probably, and this is just my opinion over the years of, I know enough about SEO to know that I can spell SEO as SEO and do a little bit of here and there. But I do, I think this, all of the changes you have to stay up with and Google's algorithm changes, none of that would have been necessary if people would have quit trying to game the system.

Yeah, there are a lot of people that definitely try to take a shortcut. And you're exactly right. Most of the updates that happen are to get rid of that stuff that people are trying to do. And so back in the 90s, keyword stuffing and then we had the panda and penguin, all those updates. It's like, you know what, why don't you just build a nicely structured website and put great content on there that educates your audience? And that should, you know, in simplistic terms, that should be.

be the focus. But anyway, I don't disagree at all. I don't disagree. I would say that everyone does have the experience where they wrote a better piece than their competitors and Google didn't rank it. And that's because Google isn't really making a value judgment. Google isn't saying like, oh, I like this content better than this content or that content or I like this product better than that one. It does come down to that you do need to give the algorithm the math that it wants. And so you do need to satisfy that. But when you do absolutely need that good content to convert, because it, you know, If you're ranking and nobody's doing anything on your page, that really doesn't matter in the end anyway. So there is kind of that balance, but you're absolutely right.

Stay within what you should, what you know, and do it well. And I wouldn't really worry about too much of the other stuff. So where do you start? When you have a new client and they come to you and they say, I need better Google rank, what is the first thing you do? Are you looking at their current site to make sure that all of the bells and whistles are optimized the right way? Are you looking at off-page SEO?

and where's the low-hanging fruit that you're starting with? The very first thing you need to look at is, does Google have any issues with finding this site? Because, you know, if there are those kind of issues that are just kind of fundamental issues about visibility, then it doesn't matter what you do after that. The next thing is once Google can find the site, can Google crawl the site,

can Google get through that site and find all of those things that are there that are important that Google's looking for. So those are kind of like two foundational steps that you pretty much always have to do, just to make sure there isn't, something there that's just going to stop us from ranking in the first place. After that, I'm really going to go into the content that's there. I want to see what they're trying to rank for. Something that happens often with a new client, I'll say, okay, what are your most important terms

or what are you interested in? And they'll say, I'm interested in this. I'm like, okay, what page on your site are you optimizing for that? And you'll just kind of hear crickets. And it's like, well, the site. And it really doesn't work that way. Google does not rank a website. Google ranks individual pages on a website. So you must have pages that are dedicated to your top level terms, your most important terms. And so that's the next thing I'm going to look for. Do we have those pages right now to cover those really important things? Like the most important, the terms that you and your competitors know that you need.

That's going to be the next step. After that, then I want to see how we're supporting those pages. And there's going to be content that you want to create that will support those pages and push it up in rankings, using the strength of your own site. The very last part of that would then be backlinks and those external signals. But I found if you dial in all that other stuff at the beginning, you really need a lot less backlinks than you need. And often you don't need it because you'll have done enough to push things forward without that. And I think people get too focused in on backlinks and then they go to the wrong place and then there's spammy places and all that mess. But I think you're exactly right.

You probably need to consider backlinks like salt on food. A little bit of it makes it taste really good. But as soon as you start shaking too much on, it's like, oh, I can't even chew it. So I think that once you've done all that foundational work, get some key backlinks that are from, you know, industry, relevant sources and all that kind of thing. And then maybe just kind of sprinkle a little bit on there and then just see what it does and just kind of wait. But don't make that your full final off page SEO focus because too many people do that. And I think that's where trouble comes in, right? Absolutely.

And as I mentioned, there were like four or five things you really want to work on before you even get to the backlinks. But I think to your point is exactly right. They go right to backlinks thinking that's what they need. But there was actually something on step one. It doesn't matter how many backlinks you build. You're just going to, it's just simply not going to be effective. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about then on page because I know that is one of your brands that you have,

which is the page optimizer. So that is on page SEO. And I'm sure that you've got things where you can say, hey, we run this report and here's some of the flags we need to fix, which are whatever, alt tags or title and all that. So what is then the on-page aspect and how could you help expedite that? Well, it's important to understand that there are different places on a web page that have different weights. Google looks at different spots on a web page and gives different places higher importance than others. And so you want to make sure that you have your important terms in those places.

So one of the dirty secrets of SEO is that if you were to take your target term, that thing you're going after and put it in your title tag, your H-1, your URL, and one time in paragraph text, you've probably done 60% of SCL right there. Yeah. After that, everything else is the little extra. Now, something that, where my tool would come in, and there are a lot of similar tools on the market.

The idea would be you need counts for everything else. You know, how many times variations of your term, how many times for contextual terms, and where to put them. And you need really good benchmarks on those things so you know what you should be putting into those places. how many times are that Google will like your page? Yep, love it.

So on your website, I see one of the tabs is that you can address schema, and that's kind of getting into the weed. So let's leave that. But Google entities, but then the other is eat. So tell us how to eat the right way. Heat. The two hottest things right now in SEO are eat and AI. Eat is actually, it's pretty funny.

It used to be just EAT, and they just a few months ago added in an extra E for fun. But it's expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And really the bottom line is, you know, should your website be in Google in the first place is really what Google is looking at? Are you trustworthy enough? Are you an authority enough that you should be here at all? And this started a few years ago with what they call your money or your life sites. And these are sites that give financial or health advice because you can see the obvious danger there. If somebody shouldn't have been in the index in the first place, if they're just not trustworthy,

then you can see the obvious harm that can happen to people. But then it looks like this is pretty much spread to almost every niche and every industry. And it's probably a matter of traffic. If your site gets up to a certain level of traffic, then Google will check. But the two most important things that fall under the trust side are who is responsible for this website and who is responsible for this content. They really need to be a bot needs to be able to come to your site and identify, okay, I can see that this is a real business.

I can see that there are real people behind it. I can see the real people have written this content. And there are a bunch of different factors you want to look into, but really the basics of it are you presenting as a real business, the business that you should be. Are you showing your address, your phone number, the people that work there? Do you have like your privacy policy and your refunds and different forms of ways of people to contact you,

such as like different departments in your company? Those are, it's kind of funny, those are the simple things that you should have been doing anyway. and a lot of people don't get to them. And really for Google, for check these things, it's not, if Google will, it's a win. And it usually happens at the worst time for people. Their site's really taking off and they're really jazzed and they're really doing well. And then they get an e-check and they'll basically lose all of those rankings that they just got.

So doing these types of things aren't going to help improve your rank, but they'll help you keep your rank once a sweep comes through. Now, before we get it, AI, which could be a nine-hour conversation right there. So we definitely want to just talk 30,000 people. foot view. But what are the factors that you see? Because some of the things that I see out there related to is your site mobile optimized and we're going to ding you if it's not. And does it load fast enough? And number one, your visitors don't want to wait around for the site to load. They'll bounce off anyway. But Google doesn't want it to load too slow. So how important are those two factors? Those on the technical side of things, I think they actually weigh more for actual conversion.

on your site than they would towards anything in ranking. I would definitely encourage you to do that. But I wouldn't, for eat purposes anyway, I wouldn't focus on those types of issues. What I would focus on is could a, and not a human, because Google isn't looking at the page as a human. Can a bot come through and identify that I'm a real business? Can a bot come through and see that real people are behind us? Those are kind of like the two things that I would put in my mind as I evaluated a site to see if I have a, if I stand a good chance of passing a neat check. And isn't it true that it's almost like you need to write your content for Google first and then make sure that your actual visitor, you know, is getting getting what they want?

In other words, to that very point right there, would Google's checkbot be able to look at that and go, yep, they know what they're talking about. They've got some relevance. They've got, okay, we're good to go. And if you've got those things in place, you know, however that is done, and I know that's an art form. But then at that point, maybe you just need to go back through and then go, okay, if one of my. prospects was reading this, we would want to make sure that we're including this. Is that kind of something to keep in the back of your mind when you're creating content? I think it is because ranking is a different animal to conversions, but I have a little trick that I can give you on how

I think you can get kind of the best of both worlds. And that's where when you go to your writers, don't give them a tool like page automizer pro or any other tools. Don't give them those counts because that becomes frustrating for writers. And a lot of times they have difficulty doing that. And if you're doing your own writing too, it's really hard to look at those counts and try to write that way. So here what you want to do is get the title for your page and then get your sections. Get those H2s or H3s, those subheadings. Get those together. Hand that to your writer and say, hey, look, we need X number of words.

We need 1,500 words, 2,000 words, whatever it might be. But give them those sections and then tell them not to worry about anything, but answer each section sufficiently. When you get that copy back, then you run it through a tool and the counts should be really close to what they need to be. And then you're just doing, you're just doing little edits for SEO at that point. But if you find that your accounts are way off for SEO, that means you've got a bad writer. They just missed the topic completely. So I think if you do it that way, you give them the freedom to write, but just tell them the sections you need. And when you get that copyback, run it through a tool and then tweak for SEO.

And I think you'll have a pretty successful process to getting your content out and content that has a good chance of ranking very well. That's a really good tip. So now how about AI? How does AI factor into all of this? as it relates to SEO. A is going to kill SEO. No, I'm kidding. It's going to take all of her jobs and the machines will take over the world.

Forget everything from the last 16 minutes. And no, where I see AI going from, say, a search perspective, you know, the little part of the top of the search. It comes up sometimes when you search or something, it's called a featured snippet. And it gives like a little answer. And it gives you, what I think we're going to see is just fancy featured snippets. We're going to get a little more information. And they're basically Google's going to do it search or Bing's going to do their search.

And then they go in and they're going to extract information that they think is important to you. I'll put it up there. And I think you're getting opportunities to modify that so that you can pull out information that is actually relevant to you or the information that you want to see when you do these types of searches. I think they'll be able to pull that out for you. So it'll just be an enhanced search or an enhanced featured snippet that might make things a little more user-friendly. So you don't have to click into maybe as many websites because it'll pull out. the important blurb for you. So I think that's pretty good.

A lot of people on the other side of things on the creating content or creating websites, the one thing that's absolutely true is AI can make things faster for sure. But the thing is, if you're bad at SEO, it's only going to help you make bad SEO faster. Yeah. It's not going to drag you and somehow like create you into this amazing SEO. It can only take what you're giving it. And so if you give it bad direction, it's just going to give you bad. information back out and that and your performance will just have tank faster than it would have

if you didn't use that sort of. Yeah. I think, see, that's the thing that too many people get hung up on is AI is going to take of the world and kill jobs. But in reality, AI is a tool to help you be more efficient to do what you need to do so that the human behind the technology can just kind of give it that gloss over and make sure, yep, that's what I want. Oh, let me tweak this, tweak this, whatever it is, whether it's writing or whatever the point

is AI is a wonderful tool, but man, you can't just push the easy button and go copy, paste without putting your strategic eyes behind it. Exactly, right. And if you think about that enhanced searched area, what that actually creates is just another optimization opportunity because you're going to want to be able to make it clear for Google, this is the part that you should be pulling out. That's going to require other optimization. And so from a perspective as a professional that's doing this, I just see this is more

opportunity because now not only are we ranking in that one through 10 spot or now we have ranking through that and we also want to get in these three or four over here as well and that's just going to provide an opportunity for more services yes love it love it love it hey so um if someone's interested in learning more about your dialed in expertise and page optimizer pro and how you can even jump in and help them with all of their SEO what's the best way that they can learn more and reach out and connect with you uh the easiest thing is just going to Kyle atroof.com agency, the software, my courses and all that is on there. And also like recent podcast and shows and stuff like this will be on. This show will be on there soon as well

once it goes live. So all the stuff that I'm doing, they can find there at Kyleoruth.com. Excellent. Well, Kyle, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you today. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. You've been listening to influential entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to pay. Last episodes, visit www. www. www.

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