Welcome to another episode of Live SEO Support!
Live SEO Support is an hour-long Weekly Livestream where our founders, Nicholas Altimore and Chris Tzitzis, take questions from the audience on anything related to SEO.
It’s 100% free, and anyone can join us weekly in our Facebook Group or on Youtube.
But in case you missed us live this week, here’s the full episode:
Watch This Week’s Full Live Stream:
Live Stream Summary:
[05:44] (real estate site audit) I was in managed link-building with you guys for about six months. Got a few HARO links. Got a few Fiverr links. About half of the pages are not indexed. I have optimized the on-page SEO, H1, image alt text, inner-linking, etc. I have invested thousands of dollars. I started with zero traffic; six months later, I have zero traffic.
When I land on your homepage, I have no idea what your site is about. It doesn’t say anything about real estate. You call it a “community guide,” and there’s a video at the top. The rest of it is a database of some kind. But there’s no blog. In fact, there’s no actual content on the website. You need to show Google what the site is about, or else they won’t know what to rank it for. A list isn’t enough. The main thing you need is unique content on each page. Get the huge listing and the same auto-generated content off of every single page. The number one rule of SEO is to look at your competitors, see what they’re doing, and mimic them if you want a chance at competing with them.
[22:37] Does Parasite SEO work now?
Yes. You can see all sorts of examples. Just type in any competitive affiliate term.
[25:18) What are the most important WordPress plugins you should have?
Yoast SEO, Rank Math, WP Rocket, Wordfence, Pretty Links, OptinMonster, Contextual Related Posts, and Advanced Custom Fields. Some sort of auto-301 redirect plugin is also useful.
[30:17] I want to start a blog in a new niche. I have bought two expired domains for this niche. I am thinking a good strategy would be to write content for both sites targeting the same keywords (e.g. 5 articles for site A, 5 articles for site B, targeting 5 keywords (same 5 keywords for each site).
I wouldn’t advise doing that because you’d be spreading yourself thin doing the same thing twice, spending twice the money on both campaigns. Focus on building niche relevance and authority over time on one domain in the form of content and backlinks. I would merge these two websites via a 301 redirect and build out all the historical permalinks that had referring domains pointing at them that are worthwhile.
[35:46] Also, regarding the main pages on these sites that have backlinks, should I rebuild these pages or 301 them to the homepage? The new purpose for this blog I am planning does not match exactly with the initial posts I want to write about, but they are in the same niche, so I could either rebuild the same content on these old pages or just 301.
If the historical permalinks are worthwhile in the form of keyword research, then you can just rebuild them as they are. If they’re similar to something that you want to rank for, then 301 not to the homepage but to that specific page. You want to keep as much juice flowing in the direction of your niche as much as possible.
[38:03] Can you guys elaborate on Nick’s AI woes? You mentioned it a few weeks ago. I’m experiencing similar problems: A page shows up first for a couple of days, then is nowhere to be found.
We’ve had at least then people post about this in our SEO Round Table Facebook Group, and even more ask about it on live streams. It’s calmed down a bit over the last two weeks, though. The bottom line is that you have to edit or have a human edit AI content, or else it’s not going to resonate as well as you want it to. You can’t just put ChatGPT content up and expect it to do really well. What’s also really important is doing the outline yourself, or at least having heavy human input on the outline. It’s not a good idea to use ChatGPT for outlines.
[46:20] To clarify my above 301 question, if we buy an aged domain that has been used as a 301 before for 12 months, then it was dropped, would it lose its value?
It won’t lose its value, especially if you rebuild the inner pages either to the specific permalinks or to comparable permalinks.
[49:34] (site audit) My site ranks for two terms, but it does not rank at all for my main keyword, not even in the top 100. Don’t look at the design yet, as it will be redesigned completely in the next few weeks. The Rank Math score for the website is 94. The site is now 5 months old. It is a site for a local business and has 11 pages and 2 posts.
Ignore the Rank Math Score. Go look at what your competitors are doing. The number one website has only 4 indexed pages. The number two has 21 indexed pages. Yours also has 21 indexed pages. You have no Contact Us page, and some of the site is in English while some is in German. Only the homepage has a footer. There is no EEAT. I’d focus on building more quality links and local SEO, such as GMB and reviews on GMB. Don’t worry about adding more content since your competitors hardly have more content than you.