How to Improve Website SEO (Quality Over Quantity Strategy) | Liz Bowers

SEO is changing fast. AI overviews, LLM traffic, shifting keyword intent, and many businesses are asking the same question.

Is SEO still worth it?

In this episode of The Website Growth Show, Rana Shahbaz speaks with SEO expert Liz Bowers about what is actually working today and what is not.

Liz explains why SEO is still essential in an AI driven world, but why the old strategy of publishing more blogs no longer works. Instead, she shares why refreshing existing content, focusing on search intent, improving site structure, and measuring the right data matters more than ever.

They also discuss:

• Why AI traffic still relies on strong Google rankings
• Why intent now matters more than individual keywords
• How to remove dates from URLs safely
• How crawl depth affects SEO performance
• Why content quality beats content quantity
• The right publishing frequency for small businesses
• Whether thin content should be indexed
• How to use AI to audit your own website
• What KPIs actually matter in modern SEO
• How to avoid wasting money on poor SEO services

Liz also shares a real case study of a franchise business that doubled organic traffic by restructuring their site and focusing on authority and intent.

Unlock the truth about modern SEO — from AI's influence to optimizing your website for long-term growth. Liz Bowers shares her insights on how businesses can adapt, strategize, and succeed in a shifting digital landscape.

Key Topics
Why SEO is a long-term game – expectations and timelines
The importance of understanding search intent versus keywords
How AI and LLMs are changing search and ranking signals
Strategies for reworking old URLs without losing traffic
Balancing local SEO with organic growth efforts
The significance of quality content over quantity
Proper site structure: internal linking, folder organization, and URL best practices
Combining technical SEO, content refreshes, and regular publishing
Effective ways to promote content and earn high-quality backlinks
Metrics to track: KPIs, engagement time, impressions, and conversions
The critical need for accurate data setup (Google Analytics, Search Console)
Avoiding common SEO pitfalls: thin content, keyword stuffing, and "set-it-and-forget-it" approaches

Timestamps
00:00 - Intro
02:03 - Search intent versus keywords — what truly drives growth
03:00 - The significance of authority, backlinks, and references in modern SEO
04:08 - Re-evaluating old SEO tactics: keywords and user-focused content
06:08 - Preparing your site for search intent and understanding customer behavior
08:19 - Setting realistic SEO expectations with clients
10:12 - Case study: Growing a home care franchise via site rebuild & local SEO
11:42 - Organic traffic and AI growth metrics — what to watch for
13:12 - Timeline insights: How long site optimization takes
13:32 - Strategies for URL restructuring without losing link equity
15:02 - Managing URL changes and the importance of redirects
17:08 - The debate on URL dates and evergreen URLs
18:17 - Structuring your website: service categories and subfolders
19:11 - Lessons learned from large SEO projects
22:16 - Broad

Transcript

Rana (00:00)
SEO is the log game. You're not going to change overnight. You're not going to be able to buy your position into Google or into the top spots where you want to be shown. So how long it took you to rework the site, optimize the site, and then started to seeing the results? Do you have any time frame? So don't create content just to create content. ⁓ Look at the data. Look at what your audience is searching for, whether it be those keywords or those topics, and look at how that content is currently performing on your site.

For those sites who have published reasonable content, they're getting reasonable traffic, can they stop publishing without losing the traffic? It's going to take about that same amount of time for Google to say, hey, where's your content? I'm not getting the same cadence that I was from you. What's going on? And you'll slowly start to see those results fall off. So if you are just starting off with SEO, I would simply ask AI, whatever platform of your choice, what do you know about insert business name here?

If you're just starting off, might have to prompt it a little bit and say, in this industry or providing these types of services and just see what it knows about your business. That's your launching off point. Strategy, intent, keyword search is very important. Then site structure, site development is important. After that, content is the backbone of any SEO work. Is that enough to get traffic from Google or do we have to do something else as well?

Rana (01:36)
Website traffic is down, AI is changing search, SEO is dead and no one's quite sure what still works anymore. This is what most people are saying about SEO at the moment. Today's guest Liz Bowers has spent the last 10 years in SEO and sees things very differently. Liz helps businesses cut through the noise and focus on what actually drives growth, understanding search intent, building real authority and creating content that earns trust, not just clicks. She has worked with small businesses and large franchise brands, cutting them through major site rebuilds.

AI-driven search changes and long-term SEO strategies that still convert into real leads and revenue. In this episode, we talk about why SEO isn't dead, it's evolving and how clarity, quality content and patience can turn your website into a true growth engine.

Rana (02:17)
Liz, welcome to the Website Growth Show.

Liz Bowers (02:20)
Hi, happy to be here.

Rana (02:21)
And I'm excited to learn how you can turn your website, your number one business growth tool. and before we get into SEO strategy and tactics, can we start? What is keeping you going as an SEO for the last 10 years?

Liz Bowers (02:37)
Yeah, absolutely. So my background, I came straight out of college and went to a digital marketing agency. It was a small agency. So I had my hands on a little bit of everything, tried paid, tried email, tried SEO, and SEO just really stuck with me. I mean, obviously I've been in it for the last 10 years. But what I really enjoy about SEO is it's constantly changing.

And this past year, if anyone has followed SEO, knows it is constantly changing. This last year has definitely thrown a curve ball to us, probably the biggest one that I have seen in my time. But I just enjoy it. I think that SEO isn't really a science, but it's not really an art. It's kind of a combination of both. You get to mix data, but try different things, create new things. You never get bored. I think that's what keeps me here.

Rana (03:26)
Fantastic. And with all these changes going on with SEO, there's lots of noise discussions. Is it still possible to grow a business with SEO?

Liz Bowers (03:36)
yes, absolutely. I am under the firm belief that AEO, LLMO, whatever acronym you want to go by is all still SEO at the core. So there's even stats that have come out where 60 % of the sites that are cited in LLMs are from top 10 Google search results.

So it still comes down to good SEO. It still comes down to the authority of your content and the information that you put out there.

Rana (04:08)
Amazing. old role, old SEO formula was, you find a low competitive keywords with reasonable search volume, create some content, build some links. And you normally you are in business. Is it still working or is it now different?

Liz Bowers (04:19)
Yeah, I would... Yeah.

Yeah, so

that that I think is where it has been the most change. So yes, keywords are still important, but I think they're being seen more as almost categories or topics. If you think about digital marketing, OK, yeah, that could be a keyword that you optimize your website for, but people aren't going to LLMs and just typing in.

digital agency or digital marketing or something like that. They're going to say, I have this type of business and I'm looking to do SEO services. What is the best digital marketing agency in my area? Okay. I'm not going to optimize my site specifically for that certain search term, but that's where you go keyword. And then secondarily, you focus on intent. That has always been a part of SEO, but it hasn't always been.

the most important piece. It's always been about topic coverage, making sure we talk about those keywords, but never really saying, yeah, we write for the visitor of the site or the user, but who is that user? That is definitely more of a focus. So I would say it's better SEO at this point, but yes, it still does come down to keywords. It comes down to backlinks.

Even more than backlinks, though, just references to your site. ChatGPT, all the different LLMs are looking at your brand as a whole and just its name. How does it, how is it referred to on the site or throughout the web? That is almost more important than backlinks in some cases. Backlinks are still important, but even just references on forums or things like that have become more important.

Rana (06:08)
Fantastic. You mentioned that intent is really important in going forward. So it's easier to research, do a keyword research, and find out numbers about keywords. How do you prepare your site for an intent that you understand what are the intents of your customers are and you're addressing those in your content?

Liz Bowers (06:28)
Yeah,

yeah, absolutely. So it really comes down to understanding your audience. So yeah, you can go to Google Analytics and pull the hard data of is it female, male, what's the age range, some of those like higher ⁓ level demographic metrics, even Google ads, you can pull some of that. But for me, it really comes down to talking to the client base and talking to

I mean, being at an agency, talking to our clients and they know their audience and say, okay, what is your target audience? Okay, it's that adult daughter or it's the children that are looking to go to college or something like that. All of that is things that we need to understand. And I don't think it comes from one place. We can pull the hard data to show what is actually converting, but we also want to say, okay,

who do we actually want to target and how are they searching? And that last part of the how are they searching, I feel is one of the hardest things to get any kind of metrics on because cookies, you need cookies, cookies protect us, I get that. But it makes it hard on a marketer to say, hey, you are my exact target audience because you fit all of these buckets, some of which are personal that

You don't want me to know about you, but I know. So it makes it hard. I think you can put as much as you want into a persona to describe the demographics, their likes, things like that. It's almost like a social media targeting in a sense is more of what our personas or our intents have gone to for the website because it takes into consideration more than your demographic.

It's all about your likes, what you're searching for, all of that.

Rana (08:14)
Exciting and it is difficult, but this is how is now. ⁓ is. When businesses come to you, every business wants to grow. But I think these economics rules often apply that unlimited wishes and limited resources, is generally is the challenge. So when businesses come to you, how do you set their expectation, their results, what they expect from SEO work?

Liz Bowers (08:19)
Yes.

Yes.

Yeah. So I think that one, it's always like a, think Danny Sullivan had the sticker of it depends. That's always the SEO answer. It depends. And honestly it does. But to give you like an actual concrete answer, it does look at how long has the site been around? Have they done anything in the past? But even if we just have someone come to me green and say, I want to grow my business.

Rana (08:48)
you

Liz Bowers (09:05)
Here's my website. I like to set the expectation of SEO is the long game. You're not going to change overnight. You're not going to be able to buy your position into Google or into the top spots where you want to be shown. You need to fight for it. And that takes time. And that's where my joking answer of it depends comes into play. It's going to take longer if they're a brand new business, brand new site, just starting up.

If it's a business that has 10 years under it, but maybe they never did SEO, that gives us a better platform to work from because they're at least known in Google and we can just kind of work up from there and look at some of that data. So I like to set the expectation of it's not overnight. It is the long game, but it's worth it. The return on SEO and the quality that you can get, the quality leads specifically or sales.

is extreme. It's tenfold compared to some of the things that we've seen in Paid.

Rana (10:04)
Amazing. And for those who are looking to invest in SEO, they are on the edges. You mentioned it's a long game, but it's worth it. Do you have any research examples where you work with the business and you implemented some of these SEO strategies and it worked out as per plan?

Liz Bowers (10:12)
Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. So we have a home care business that came to us and they are a franchise system. So they are known nationally, but they aren't as old as some of the other competitors that they have. So we are fighting more of like a recency domain age, not as much history on the web about the business, all of that kind of working against us. We rebuilt their websites.

put all of their franchisees onto the same domain and worked up from there to say, okay, let's make the corporate site a thought leader to show that the brand specifically, the franchisor knows what the service is about, what kind of care these people would need, all the way down to what the local businesses would need on their individual sites of.

Okay, if someone's looking for care, they're going to look for care in their area, not nationally. So how can we set that up as well? So we were able to set the expectation of we need to guide our strategy towards the intent of what people are looking for. And we've been able to double the amount of organic traffic to the site. This is an example of one that I have not seen a huge downturn in organic traffic.

⁓ across the board, like I have in other industries and what we see all over LinkedIn or just in the SEO realm of organic traffic's going down, but maybe AI chat is going up. We show both sides of the coin. So I like to show some visibility into AI traffic as well so they can see that growth. So what we've been able to see is obviously,

conversions. We've been able to see form fills, sign ups, all of that. But we've also been able to see just from digital marketing metrics, organic traffic is either flat or a little up compared to what we're seeing in the industry. And then in Google Analytics, I created an AI chat bot channel. So I'm not tracking when they are learning from your content, only the conversational ones.

So I pulled the names of those chat bots in and we can see the growth in AI chat bot. So even though organic isn't as pretty as we would want it to look like, we can see, all the efforts that we are working on are still increasing. Here's what we're seeing. Even though it's only the traffic that goes to your site from AI and that's obviously a small percentage, but it's still something. We do still see that growth.

So all of that has really been a great conversation with the clients and just, I would say they're happy. They're seeing results. I'm seeing the results that I would expect.

Rana (13:12)
that's what at the end of the day, that's what matters, not the traffic. As customers are happy, they are getting business growth and everything. On this home care business, what you mentioned, that is a lot of work. So how long it took you to rework the site, optimize the site, and then started to seeing the results? Do you have any timeframe? How long it took you to get to that stage?

Liz Bowers (13:15)
Yes, exactly.

Yes.

Yeah, so as far

as the website development, was right around a year is what it took us. And that was a little bit from a design perspective, changing up wireframes and things like that, all the way to cleaning up content. So they had some technical issues with how their URLs were rendering on the old site. So there was a bunch of garbage URLs that

search engines that was showing up in Search Console, everything was picking up. So we also had to create a really robust redirect strategy to say, okay, these should have never been a thing. It should be this. So making sure that all of our redirects were inclusive, but not too inclusive to redirect the wrong pieces. All of that took about a year. There wasn't too much on the content rewrite side of things.

So that did save us some time. I think you should clean up content when you do a website redesign, but I wouldn't necessarily rewrite your content that you're keeping. Specifically because you're changing so much of your tech stack, that content could perform well on its own if you give it a good foundation to sit on.

Rana (14:43)
That's very interesting. I normally try not to go into tech stuff, techie stuff of SEO or anything when I do these interviews, but you mentioned URLs. So this is something I'm working on at the moment, 30, 40 years old site, but we are looking into improve. One of the challenges, their URLs have the dates in it, in there. So any idea how to manage those old URLs without losing the link equity or...

Liz Bowers (15:02)
Yes.

Rana (15:10)
traffic to those URLs.

Liz Bowers (15:11)
Yeah, so if you have, I'm assuming all of them would be unique. You would want to keep them. You're just changing ultimately the permalink to remove the date, right? Okay, yeah, so I would say having the redirects there, look at the traffic that you're getting to those pages now. What percentage of the traffic is that to the site now? If it's not more than like, I would even say

Rana (15:21)
Yes, yes.

Liz Bowers (15:38)
40 to 50 % of the traffic, it would probably be OK to redirect it. Remove the date from there. There's many benefits to that. One thing is it takes it out of the subfolder, subfolder, subfolder, so it gets it closer to the domain. I will fight anyone who says that it doesn't matter anymore about how close it is to the domain. It does, because Google's rule of crawling and all of that has not changed, even with AI.

The closer it is to that root domain, the faster it's going to crawl that page specifically, the deeper it is. Obviously, the longer it's going to be between crawls. So redirecting from those URLs, keeping the rest of the URL and not rewriting everything. So let's say it's 2026 slash 01 slash 01 slash this is the best podcast ever.

I would keep the URL of this is the best podcast ever and just remove that date and bring that in. If I were to say, let's rewrite everything and say best podcast ever or best podcast and that's it, that's too much. Google can pick up on patterns in URLs. So if you just strip the date from the permalink,

you're going to have a lot more success than rewriting everything. Because it understands that pattern change. Yeah, absolutely.

Rana (16:58)
Thank you so much.

That's very helpful. do you recommend amending these, removing the dates? think dates are hurting the site at the moment.

Liz Bowers (17:08)
I would, mean, it comes down to AI looks at freshness of content. ⁓ Having a URL with the date in it is going to be harder to keep fresh than it is having it just as text on the site or a meta point or however you wanna include your dates in blogs or whatever. I would strip them. I think it's gonna make it more evergreen, especially if they are topics that you can refresh and just

Rana (17:14)
Yeah.

Liz Bowers (17:36)
update data points, connect to updated resources, or just kind of keep alive. If it's an event that happens once a year and it happens every year, maybe you keep the date in there because then you show the history of that event with the URL structure. But 80 % of the time, I would say, nope, let's not have the date in the URL.

Rana (18:00)
Got it, got it. And while we are on a tech discussion, you also mentioned that you should keep your perma links as close to the domain address. Do you put services or products into a services folder? For example, abc.com slash services and the best podcast services.

Liz Bowers (18:17)
I do. I

do. Yes. Now, one thing where I might change that up is if we've got subcategories of services. So let's stick with ⁓ digital marketing. if you've got digital marketing as your main services category, and then it goes SEO, then it goes reputation management, but you also have local listings and all of that that would fall under SEO.

I might say, okay, yes, it should fall in the SEO folder, but I could also see local listings just being in digital marketing and being related with internal linking and cross references to SEO, but I wouldn't necessarily bury it in that extra folder if I didn't think it needed to be.

Rana (19:01)
Got it. Thank you so much for this extra help. think that will be useful for many people who are looking to improve their old URLs and improve their rankings. So excellent.

Liz Bowers (19:11)
Yeah, absolutely.

And just one piece I would add to that too is it does come back to intent. Is there someone who would just be looking for that specific service or is that specific service like local listings? Going back to my example, if we looked at local listings, that could be something that someone is just looking for and they don't want the whole SEO package. Okay.

then maybe it should live on its own because the intent of someone's could be satisfied with just that. But if we look at it and you say, no, SEO, Local Listings is only a part of it, then I would say, OK, it should be in a subfolder. You want to show that parent relationship and that kind of depth in the topic. That's when I would kind of subfolder versus not to put an example to it.

Rana (19:58)
Amazing. And there is a disclaimer for those people who are not SEOs. You can't just go onto your site and change the URL. So any change you are doing needs to be backed by a 301 redirect. So take professional advice before touching your permalinks or URLs. Otherwise, your site will break, and you can lose a lot of things.

Liz Bowers (20:09)
Yes.

Yes, especially in something like WordPress. Love WordPress, use it all the time. But it's so easy to change the permalinks on your blogs. So you think you're doing a slight change, it's huge in the grand scheme of things when it comes to SEO and search engines recognizing your website.

Rana (20:32)
Yeah, exactly. So let's go back to your care home example. They were struggling to increase the traffic. You reworked the whole site, business gone up. And on that example, you mentioned that you created local sites as well. So basically, it's not just an organic SEO. You dealt with organic plus local SEO, correct?

Liz Bowers (20:48)
Yes.

Correct. Yes, exactly.

Rana (20:55)
Isn't it hard to do both at the same time?

Liz Bowers (20:58)
I've always seen that it's very similar in my mind. Again, apparently I'm riding the horse of it's all about intent, because it really is. When I look at organic versus local, it really is what is your target audience? For me, local just means your audience is more specific and the intent is going to be specific to that area.

So when we looked at the corporate site, it does speak more broadly. does talk about the services, but locally there's going to be things that you have to do additionally to it. So maybe you reference the cities or the area or whatever it services, but you would also want to do things like your Google business profile and some of the things to show, hey, I am local to this area.

That's where I think local SEO might differ a little bit more than just regular SEO or just organic in general at the broad scale is you do have to be a player in that local space, usually on listings or Google business profile, all of that.

Rana (22:03)
Got it. Got it. And any lessons you learned on this big project you worked on for businesses who are listening and looking to do optimize their sites in a similar manner? Any lessons or takeaways from this project?

Liz Bowers (22:16)
Yeah, so I would say the biggest lesson that we had with this project was to really look at the broad scope of everything. I think that the reason it took us a year to launch the site was we came up with many surprises that we weren't expecting, whether it be content that wasn't in the main navigation on the old site, but is a priority that they wanted to focus on in the new site.

or just looking at different features that they wanted to include. It being a service business, there's a location finder for all of those individual sites in the local businesses. We had to build that location finder and the logic and stuff wasn't all there. So in addition to building the piece, we had to help construct that logic as well.

So the biggest thing for me is asking some of those questions. How clean is your data? How clean is your content? And that would kind of help set better expectations to timelines and what they can expect from us. Obviously, if you know the full picture, you can say, yeah, it's going to take this amount of time. If you only know 50 % of it, probably lying. Or not intentionally, but just you don't know.

⁓ You hope it takes this long, if you don't know the other half of it, it could take a lot longer.

Rana (23:32)
Exactly.

Got it. Thank you so much for sharing this important takeaway. So whenever you work on any SEO project, so as you mentioned, first is the research, the intent, the keywords are very important. Then the technical part where site should be solid, properly organized. And after that, the content is very important. So over the years, what we learned that you have to pump content regularly to stay fresh.

Liz Bowers (23:49)
Mm-hmm.

Rana (24:03)
the advice still matters or other advice is have few good pieces of detailed guides and keep it maintained and maybe publish content as and when you can, depending on your resources. Wade, what is your favorite way of growing a business? Keeping in mind, most small businesses don't have big content teams.

Liz Bowers (24:25)
Right. So I would say even before the age of AI or AI was huge, I have always been under the firm belief of quality over quantity. So don't create content just to create content. Look at the data. Look at what your audience is searching for, whether it be those keywords or those topics, and look at how that content is currently performing on your site.

Most of the time, if you have a lot of pages on your site, specifically blogs, you probably already covered that topic once. If you have a blog on that topic from two years ago and you want to refresh it, take that blog, rewrite it, especially if it doesn't have the date, the URL. But I would refresh the content. And that has been a lot of my content strategy and what I focus on. Still need new content.

things that are constantly changing, topics that people are looking for, questions that aren't answered in your content that you really want to still write about. So there is new content, but I would say if I had to look at all of my content strategy across the board, 25 to 30 % of it is new content, 70 % is refreshing or optimizing existing content. So I would definitely focus on

what content you already have on the site, how it can be better. Even if that means just adding a couple paragraphs or lengthening an existing piece of content to answer a new question, then you have this nice topic authority piece. Doesn't necessarily need to warrant a new blog, then it's disjointed if it should be, is that a word? Whatever. It's not connected. So that way you wanna make sure that the flow is there.

If it makes sense to include it in that blog and someone would be searching for that entire topic and want all of those answers together, then that's how it should be on your website.

Rana (26:22)
Amazing. So quality over quantity. And how do you define quality for businesses with don't quality?

Liz Bowers (26:27)
Quality?

Yeah, so I look at data. So I like to look at data to back all of my decisions, even something as simple as Search Console, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics, all free tools that you can look at to see how people are engaging in your content. So some of the metrics I like to look at are engagement rate and engagement time on site.

⁓ For anyone who is an old analytics user, those are kind the new metrics over like bounce rate from Universal Analytics. That shows how are people actually staying on the site? How are they engaging with the content? For Search Console, it's more of a how many times are we showing up? So those impressions versus clicks and that click through.

Again, it depends on the topic. ⁓ If it's more informational, they might just get their answer in the search results itself. But I like to look at some of those data points to say, okay, if we have very few visitors or we get a lot of visitors, but they're only spending 10 seconds on the site and it's not a landing page for them to download or do a quick conversion, we know it's not performing.

we wanna keep them on there. So that's where I would say that piece is not quality. So we wanna refresh it or scrap it and replace it with something else. That's kind of the metric I like to take a look at is the data behind it and see how ⁓ it's actually performing.

Rana (27:57)
Got it. So we got the quality piece really covered it up. How about the frequency? Would there be any frequency? Should you publish regularly, daily, weekly, monthly? Or there should be any frequency? And also, regarding the quality part, if you can touch upon, because we started publishing from 500 words, then it went to 1,500, 2,000 words, and down to probably

Liz Bowers (28:01)
Yes.

Yes.

Rana (28:23)
10,000 words with Brian Dean at Backlinko who started a skyscraper thing. this quality is a very broad matter as well. Sorry, I'm mixing two questions, but I think they are related, quantity plus frequency.

Liz Bowers (28:34)
That's okay.

Yes.

Yeah. So to start with the quantity piece, I have never worked on a new site, a site that would constantly have updated pieces, new stories every day that you would want to add. So in my mind, keeping that in mind, I never would say daily. That is way too much. Even weekly could be too much.

Usually the cadence that I have done for a lot of our clients is either monthly or bi-weekly, bi-weekly being every other week. It really depends on your history of the site. If you have always done once a month and you've done it for years and you want to ramp that up and go twice a month, sure. If you're a brand new site and you don't have a lot of history on there, you don't have a lot of content, don't dump

10 pages in a month on the site, unless it's just like your broad service pages that you are launching with. That's fine. But creating 10 blogs a month just to show you're an authority, Google's gonna spam you. And you'll get out of the search results quicker than anything. So when it comes to the quantity part of your question, I would say it really depends on what they've done in the past. If it's brand new, err on the side of caution and go maybe,

once a month, twice a month. From there, you could always ramp up as you have the history and Google knows, okay, I can expect a new piece from them. It's gonna be a quality piece. I will check them. I will make sure that I get that piece included. That's what I've seen. I have done actual A-B tests on quality, or I'm sorry, on quantity, where we had 10 pieces that we wanted to upload in a day, or I'm sorry, in a month.

and I took it and I tried it in a couple different ways. Over the course of a couple months, I said, okay, I'm gonna load them all in one day. None of them got indexed for two, three weeks. I'm going to spread these 10 out and do two a day for the five days during the business week. Nope, got indexed a little bit quicker, but it still took almost two weeks for those to get indexed.

⁓ even with submitting through search console and some of the things you can try with that. What I did was I actually said, what we're going to do is we're going to do, if it was 10 and there's like four to four and a half weeks in a month, then you say, okay, two or three each week to get that 10 in for that month. That works. If you spread out the content, that's going to be a lot better. It's not going to be overload for Google.

to understand all of that content. So it's kind of a sweet spot. Now this test was probably four or five years ago at this point. So it could have changed with AI. I have not changed my rhythm even with AI and all of the different like intents and things like that. And I'm still seeing results. So I still go with what I learned from that test and probably always will.

If I flip back over to your ⁓ quality piece, then I would say length does play a factor in it. I don't know if there's a sweet spot for that though. Being in the agency world, I work on so many different industries. I have seen it really long form pieces for some industries work and for others not. And it's, posted that content within a week of each other.

So it's not like, well that was like before this Google algorithm update. No, it doesn't have anything to do with that. It comes back to intent. I'm sure you could have guessed I was gonna say that. ⁓ But it really does.

Rana (32:11)
It depends. It depends.

I think there is a logic. basically, think ⁓ how I see it, should be per ⁓ word value quantity should be there because Google is looking value of each word. So if you need to write how to tie a tie, probably a one minute video would do much better than 10,000 word articles. There are lots of variables to.

Liz Bowers (32:28)
Yes.

Right. Exactly.

Rana (32:46)
deciding what are you going to write about and how much how many words or images or videos you need for that piece of content.

Liz Bowers (32:52)
Right.

And to your point too, format does play a big part in that. Even if we kept with just the written word, how you have it on the page makes a difference too. If you have a thousand word article that is written like a thesis, it's probably not going to perform as well if you have a thousand word article that is broken up by headers, bulleted lists, images, things that kind of

Just break that content up so it's not just text thrown at you all at once. Even that makes a difference too.

Rana (33:27)
I agree, and it's very important for presentation and for conversion, for many other things. It's really important. Going back to this quantity and quality stuff, for those sites who have published reasonable content, they're getting reasonable traffic. Can they stop publishing without losing a traffic?

Liz Bowers (33:45)
No, it takes a little bit. So just like SEO takes a little bit to ramp up, it takes a little bit to ramp down. So if you had a regular cadence where you were posting to your site new blog content or refreshing your service pages or whatever your cadence was, if it took three to six months to ramp up that SEO and Google to really pick it up, I pick on Google because it's the biggest one, but any search engine really.

It's going to take about that same amount of time for Google to say, hey, where's your content? I'm not getting the same cadence that I was from you. What's going on? And you'll slowly start to see those results fall off. And that would be if you go from doing regular SEO down to nothing. If you scaled it back, you'd still see a little bit of that fall off. I've seen it where if you cut back

the number of content pieces that you're posting. Let's say you do two in a month and you're cutting back to one a month. It's not like you'd lose 50 % of your traffic. You'd probably lose maybe like 10 % of that new traffic. You're still going to hold on to most likely what you had, but you're not gonna grow as quick.

Rana (34:57)
Got it. Got it. And also sometimes businesses are publishing different types of content which are thin content like newsletters or podcasts as we publish on a podcast. Would you recommend indexing these type of contents which are thin content or no indexing these content? What are your practices for dealing with these sort of contents?

Liz Bowers (35:18)
I would say index it all. If it's on the web, why would you no index it? Or why would you not want to consider it? I would say you want to post anything about your business that you want out there. If you post a podcast that you're like, yeah, OK, it's fine. It kind of speaks to our services. It kind of speaks to some of the things that we work on. But it's not the best.

then it shouldn't be posted in the first place. So I would say if it's going to be posted, you want to believe in it, you want it to support your service, even if it's not directly speaking to you, even if it's not a sales pitch and it just shows your authority in the space of, okay, yes, we do web development, yes, we do all of this, here's some examples of what we've been through or here's some advice, gold.

That's what people are looking for to show your authority in the space in all different formats. And I think it comes down to types of audiences too, age of audience. That's why you would have different formats. So I would say index it all.

Rana (36:19)
⁓ That's very helpful. And why I asked is because maybe I learned somewhere or read somewhere that the more thin content you publish, it dilutes your crawl budget. And because you're not getting traffic, it would be rather better to noindex those thin content pages or those pages which are not bringing you traffic and maybe focus on more detailed content which are bringing traffic.

Does this relates to ⁓ indexing or not indexing?

Liz Bowers (36:45)
Yeah. Yeah, and I would say.

I would say yes, it does, but that kind of goes back to my quality over quantity too. I don't really see myself posting a ton of thin content that I would have that concern of. Is this going to provide the value? It if it's not providing the value, then I need to make it better before I post it. So if it's like.

Or if you think it's really too thin, then maybe it's just a social media piece. You get that information out there. You get it so people can engage with it or at least relate it to your business. But it's not living on your site, living and breathing. I feel like almost like a timely mark on it or just saying like some piece related to something that would be like a specific event. Those are perfect things on.

⁓ Facebook or Twitter or any other kind of social media piece. If you think it's too thin and it's just an informational piece, try rephrasing it and obviously shortening it depending on how long the blog was and put it as a Facebook post or a LinkedIn post and say, hey, let's see how this performs. That way the content is still out there. It's still being used and it should get you some value. If you no-index it, there's no value to it.

unless there's some other source sending you to it, email, paid landing page, something like that.

Rana (38:07)
Got it, got it. So again, I'll listen to this conversation again and maybe do some changes based on our structures.

Liz Bowers (38:15)
just wanted to throw something else out there too, related to your noindex question. I recently saw something on LinkedIn about Google and when it will pick up noindex. If you have noindex ⁓ implemented through JavaScript on your site, not getting too technical, but JavaScript on your site, it might not actually pick that up and it might be too late.

So it also kind of can throw off some of your crawl budget that way. So depending on how no index is being used, if you are using it to kind of limit and save your crawl budget, think about how it's implemented as well. Because it might not be providing that value or what you're trying to accomplish with it.

Rana (38:53)
got it. with this content piece, initially we were on our side, we were publishing, we had a homepage, service pages, and we were pushing a blog once a week. Recently, we are reviewing our things and with this AI overviews, think currently we are in a process of maybe having few five to 10 good solid piece of guides and all the blogs supporting those guides.

And maybe in future, we'll keep refreshing the guides and publishing the blog as and when to support those guides. Is that the right way going forward?

Liz Bowers (39:20)
Perfect.

Yes.

Yes, absolutely. And that's what I've seen work as well. Whether those ⁓ guides are posted in the blog section or you have a separate resources section and then the blogs are just the content that you're using to promote it or whatever, that is exactly what I would recommend. And I think that kind of comes down to the quality as well. Those guides are going to be rich. They're going to be so rich.

That's what's going to provide you the results and the conversions and things like that. The blogs are capturing all of those like longer terms. To my example, really early on in our podcast here about the digital marketing agency, local to me in my service, that's more of the intent that the blogs are going to capture. The reason would be to send them to the guide.

But maybe the guide covers that overall topic. The blogs cover those small, intense, longer tail keywords. If you've really been in the SEO game for a while.

Rana (40:23)
keyword.

Amazing. Thank you so much for reassuring our ongoing plan. So we got basically strategy covered. Strategy, intent, keyword search is very important. Then site structure, site development is important. After that, content is the backbone of any SEO work. Is that enough to get traffic from?

Liz Bowers (40:30)
Yes!

Mm-hmm.

Rana (40:47)
Google or do we have to do something else as well?

Liz Bowers (40:49)
I think that's enough to get traffic from Google. I've always seen SEO as a pyramid. So you kind of start out at the bottom with your technical foundation. You've got a really solid tech stack on your website. You have some of that reputation building at that next level with some Facebook, local listings, some of that offsite content just to support it. Then you get into basically the top two tiers would be content.

So you'd have those guide content that would be really rich, all about your services, what you provide, everything that you can do. And then the very tippy top of the pyramid would be not as much time into it, but you would be able to do some of those longer form blog articles, handling some of that, like longer queries or what people are searching for. That pyramid method has a...

is how I've always kind of described like the amount of time that should be put into each piece of the website to gain that success. That's a formula that has worked really well for me personally. And I would say that if you kind of keep to that structure, then yes, it works. But if you just list everything out and say, okay, I did technical, I did content, I did all these stuff and

you think about, okay, I put 90 % of my time into content SEO and I didn't think about how fast my page loads or any of like how people are interacting with the site. You're not gonna have the same kind of results. So it's like baking a cake. As long as you put the ingredients in the right order and think of it in the right order, it'll turn out. Otherwise, I don't know what you would end up with if you...

didn't put those ingredients in the right order and tried to make that cake.

Rana (42:40)
Amazing. And how about the promotion of the content? when you are publishing content, you don't need to promote? Or the backlink is the hot topic, which is very difficult to get.

Liz Bowers (42:49)
I would say you do

need to promote. I think backlink, depends on the type of piece. I think the most common backlink that people get is from their own social media profiles. And that's okay. If you're sharing regularly your blogs and using that as a topic discussion for your community on socials, absolutely, that backlink holds a lot of weight.

But if you have like a guide that you're looking at, then that you would want to maybe promote a little bit more. So maybe you do try to do some outreach to some industry leaders and say, hey, I have this guide. I think it'd be really useful. Would you like to feature it on your website and see if you can get that backlink? I have never been one of those to buy backlinks. I think it's all based on relationships.

I think that's the highest quality to that. Because while domain authority plays a piece in your backlinks and what you should get backlinks from, it should be relevant. The intent should be there. You want to make sure that if it's not relevant and it just has a high domain authority, it's not going to give you the same results as if you have something that's half that domain authority and speaks to your audience.

Rana (43:51)
intention.

Yeah, this is a brilliant advice because the backlink is the tricky part. So there is a white hat and black hat. So much goes onto it. But if you are doing lots of hard work, you are building a site properly. Your intent is clear. And I would like to touch on one more important part of the SEO success. How important is it, going back to our intent and stuff, how important is to have a clear offer? What I mean is, at the first place, how do you check whether you can

Liz Bowers (44:09)
Yes. ⁓

Rana (44:29)
with a business, whether they have a product or service market fit, are they solving the actual problem? How do you identify when businesses come to you, whether you can get some success with SEO or not? Do you do that? Or you can do SEO for any business and they can get results?

Liz Bowers (44:47)
I think it really depends. I mean, I have never really had a company come to me and say, I'm going to try to promote this product. And I look up and they have all bad reviews and turn their skin green when it was supposed to moisturize or anything like that. I haven't really come across that in my experience. Maybe I'm lucky. I'm sure there's SEOs who have horror stories. But for me, I've always seen it where

there's always going to be something that we can promote. We take on clients that are smaller business. They're usually homegrown, not usually like giant businesses or things that could be seen as like shady or scams or anything like that. So we don't usually run that risk. I think it really depends on looking at like if I were to have someone come to me and they did have that bad product.

I probably would tell them it's going to be hard. We always like to look at at least their website a little bit, kind of understand their product after they reach out to us or their service whenever they initially do that outreach so we can get an understanding of their business. I don't think from an SEO perspective that there's any business that wouldn't be successful with SEO. It's just going to be more challenging if you don't follow up with your

⁓ product being just as strong, especially with AI now. If people are asking AI about your product, it might tell them that, hey, you know, this has turned someone's skin green and they had this really bad experience and the company did not follow up well or respond to them at all. And here's eight other examples of people having similar experiences. If you're not counteracting that with some content or ultimately improving your product and say,

Hey, we heard you. This is what we're doing to counteract it. Then you won't be successful. You're not going to be able to take off.

Rana (46:37)
No, thank you so much for answering a very clear response again for my very unclear question. exactly that's what I meant in my experience as well. it's not bad or good product. There are some services or products which you don't have to teach people. For example, you need a plumber. Everybody needs why they need a plumber or accountancy services or law services.

Liz Bowers (46:45)
Yes.

Exactly.

Rana (47:03)
with digital

marketing or some other new services, have to educate customers more. Maybe people don't have any immediate needs for those services. So it's hard to create a traffic, convert, and everything. But when there is established need, a problem you're solving, a business is solving, generally that's a very good solid foundation to build your SEO work. That's what I meant to say. So amazing.

Liz Bowers (47:26)
Exactly. Yeah.

Rana (47:30)
To wrap up our conversation, as we said, there is so much work needs to be done. SEO is a long game. People who are looking to do SEO, grow their business with SEO, what is your one advice where they should start or how they approach SEO if they are on the early stage at the moment?

Liz Bowers (47:51)
Yeah, so if you are just starting off with SEO, I would simply ask AI, whatever platform of your choice, what do you know about insert business name here? If you're just starting off, you might have to prompt it a little bit and say, in this industry or providing these types of services and just see what it knows about your business. That's your launching off point.

That is one easy way for you to get data from something that you don't have data for right now, like your Google Analytics or your Search Console, to say, OK, this is what it knows about me. If it's spot on, then continue optimizing your site for those services, what it's recognizing you for. If it only covers 50 % of it, then focus on the 50 % that it's not including in its results. Or if it's completely off,

think about the content that you have out there on your site. What is sending the wrong signals? And think too that it could also be things off site as well, but the main driver is going to be things from your actual website. Obviously that's going to be the easiest to control as well. But if you had a bad post on Reddit and for some reason you're a new company and someone gave you a terrible review or talked about a terrible experience,

make sure you address that as well, because those are going to be things that get pulled in. But starting with SEO, I like to use the LLM as almost like a partner and say, hey, what do you think of this? Or what do you know about this? And that really has been able to give us a good launching off point. I still even do it in some of our established SEO clients and just see what it knows. And I'll test them all.

and go into two different ones to see, because they all have a different knowledge base. So that's probably the best place to start off. If you asked me this question last year, I would say, ⁓ well, launch the site, wait for some data, whatever. But now we have this wonderful access to data right from the get-go, even if we just launch a site. So it's fantastic use of AI to

prompt it what it knows. It can answer your questions, but it can also give you insight too.

Rana (50:05)
Amazing advice, Liz. Fantastic. As you mentioned, going back to it depends and SEO is a long game. think there are many, many people or businesses lose money to paying for SEO as well. So what are the couple of biggest mistakes you see businesses often do when it comes to investing in SEO? And if you want to address those mistakes to help people avoid wasting any more money.

Liz Bowers (50:31)
Yeah, absolutely. So hold SEO accountable. Ask them questions about the results. Have them show you the data. I would say with AI, some of the metrics are changing. as long as they can explain that to you, that's going to be OK. So if your organic traffic is going down and you ask, well, what's going on? And they say, well, I don't know. We're working on this, but it's going to take some time.

Don't trust them. They need to be able to know ⁓ well we're down because in the industry This is the the trend and here's why and they should be able to answer some of those questions of Specifically your why questions? Some of the other pieces that I've seen where SEO hasn't been successful is that thin content posting quantity over quality There's no return there look at

a month or two after some of that content is posted, if it's not driving the results you expect, ask them about it. Ask them, why are we not seeing those results? So the biggest piece of advice that I would give is go to your SEO person and say why, and see how they answer. If they answer confidently, like a good SEO can, then you're in good hands. If they fumble or they are not able to answer that question or

just make up something and it doesn't even sound like it's real and they can't back it up, then I would say, unfortunately, that is a spam SEO or a scam SEO person. I know all too many businesses that have run into that and they just blindly trusted because they didn't know what questions to ask. You don't need to get technical, just ask why.

Rana (52:11)
Amazing, very helpful advice, Liz, and I'm sure that will help many, many businesses. ⁓ Yeah, last question. While we are discussing on this conversation, how can we make your website your number one business growth tool? Any question which I should have asked you, I haven't.

Liz Bowers (52:17)
I hope it does.

No, I would say I kind of talked about it in some of my answers, but I do come across a lot of sites that don't have any metrics in place. So I don't know if this would have been a question or anything, but one piece of advice that I do want to make sure I emphasize is set up your data. Get as much as you can.

There are free tools out there. Understand how people are looking at your site. I mentioned Google Analytics. I mentioned Google Search Console. All of those. I don't even think you need a Google email account. You can use any email account and sign up and get that up there. If you don't have that data, you don't have anything to optimize against. You don't know how you're performing except for maybe sales and things like that. But even if you're getting sales,

no idea what's working. And that comes down to what do you invest in? What do you actually focus on? Those insights and those analytics can tell you your best performing source is Facebook or your actual website or this referral or something like that. You have no idea if you have no data. So make sure you get your data set up when you first stand up your site. It is super important.

Rana (53:44)
Amazing. I agree, super important. Do you have any preference what KPIs, businesses should measure on SEM?

Liz Bowers (53:53)
So for SEO, would say I still track keywords, mainly from a higher level. I look at the root word of things. So we talked about digital marketing. That would probably be one. But there's other phrases, like some longer tail terms I might include in there as well. But I use keyword rankings as a guide into how I'm optimizing on my site.

I also like to take a look at the individual page metrics. So I do look at Google Analytics. Even if overall organic is down, I can look at the individual pages and say, OK, well, these are the ones that are performing, or this is the number one page that fell organically. So I need to make sure I focus on that. So that's really what I like to take a look at from a metrics perspective.

If we look at anything else that gets into like usually custom reporting, if we try to show the whole sales funnel, but from a high level SEO perspective, those would be the main two.

Rana (54:50)
Amazing Liz. Thank you so much. I really learned so much about SEO from you and I'm sure people who will listen or watch this podcast will have something valuable to improve their websites and make their website their number one business growth tool. Where people can connect with you and how do you help businesses with SEO?

Liz Bowers (55:03)
Absolutely.

Yeah, so I am a huge advocate on LinkedIn. ⁓ I am on there probably daily. I like to post, but I also like to just share ideas and connect with ⁓ people who are either struggling with SEO or in SEO and struggling along with me with all the AI changes, all of it. So LinkedIn is definitely my biggest source there. If you look up Liz Bowers, SEO should be able to find me. And then from

SEO and who we help. I work for a small agency. We help anybody. So I talked about a large franchise system that we work with. We also work with small businesses to medium-sized businesses in any industry. So it's fun to see that you can take kind of the core SEO strategy and apply it to any industry. So we can help anybody.

Rana (55:56)
Amazing. Once again, Liz, thank you very much for your time and I really appreciate it.

Liz Bowers (56:00)
Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation. was a lot of fun.