Work Hat SEO: Why White Hat and Black Hat Labels Don’t Matter

If you talk to anyone who knows or doesn't know much about SEO, they'll ask, "Is that white hat or black hat SEO?" That’s the wrong question.

When most people say White Hat SEO they mean, “ Does this search engine optimization strategy completely follow search engine rules and policies?”

When most people say Black Hat SEO they mean, “Does this search engine optimization method deliberately manipulate the search engine indexes?” Sometimes they will add the criteria, “Does this break the ‘search engine rules’?”

If you are a business owner or marketing decision-maker, this article will unpack a new SEO approach using non-technical terms - Work Hat SEO™.

Almost everything done in SEO is technically “Black Hat.”

If you publish a blog post then go to your Facebook page and say, “I just published this post on my website. Go check it out,” you just, by the letter of the law, did Black Hat SEO. You did something other than publishing your content and leaving it in a vacuum for the Google Bot to crawl it and decide what to do with it.

Note, the search engines do not own the internet nor do they determine anything online beyond how they show their own search results. So there is nothing illegal or legal involved in any part of the discussion. It’s simply a question of, “How does this particular search engine respond to a prescribed SEO tactic?”

It’s time to dispense with the white hat, black hat, and even weirder gray hat SEO labels — they are meaningless. Instead, we use the term WORK HAT SEO ™.

What is Work Hat Seo?

Work Hat SEO determines whether or not to use an SEO strategy by answering the following questions:

1. Does this SEO strategy work now to increase rankings and organic traffic? Answer.
2. Based upon what we know about Google (and other search engines), will this SEO strategy work into the foreseeable future? Answer.
3. Is there any risk associated with this SEO strategy now (or one we see as probable in the future)? Answer.
4. Can we mitigate those SEO risks to the website? Answer.

Why is a Work Hat SEO strategy important for your site?

Eliminating the labels of black hat and white hat is much like removing political labels.

In the current political climate, if an idea is labeled to be Republican, then almost all Democrats will forthrightly reject it, even if it is a great idea. If an idea comes from a Democrat, then it is almost always accepted as good policy by Democrats and as bad policy by Republicans, regardless of the solution’s actual real-world merit. This prejudice goes both ways.

The same is true of SEO strategies and tactics. If someone labels a tactic "white hat”, many SEOs utilize the tactic, whether it works or not. If someone hints that something is black hat, many SEOs run like a scalded dog even if it works well and provides no significant risks.

Instead of including an SEO tactic because of its label, as a business owner or website/marketing decision-maker in your company, you should instead evaluate each proposed SEO solution on its unique merit using the four questions above.

If your search engine optimizer can articulate clear answers to the four work hat suggestions, you have most likely found a trustworthy SEO provider (granted that they also can deliver on what they say.)

As far as we know, Moon & Owl Marketing coined the term Work Hat SEO ™. It is foundational to our approach when working with clients like you to achieve improved site search rankings and more qualified organic traffic to your website.

Want to learn more? Let’s unpack each of the Work Hat SEO criteria questions…

01. Does the strategy work now to increase ranking and traffic?

The goal of organic SEO is to drive people who are searching for a solution, service, or product you offer to your website. This is accomplished by using SEO strategies and tactics to increase your rankings and the amount of qualified organic traffic that arrives at your site.

These search queries are typically either:

• Branded–they know your company name already
• Transactional–they want to buy/purchase
• Informational-they are looking for information

A good SEO should know WHY the strategy works, not just that it does work.

If you own a business and an SEO agency suggests a specific SEO strategy, do not be afraid to ask them, "Why does this strategy work?" "It just does" is not an acceptable answer.

True SEOs know why the strategy works in relation to the current search engine algorithms.

Even if you don’t know what the terms mean, you want to hear an SEO company relate each strategy to something specific, like:

• Strengthening your entity because of X.
• Creating better internal interlinking and link equity.
• Leveraging Google’s preference for showing its own properties in search.
• Creating healthy, powerful off-page backlinks.
• Setting the Google vector using Natural Language Processing.
• Increase off-site authority that powers up the main website
• To shield the site from Google penalties and manual penalties

If you don’t understand an SEO term, ask them what that phrase means. If the potential SEO agency can’t explain them in layperson’s terms or treats it like a dark secret, look elsewhere.

Just like a solid science hypothesis that is proven to be true, the SEO strategies used on your website by a search engine optimizer should be tested and proven to work in multiple, repeated scenarios. Because the algorithm is complex, undisclosed, and dynamic, it is a complex undertaking to do SEO testing. Hypothesis theory comes in to play here even if an SEO agency doesn't use that term or realize they are using it.

Hypothesis Theory and SEO

This gray section is for those who like to nerd-out a bit. However, it is important to understand how your SEO agency works on your behalf. With any website, the SEO hypothesizes why a particular strategy may or may not work.

Hypothesis:

1. i) X tactic causes a change (+/) in ranking/traffic.
2. ii) X tactic does not cause a change (+/) in ranking/traffic.

They then apply that SEO tactic to your website which either improves things, does nothing, or actually makes things worse.

What you want from your SEO:

1. a) X tactic is said to cause a change (+/-) in ranking/traffic, and it does have an effect.
2. b) X tactic is said to not cause a change in ranking/traffic, and it does not have an effect.

If your SEO properly understands a) above, the work your SEO agency is doing will properly have the effect to help your online growth and won’t waste time on things that don’t mover the needed.

If your SEO properly understands b) above, your SEO agency won’t be wasting your money or their time on things that do not work or affect your ranking.

What you do NOT want from your SEO:

The dangers are that the SEO agency will make a false rejection or acceptance error of an SEO hypothesis.

1. c) X tactic is said to cause a change in ranking/traffic, but it does not have an effect.
2. d) X tactic is said not to cause a change in ranking/traffic, but it really does have an effect.

If your SEO agency applies c), then you will be wasting money on tactics that don't effectively work.

If your SEO agency excludes d) because of bias or ignorance, you might be missing some efforts that could, in fact, help you. Conversely, you could be experiencing impediments in growth because your SEO has not attended to something that does matter because they believe, in ignorance, it doesn’t.

Test and Test More

Ask any potential SEO agency how they test the SEO strategies they recommend.

• • Do they continually repeat testing?
    Repeated test conclusions reinforcing the outcome bolsters the case that the SEO hypothesis can be accepted as true. Once a test is run, and the results are in, the best SEO companies will repeat this test across other sites expecting to see similar results.

 

• • Do they do any single variable testing or as close-as-possible-to-SV testing?
    Single-variable testing is very difficult to do in SEO in a live-fire situation because the SEO only controls your side of the equation, not the search engine’s side. Nevertheless, changing a single variable on a page and tracking the results is still a better practice than making a slew of changes all at once and being unsure as to which change actually improved results.

 

• • Who else do they trust and lean on for SEO testing?
    Does this source just throw out gibberish, or are they truly authoritative?Ask them whom they listen to for SEO wisdom? What mastermind groups are they in? Why do they listen to these specific people as authorities? You don't have to be an SEO expert to discern if they can answer this question with confidence and clarity.

 

• Do they just believe, "Google says," so we should do it this way? Or do they test against what even Google says to do?
  Remember, Google, Bing, and other search engines' goal is to make money from you by having you buy ads, not giving you organic search gains. They say to do and not to do a great many things that proper testing shows isn't accurate. It's not that they are intentionally lying. The algorithms required for search engines to perform the task are so complex they can't know every variable and how it affects ranking. (Of course, some may be so jaded as to say that search engines do intentionally lie to get organic folks to shift to a larger paid-online-ads strategy.)

02. Based upon what we know about Google (and other search engines), will this strategy work into the foreseeable future?

When an SEO agency can tell you WHY something works, it also gives them an edge on predicting whether or not the strategy or action will work in the future.

The Value of Gained SEO Wisdom Over Time

Typically, the longer an SEO services provider has been in the business, the more they have seen algorithms come and go. A wise SEO will begin to see patterns occur over time. Yes, an algorithm element may shift 180º, but over time, wise SEOs will know how to diversify the search engine optimization efforts on your site to make you more bullet-proof against and algorithm change. (For example, we use the SEO Wheel to ensure ten areas of SEO are addressed.)

The internet is full of Facebook groups with newbie "SEOs" asking questions that an experienced SEO already knows are outlandish, silly, or ignorant. And experienced SEO has answered these questions well in their past and is now more focused on things that work.

How is the future of SEO best predicted?

By reading Google patents, SEOs can see what the largest search engine company in the world is at least considering as a future consideration. Does the current strategy reinforce that or violate that possible future algorithm implementation?

By being connected to the best thinkers in SEO–those who love reading and analyzing these patents–an SEO can gain you a leg up on other, not-as-well connected SEOs. Finding out who is repeatedly accurate in their predictions is helpful.

Surviving previous major algorithm shifts is also a positive indicator of how well and SEO understands the future of optimizing for ranking improvement and traffic to your site. Ask to see how their existing clients did after the major algorithm changes (especially those algorithm updates explicitly stated by Google itself.)

03. Is there any risk associated with strategy now (or one we see as probable in the future)?

Any SEO performed on your site, called on-page SEO, or performed on the internet at large that connects to your site, called off-page SEO, carries a risk.

A smart SEO knows these risks divide into six major categories:

1. Minute risk with small gains potential.
2. Minute risk with massive gains potential.
3. Medium risk with small gains potential.
4. Minute risk with massive gains potential.
5. Major risk with small gains potential.
6. Major risk with massive gains potential.

You obviously want as little risk as possible with the best possible gains.

The six risk categories shows the importance of the optimizer knowing WHY something does or doesn't work in SEO. It is only possible to place the tactic into the proper risk bucket when the reasons the action works is clearly understood.

As a business owner, if your SEO suggests a new tactic you haven't used previously, you should ask:

• Why are you recommending this tactic?
• What is the risk vs. reward ratio of implementing this tactic?
• Am I the first client to whom you are recommending this strategy?
• How long have you used this tactic with another client, and what have been their results?
• Who recommended this tactic, and do they have proven results from implementing it?

If the SEO agency cannot articulate convincing answers to these questions, you might put that tactic on hold or even switch SEO agencies.

This leads us right into the final criterion which is a continuation of the risk question.

04. Can we mitigate those risks to the website?

The key to successful SEO is utilizing the strategies and tactics that provide massive gains while mitigating risks to your site.

 

There are several ways to mitigate risks. One powerful way is to incorporate buffer sites that provide an additional level of shielding from the tactics that include a higher risk.

For example, we use a drive stack and other properties to provide a shielded buffer layer between your site and any large volume of backlinks we are building. Should the algorithm change, all we have to do is disconnect these properties by unlinking them to your site. This means your site is safe and shielded from any long-term penalty or manual actions while allowing tactics that effectively improve rankings and increase traffic to be implemented.

White Hat SEO is a Myth

Remember, anything you or an SEO does besides publishing raw content to your site with nothing done to it is already considered non-white or gray hat SEO. Even tweaking the keyword volume on a page is an SEO action, albeit one with minute risks.

Black Hat SEO is Sort-Of a Myth

When people say something is Black Hat, it is typically because something sounds scary or out of the norm. We tend to all be somewhat afraid of that which we have never heard about before. But a lack of exposure to an idea does not mean it is a bad idea.

Examples of Using Work Hat SEO Effectively

Let’s take the example of building backlinks to a website.

Keeping in mind that you evaluate the tactic through the four criteria of work hat.

• Does this work now?
• Do we see it working in the foreseeable future?
• Does this expose the main website to risk?
• Can risks be mitigated versus the payoff?

Example 1

Getting a single, valuable link from an authoritative website that relates to the niche of your business.

This is typically a good idea. The tactic has always been considered a super “white hat” strategy. Ninety-five percent of the time, you should do it. But what if you reached out for that link or even paid under the table for it? That’s against Google’s Terms of Service. If the site you get the link from is found to sell links to others, you now just entered dangerous territory, even if you honestly gained a genuine backlink from them.

Example 2

Building 20,000 backlinks to your main site is a bad idea because:

• It cannot be easily undone.
• If Google changes the algorithm, your main site is completely exposed.
• We already know Google is looking for high numbers of backlinks that instantly appear.
• We already know that they can establish an artificial pattern of links.

Thus, this tactic isn't a good Work Hat solution. It has a very high risk and very temporary gains. A manual penalty or algorithm shift could doom your main site.

Example 3

Building 20,000 tiered backlinks to a shielded property that then safely points to your main website.

This is a good Work Hat SEO idea. Why?

1. The shielded property can safely buffer those backlinks (like a Syndication Network, Press Releases, Google My Business sites, Gsites, Amazon Bucket sites, and Drive Stacks). We have proven over and over that these buffer sites can take the beating and pass on increased SEO power to your website.
2. Any property, should it be seen by Google as an offending property, can be disconnected by simply removing the backlink from the shielded property to your website.
3. We can see a corresponding climb in the metrics–domain strength, domain authority, and trust flow–on the main site as these shielded properties are powered up. This should correlate to increased ranking, visibility, and traffic on the main site, which are also measurable.

Very low risk, very massive gains.

Remember that in Work Hat SEO, we want to know WHY the tactic works.

This tactic works because:

1. We know that Google is now assimilating your branded online properties (example: Google My Business, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even things like branded blogging sites Tumblr, wiki-sties, bookmark sites, etc.) into a single Brand entity.
2. We know which of your entity properties can handle, buffer, and clean this large amount of links.
3. We know building tiered links works because the first tier of links pointing to your branded entity properties (not your main site) is subsequently powered up by a set of links (tier 2) pointing to your tier 1 links. This is mathematically shown to provide exponential power. We have also repeated this “test” repeatedly with the same results.
4. We know that the risk is highly mitigated because of #2 above. All we have to do is to delete that entity property or unlink it as pointing to your main site.
5. We do not use this tactic in isolation. It is just part of the SEO Wheel.
   By not putting all your eggs in one particular SEO strategy, your web’s online reasons for ranking well are diversified. This provides greater safety and improves your site withstanding future algorithm shifts.

Based on the four Work Hat SEO criteria, this is a solid SEO strategy and should be implemented.

Work Hat SEO Conclusion & Your Free Consultation

Stop labeling things as white hat or black hat. Shift your perspective to Work Hat SEO. You’ll get better results and sleep better at night, knowing your website is shielded from the crazy fickleness of the search engines. Life is too short, and money too tight to waste on SEO that doesn’t move the needle or that puts you at unnecessary risk.

We use the Work Hat SEO exclusively in our optimization efforts. We have large international corporations and hyper-local small businesses benefiting from the Work Hat SEO approach. To date, we've seen massive traffic and revenue gains while never incurring a manual penalty. We also rarely see client's rankings fluctuate wildly from an algorithm change. Work Hat SEO brings steady, consistent online growth. We’d be happy to give you a FREE Moon and Owl Marketing Work Hat SEO Consultation. Simply call us at 817-889-1487 or complete the Free Consultation request form.

The post Work Hat SEO: Why White Hat and Black Hat Labels Don’t Matter was first published to: https://moonandowl.com

Medical SEO: An Interview with Jordan Fowler

Jordan Fowler, an expert on Medical SEO and founder of Moon and Owl Marketing, was recently featured on the Practice Growth Machine podcast. The interview covered a wide range of medical search engine optimization questions and answers.

Listen to the Medical SEO Podcast

Read the Medical SEO Transcript

• Table of Contents
• What is Medical SEO?
• Should we focus on Google for Medical SEO?
• What made medical SEO a focus for Moon and Owl?
• Do I need an SEO expert for my medical practice? Can I do SEO myself?
• Why do some SEO firms fail to get results or fail to keep up with changes?
• What are some questions someone should ask a potential medical SEO agency?
• Do I need an SEO agency that is a total subject matter expert in my medical specialty?
• How does a doctor, dentist, or surgeon check their SEO performance?
• What about on-page versus off-page efforts for medical SEO?
• How do I get help with SEO for my medical practice site?

Here is a transcript of the podcast (used by permission from http://troycole.com/).

Troy: Today’s show is about SEO.

What is up, my friends? It’s your boy, Troy. Welcome to a fresh episode of the Practice Growth Machine Podcast, where we teach you the persuasion tips and strategies you can use to command higher prices for your premium procedures and fill your surgery schedule.

Something a little different for you today. A recording of a conversation I had with a friend of mine: Jordan Fowler from Moon and Owl Marketing.

Jordan is one of my go-to guys when I have questions about SEO – and ranking, and search engines, and what the heck Google is doing.

We were due for a conversation and I thought, “Hey, this might be something super useful for the podcast.” So, we recorded our chat.

I ask him about all kinds of different things regarding SEO – from what tactics are working, which ones are not, how do you know if your SEO is actually doing good without being an SEO expert and without spending hours every single month trying to figure it out.

We cover all this and more in this episode. I think you’ll find it highly beneficial. A lot of good tactical and strategic points that we cover throughout this conversation, so I hope you love it.

Take some notes. Listen to it twice, if you need to, and without any further ado, here is my conversation with Jordan Fowler from Moon and Owl Marketing:

All right, Jordan, what’s going on, man?

Jordan: How are you, Troy? It’s good to be here today.

I’m doing good, man. I’m doing good. You are my go-to SEO guy when I have SEO questions. We were due for a meetup anyway, and I thought, “Hey, let’s chat a little bit, record it for the podcast.”

I’ve got a lot of SEO questions. I talk to my clients a lot, and SEO comes up fairly frequently, and I love having the right answers to those questions.

Because I know this is an area where there’s a ton of misinformation out there, I’m sure you can speak to that.

Jordan: Snake oil salesmen, voodoo, swing a chicken above your head. Yeah, that kind of stuff. Yes. Definitely.

Yeah, 100 percent, man, and you know my feelings on SEO.

I don’t like SEO, I think it’s important. It’s obviously a thing. If I need to find a LASIK surgeon in Dallas, I’m not going to search cheeseburgers in Kentucky.

Google serves up search results based on the way people search, and we want them serving up our clients’ pages, number one, for those specific things that we’re searching for.

But I know there’s a lot more to it now, from what you’ve taught me, than just a few keywords here and there and hoping and praying, and snake oil like you’re talking about.

So I want to dig into some of that today, but before we get into that I’d love to lay some foundations.

We might have some folks who are listening who don’t know a lot about what SEO is, or maybe they have a general idea of it, but we can solidify that some.

I’d like to start there, and then we’ll get into some of the more complex and nuanced questions as we go, if that works for you.

Sure, sure.

What is Medical SEO?

Troy: Well, go ahead and just tell me, man. Give us a little, like, your overview of SEO.

Jordan: Well, I mean, at its base level, if you don’t know anything about it, it stands for search engine optimization, right? And at its most basic level, it’s just getting people to discover you online and then to start to trust you and like you, and then from that journey where they type something into Google, or Bing, or something like that, to end up selecting you as the solution to their problem or situation.

In the case of your medical clients, right? Somebody says, “I’m sick and tired of these glasses fogging up when I go outside,” or, “my eyes getting dry.”

And so they’re going to go search LASIK doctor, whatever city they’re in. Or best LASIK doctor, whatever, and you want to be present there.

And a lot of people will say, “Well, I’ll just use paid AdWords.” And all the research is showing us that a lot of users are skeptical and they won’t click on the ads, and in fact, even the people that do AdWords say 59 percent of your traffic will never click on an ad.

They’re just skeptical.

Being ranked in organic’s really important, and so not only do you want to pop in on the search results, but you also want to be seen as the most credible.
You’re going to hear me use the word Google a lot, but yeah, there are other search engines like DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, all those, but Google also gets 90 to 92 percent of all searches, so it’s definitely the behemoth in the field right now.

Should we focus on Google for Medical SEO?

Troy: All right. That makes a lot of sense. So, a lot of focus on Google, just because that’s where the volume is, then.

Yeah. Until they mess up more or get de-monopolized, or whatever, that’s where you got to play right now.

Troy: Right, right. Love them or hate them, they own the sandbox, right? That’s what I tell my clients. That and Facebook.

Facebook can make some stumbles, but Facebook is the place to be when we’re doing our social ads and things because they’ve got the biggest audience, the most traffic and companies like Facebook and Google are resilient enough and big enough at this point to stick around and to take a few hits, right?

So, if you want to play the game, then that’s where you need to be.

I’m not trying to take us off on a Facebook tangent here. Let’s stay focused on SEO.

I’m just curious, man, because I’ve known you for a while. You know, I know what you do at your firm for your different clients.

What made medical SEO a focus for Moon and Owl?

Troy: But I’m curious: can you explain a little bit about why you started focusing on SEO? Because I know that’s a big part of your business now. You’ve really grown your efforts there, so what made SEO turn into a focus for you?

Jordan: We were really reluctant to get into SEO, and we used to do more of the other side of it, and we would just farm out our SEO to somebody.

We kept getting people – clients that we would come alongside, and they would be working with an SEO agency or hire one, and then it would go sideways really quick and they would end up having to fire them.

We found out through that journey that there were about three different SEO categories of companies if you would, and the first one is like everything is a secret voodoo type.

They won’t be transparent. They just say, “Trust us,” they won’t tell you the action they’re doing on the site or the strategies they’re implementing each month.

So the client’s dumping all this money and saying, “What are you guys doing?” And they would always say, like, “It’s a secret.” You know, as if the client has the time to reverse engineer the SEO practices, right?

Anybody that has a medical practice or a business doesn’t want to be doing that. They just want the results.

The second one we saw was the rockstar type of agency.

This is where usually it has a very charismatic leader, and that guy or gal is more concerned about getting invited to speak at MAWS or one of these huge SEO conferences.

They would rather be seen as a guru among other SEOs, and so they’re really concerned with self-promotion, and usually as a result of that the clients take a hit for that because their primary objective isn’t like, “I’m going to drive traffic.”

Their primary agenda is the self and self-promotion.

And then the third one is, and this happens a lot with a lot of agencies that either won’t highly focus on SEO and just kind of have it as a side add-on or whatever, but they don’t really know what to measure, and we see this a lot.

An SEO company would come back to one of the clients we had and say, “Look, we ranked you on this term. You’re number one.”

And if you didn’t look deeper, you wouldn’t realize nobody’s searching for that term. It’s just, there’s no search, you know? Best left-handed LASIK doctor, with bald, New York.

Okay, yeah. You ranked for that. Nobody’s searching that, right?

What we like to do, too, is we don’t just want people to watch rankings. What we measure at Moon and Owl is traffic. Organic traffic that comes into the site, that converts into patients or clients.

And we actually try to keep our clients from what I call search watching, where all they’re doing is watching the search engine results and that kind of thing.

And really move up – move up a level to organic traffic, and is organic traffic going up because of these SEO efforts, and are you getting conversions from it?

Or, on the other hand, is it going down? And so we just worked with those three types of agencies long enough, and our clients kept going, “We’re sick of this. Why don’t y’all do SEO?”

And I would say, “No, no, no.” “But we trust you? Why don’t you do SEO?” And, finally, we just relented and we were like, “All right, we’re going to do SEO.” And my personality is if I’m going to do something, I’m all in, and so we went all in.

I mean, I’ve got guys reading Google patents to see what’s coming, and so we’re really, really deep into that environment now.

Do I need an SEO expert for my medical practice?

Troy: Seems like the kind of thing you have to be deep in if you’re going to do it right. I talk about – there’s a few areas of marketing where you want someone who’s literally a nerd about it, and then just consumes everything on it to stay on top of it. SEO seems definitely one of those categories.

Jordan: For sure. Right. Like, some practice might say, “Hey, I’m going to do my own SEO.” Right? And yeah, there are some basic things you can do in-house, but for medical clients, they’re in a category Google calls your money or your life.

Medical, finance, legal, health, and Google’s super picky about these kinds of sites, because your site can literally screw up somebody’s life, right?

If it puts out false information or whatever, and so one of the challenges to do-it-yourself SEO by a company that just says, “Hey, we’re going to do it,” is the Google bull’s eye’s always moving.

So unless you have just an inordinate amount of time to keep track of all the changes – you’ve got to be looking at patents, looking to have enough data coming in that you’re seeing algorithm shifts.

That’s why having a broader client base helps. And in a competitive market, to be honest, you’re just never going to DIY, do it yourself, SEO outrank somebody who has a solid expert doing SEO for them.

Just like me. I wouldn’t go, “Hey, I’m going to,” I mean, if I could save enough money I guess technically I could go buy a LASIK laser or any other medical procedure thing, and try to do my own eye surgery, or buy some dental tools and try to do my own tooth abstraction.

That would be absurd, and so typically, once you get to a certain level, you need to let an SEO expert handle your SEO.

And just make sure it isn’t one of those three types of bad SEO agencies we talked about above.

Troy: You talked about those SEO agencies, and you mentioned that you would have clients who would have relationships with SEO firms, and then they would go sideways, and I’ve had that experience as well.

Why do some SEO firms fail to get results or fail to keep up with changes?

Troy: I’d love for you to dig in a little bit and explain why SEO firms either fail to get results or why SEO can seem to change overnight.

Because I think those are kind of two sides of the same coin, right? Talk a little bit about that.

Jordan: So a lot of times, what happens is these SEO agencies become one-trick ponies. They will find one tactic that works, and yeah, it works great maybe for a really short season, and then the algorithm switches or updates.

The next thing you know organic traffic’s tanking, rankings are tanking, because they’re really one-trick ponies, and so one of the things we’ve done is developed something we call the SEO wheel.

And the SEO wheel has 10 different elements to it, and they’re pretty broad, and they’re pretty unique. That way, let’s say Google de-emphasizes one element. You still have nine supporting elements that are really, really strong, and while we figure out, “Okay, they kind of replaced element number two with this, or they changed their waiting,” you don’t just fall apart because we’re not a one-trick pony.

In fact, we’ll put together a YouTube video for your listeners that’s kind of exclusive to them, and we won’t really put it out publicly because we don’t want other SEO agencies stealing our methodology.

We’ll get something on our site that talks about the SEO wheel and give them a video overview of what it is, and we can put that at moonandowl.com/pgm, and it’ll be accessible for your listeners there.

We haven’t found many agencies using this holistic approach. When we presented this to one doctor recently, his mouth dropped and he said, “I’ve never seen such a clear presentation of an SEO strategy.”

And this was actually a surgeon who knew a lot about SEO, and that makes me happy for us as an agency, but it also makes me sad for the state of SEO that it’s not approached as scientifically and as data-driven, and it is a little more of the snake oil hype kind of thing.

It was both exciting and kind of sad for us to hear that “Oh, I’ve never heard it presented like this before.”

Troy: Yeah. That brings up a good question because part of just my goal in my consultancy is – I mean, we do services for clients, but we do a lot of advising as well, and I want to empower my clients to be able to ask the right questions and understand, like, I don’t expect my clients to be SEO experts.

But they need to be able to ask the right questions when they’re choosing an SEO firm or speaking with whoever’s doing their SEO so they can understand if it’s working.

I’d like to dive into that, as well.

What are some questions someone should ask a potential medical SEO agency?

Troy: Why don’t you go ahead and, well, just tell me: let’s just start with, let’s say someone’s going to select an SEO firm, right? What are some questions that they can ask, and what answers should they expect so they can very quickly understand does this person or does this company know what they’re doing as far as SEO goes? Or do they fall into one of those detrimental categories that you talked about earlier?

Jordan: Right, right. I mean, the number one question I would ask is how are we going to measure success? And if they answer anything other than getting patients into your practice, that’s not the right focus.

If they start with ranking, if they start with brand awareness, all that’s great, but the end of the day, the measure of success for any medical practice is patients through the door.

How do they measure success?

And then my next question would be, “And how are we going to measure that?” They need to have a deep enough understanding of Google analytics, conversion funnels, et cetera, to track that, and I know, Troy, you coach all your clients to, when they get a lead or a call, to be like, “Hey, how did you hear about us?”

We like to correlate that data that the practice gets with the hard metric tracking tools that we have in place to cleanly measure that.

What are you going to do tactically to help increase my medical website's traffic?

And then my next question would be, “Well, what are you going to do tactically to help increase traffic?” And that’s where you’re going to discover how transparent the agency is going to be.

Like, if they’re going to be a voodoo agency, and they’re going to be like, “No, we can’t tell you. You know, just, traffic’s magically going to show up on your doorstep.” That’s not our approach.

We walk a client through the SEO wheel and we say, “Here’s exactly how we’re going to do each element specifically for you. And even our budgets or line items” so they can see exactly what they’re getting.

Again, nobody wants to reverse engineer this. Right? A physician or a dentist, they don’t want to reverse engineer it, so I’m not worried about putting that information in their hands.

What is your track record for increasing traffic?

The next question I would ask is, “What is your track record for increasing traffic and what case studies do you have?”

Whether they have them formally written out, or can simply share them verbally, and you want to say, “Hey, what tactics did you use to get those results,” and, “Hey, are you going to be using those on our account?”

Can you work with my budget?

And of course, budget is a consideration, right? If they pitch out a case study on somebody spending $15,000 dollars a month on organic SEO, and your budget’s $2,500, you’re obviously going to see some difference in results.

How do you stay abreast of the changes going on in Google and other search engines?

And then the final thing I would kind of ask is, “How do you stay abreast of the changes going on in Google and other search engines?” For us, we’re in these exclusive mastermind groups. I can use no other term to describe it but the nerd of nerds.

These guys are literally reading and dissecting Google patents to see what’s coming, and so you want to kind of know where they’re getting their information from and where they’re learning.

And for our clients, we always run the full SEO wheels. So the only difference is the cadence at which it happens, so someone with a huge budget might get 10 articles optimized per month, and somebody else with a lesser budget might be getting on one a month, but they’re still getting great articles, et cetera, and it’s still running the whole wheel.

The only question is cadence. A lot of other SEO agencies won’t do this. When they get a smaller budget, they start truncating the wheel, which is not a good idea because it leaves you vulnerable to algorithm changes.

Troy: Okay. You’re still doing all of the pieces. It’s kind of like, “Are you doing those pieces with a nine millimeter or a bazooka?” In a way.

Jordan: Yeah, the frequency. Really, the frequency which we do them, yes, but they all get done. It’s just some get done over a longer period of time.

Do I need an SEO agency that is a total subject matter expert in my medical specialty?

Troy: That makes sense. Well, let’s talk about subject matter expertise because this is a big one that comes up, right? You’ll have agencies or people who are focused on a specific subject matter, or a specific vertical.

Maybe it’s medical, or LASIK surgeons, or plastic surgeons, or what have you.

And that’s what they do day in and day out, all day long. Then you’ll have others, and I think this is more of your firm.

You can confirm this, but you know, I think you guys have different clients, and different verticals, different cities, different products, high ticket, medium to low ticket, all kinds of different things.

And I think there’s value to both depending on what you’re trying to do. As it relates to SEO, is subject matter expertise on a particular vertical, is that an added benefit, or in a way could it even be detrimental to the results that you’re trying to achieve?

Jordan: Yeah, and that answer is not definitive. It kind of depends, right? I know of a company that only does LASIK doctor SEO, but if we analyze what they do, it’s like it’s 2005 – what they’re doing for tactics.

So yeah, it helps to have some experience in a niche, but it’s not crucial because, again, I would rather know, as an SEO, I would rather be an expert on Google and learn the subject matter than be an expert on the subject matter trying to learn Google.

No matter what, man, the SEO wheel approach works no matter what you hook it up to, because it’s what the bot and the algorithm are looking for.

So, I was at a previous agency, we did all medical, and then I left to start Moon and Owl, and I wanted to diversify the client portfolio.

And what’s been cool about that is there’s also cross-learning that applies when you have a diverse portfolio of clients. You can say, “Wait, that worked great on this energy oil client. Let’s utilize this in medical and track the results and see what happens.”

I would much rather my SEO firm be a Google expert and learn my subject matter, or bring in parallel strategists for my subject matter than get somebody like that other agency I was talking about who knows LASIK, or whatever specialty, inside and out but doesn’t know Google as well.

Troy: That makes sense, that makes sense. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about on the client side, right? Let’s say that someone has an SEO agency or they’ve hired someone and that agency’s been working for a few
months.

How does a doctor, dentist, or surgeon check their SEO performance?

Troy: If a client wanted to quickly go and check their SEO, what would be the best way to do that?

Because you talked about not just going to Google every day, and googling key terms, and seeing where you are as the only measure of success.

What would you say to a client if you said, “Hey, look, you got five or 10 minutes. Do this once a month and you’ll be able to keep pretty good tabs on your SEO without having to learn a ton of SEO things yourself, and without having to take just hours and hours out of your life.”

Jordan: Sure, sure. Google analytics, right? You should have that hooked up to your account. If you had a website built and that developer didn’t hook up Google analytics to your account, never use them again.

Because that’s just 101, to have it hooked up, and you don’t have to have a ton of goal conversions and stuff set up for that.

Literally, you go into your Google analytics, you log in, and then on the left-hand side there’s a little button that says acquisition, so click that and then there’ll be a dropdown and you click all traffic, and then you click the word channel, and then organic.

And that’s going to show you your organic traffic, and you can go up in the upper right-hand corner and dial in you want it for the last month, whatever, and there’s a little button you can click, and you can either set it to compare it to the previous month or the previous month a year ago, and so you can see how much you’ve grown kind of year to year.

That’s super easy. Google analytics, acquisition, then traffic, then channel, then organic. You know, what is that? One, two, three, four, five clicks and then you’ll have a great view of what’s happening in the world of organic on your site.

Troy: Okay. And you like looking at it from that holistic approach more so than just one individual keyword, I think is what I heard you say, is that right?

Jordan: Yeah, because it all works together, right? I think 15% percent, I’ve heard different statistics, but anywhere from 15%-20% percent of Google searches, and this is absurd if you think about it, are unique. Google has never seen someone search that term in that way before.

In other words, they haven’t been put together in that construction before. Right?

And so what happens, if you just watch the keyword, LASIK Dallas, but you might not be then picking up on, “Hey, because we rank for this, we’re also ranking for LASIK surgery options Dallas.”

That’s a longer tailed keyword that not near as many people are going to use, but people are going to use it, and so I want to see what’s coming in, total from organic, and then I can break it out into branded.

Like, people that already knew our practice name, and unbranded, like, bridge, ICL, those more transactional, informational terms, where they don’t know the brand name. And they come to us that way. Because those are important, too.

What about on-page versus off-page efforts for medical SEO?

Troy: Okay. All right, that’s good, man. Let’s talk a little bit about the SEO tactics, again, because I had a question on how people do SEO.

And it seems like a lot of SEOs focus on activity on the client site, whether that’s building links within the site, or using a bunch of different keywords to try to get rankings, and maybe this is where your explanation of the wheel comes in a little bit.

Should SEOs be focusing a lot on the client site activity, or is there more to it? Are there more areas where SEO should be conducted offsite?

Jordan: Yeah, so on-page SEO is what you’re talking about. That’s what it’s called – is when you’re working and trying to assess, so on-page is like building your foundation of your house.

If your foundation is bad and your site’s not done well, no matter what you throw at it off-page, it’s just not going to, first of all, rank as well and perform as well.

Second of all, it probably won’t convert as well. And so if I can borrow a biblical metaphor, you want to build your house on the rock, not on the sand. Basically, there’s the new frontier in search, and it’s called entity strength, and let me kind of explain what that is.

Because this is where a lot of SEO agencies are missing this, with this shift to entity. Back in the stone ages of SEO, the way you ranked a site was you just built a billion backlinks to the site.

It didn’t matter what the quality of the page the backlinks were coming from.

Basically, the site with the most links was going to rank best, so guys would build link farms and all that stuff. Well, obviously, Google got smarter.

They changed things up and they said, “Hey, we’re going to start giving a rating to the page that links to you.” The stronger the page that links to you, the more that link is going to count.

So, obviously, a link from Time Magazine or Huffington Post became better thank a link from Billy Bob’s medical blog. And then another thing started happening a few years ago. Guys started to try to game the system by creating lead gen sites, so for example, there wouldn’t even be a real practice.

They would just try to rank Chicago LASIK surgery, for example, and then they would take you to a landing page, capture you as a lead, and then sell you as a lead to other docs.

That happened particularly in the blue-collar, service home industry, happened a ton, but why it didn’t happen near as much in medical and it happened in house services?

Google made a kind of across the board big shifts. Now Google’s looking at your practice, and it’s saying, “What is this as an entity?” In other words, is it a real business with multiple online presences?

The Importance of EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trust)

And they’re looking to see how strong and legitimate your entity is. In medical, it’s looking at something it calls the EAT score, which stands for expertise, authority, and trust.

E.A.T. and Schema

And Google’s wanting to see that. Obviously, your physician is highly credentialed, that they’re active. So there’s a lot of ways we can work to do EAT score, but the best way to do EAT score and to get that on-page strong is schema.

Schema’s huge now, and schema’s some code that goes into the header of your site and it does two things.

Number one, it disambiguates you as an entity and says, “Hey, we are the real entity, and we’re credible, and we’re going to tell Google bot all these things about us.”

I like to use this analogy. If you’re old enough to kind of remember going to the library, I’m 50, so I had to go to the library, and there was a card catalog.

And when I walked up to the card catalog, each card told you basically more about the book before you ever went to the stacks or the bookshelves and got it.

Who the author was, what year it was published, how many pages does the book have, where was it published, does it have color pictures in it?

And then it has a number. The Dewey decimal, where you can go find it in the stacks. So even without having the book in hand I could tell a whole lot about the book, and is this the book I’m really looking for?

Kind of like the card catalog of the website, so when the Google bot calls it, it says, “Hey, this is where this is located. This is the physician’s credentials. Here’s their other properties they have.”

And most other SEO agencies, right now, we’re finding, they’re doing very minimal schema work. We’ll look at a medical site and their organizational schema might have like five or six things in it.

And we’re putting like 30 different things in there to really strengthen that entity.

Troy: Oh wow. Okay.

Jordan: Yeah, and so that credential’s your expertise and uniqueness, and then Google just gobbles that up, because now they’re shifting away. Backlinks still matter, but it’s looking for that entity strength.

And then what you can do is start to do your off-page stuff, with syndication networks and some other things like that, that are basically amplifying, if you would, the strength that you have on your page.

I always use the illustration, if I sit in my living room with an electric guitar not plugged in anything, and you sit two feet from me, you’ll hear me play it.

But it’ll be kind of "changy" sounding, but when you get the off-page right that correlates to the on-page, it’s all of a sudden like you took your electric guitar, and basically turned it into a Marshall amp stack, and cranked it to 11.

Everything starts to gather steam, and so we always start with on-page to make sure it’s strong, but we’re always paralleling things off-page as well.

Troy: Okay. That crank it up to 11, I like that. That’s a good one.

Jordan: Yeah, man. Spinal Tap, a Spinal Tap reference. It goes to 11.

Troy: All right, so you mentioned that Google doesn’t pay as much attention to backlinks, that they’re still important, but that sounds like it was one of those one-trick ponies at one point, where it’s like, “Well, let’s shoot a bunch of links at this site and rank it.”

And now I’ve even had clients who’ve gotten in trouble because they had backlinks that are coming, I guess, from low-quality sites, and they’ve been penalized from Google for that.

Are SEOs using out of date tactics that could actually hurt a practice's site?

Troy: Are there any other things that maybe are more old school SEO thinking that folks tend to say, “Well, man, we really need to be doing X, Y, Z for our SEO,” but in reality they just don’t matter as much if at all, or they could be actually hurtful?

Jordan: Yeah. I think, like keyword stuffing, right? And we still see some people doing this, where they’re trying to – there’s one company that works with a lot of medical practices and we still see them keyword stuff. That died a long time ago, of just cramming in every variant of a keyword that could pop up.

You know, LASIK doctor Dallas, Dallas LASIK surgeon, LASIK, all crammed into one article with the headers. Google’s way smarter than that now.

So you just have to make sure your SEO agency isn’t stuck in a time machine. You know, are they reading the newest patents? Are they in leading-edge think tank groups that are front edge and tracking algorithm changes?

I mean, as an agency, we do that, and so we know when the trends shift.

Troy: I got a couple more questions as we wrap up here. We got a few minutes left, but I wanted to ask you about the terms black hat SEO and white hat SEO.

That’s something that I’ve heard a lot. I’m sure some of our listeners have heard that as well.

What’s the deal with black hat and white hat SEO?

What’s the deal with black hat and white hat SEO? What does that mean? I mean, what do we need to know about that?

Basically, the premise is that white hat is good SEO stuff and black hat is bad SEO stuff. But as an agency, we don’t use those terms. We just refuse to use them, and here’s why: they just aren’t applicable.

Google has a policy, and it basically says this: all you’re allowed to do is to put content on your website. That’s it, and then it has to get naturally discovered.

Technically, the moment you publish a blog or an article, and you go on your Facebook page and say, “Hey, go read my blog,” and you put a link to it, according to the letter of the law you’ve technically broken Google’s terms of service, because you’ve just promoted your content in some way that wasn’t finding it.

Now, everything instantly has – there’s no such thing as white hat. Everything’s already moved into gray hat, right? At least.

Okay.

You know, basically, by everybody that’s doing any SEO is, by definition, using a black hat technique, so we just got rid of those terms.

Instead, we use the term, instead of black hat or white hat, we use the term work hat. (Read the full Work Hat SEO article here).

[Transcript Redacted. See Article Above]

Google's Goal to Make Money and the Effects on Organic SEO

They want to make money, and the only way they make money is through paid search. They are shifting things around to where they make money.

And when they give SEO advice, they’re not giving it out so your organic rankings will come better. Do not take these glasses off; they are giving out that advice so that their revenue goes up.

We don’t buy everything Google says. We prefer to go in and do heavy testing, obviously on some testing sites and some safe sites.

We don’t always bite whatever fruit Google hands us and says, “Go do this.” We want to test and see if there are ways that we can leverage Google to our advantage.

That’s excellent. So, you go out and you’ll test new things in low-risk scenarios, and then you figure out if it’s working or not, and then you’ll go and apply it to your client.

Yes, and those mastermind groups that we’re in is where a lot of that happens, so we’re able to cross-reference with other high-end thinkers in SEO and be like, “Hey, we’re seeing this. Are you guys seeing this?”

When two, three of us can repeat the experiment, we say, “Yeah, that’s the way we’re going to go now.”

How do I get help for Medical Search Engine Optimization?

Troy: Nice. That’s awesome, man. Well, look. This has been super helpful for me, dude. I appreciate you making the time to come on.

I learned a lot today. I’m hoping everyone who is listening took notes on this. It’s definitely worth going back and listening to again.

Jordan shared a lot of just straight up, tactical information, and things that could benefit you, whether you’re trying to find someone to do your SEO, you’re trying to make sure that your current SEO firm is doing what they’re supposed to do.

I really appreciate you sharing just your different approaches to the way that you attack SEO testings, validate them, and determine your results.

One thing, just to summarize here, that Jordan said is focusing on patients getting in the door and having surgery is the ultimate focus point for any marketing that you do for your practice.

I mean, yes, of course it’s important to rank. It’s important to have a website that shows up in the search results.

But ultimately we’re not just trying to get you to rank. We’re trying to get people in the door to come in and have surgery with you.

So whether you’re doing SEO or any other marketing services for your practice, just make sure that that is the north star because that’s the only thing that matters. You can’t take clicks to the bank and do your payroll.

Like, you can’t make your car payment with website clicks or traffic. You do it with patients who come in and give you their hard-earned money for your expertise, so Jordan, man, I really appreciate the time today.

Where can people go and find out more about you, what you guys do? Give us some websites or whatever you want to share.

Jordan: Sure, sure. Yeah, we’re happy to help in any way we can. A lot of times a starting point for us with someone is they want us to do.

We call it The Lucid Process™ digital audit, and we’ll go in and do a full SEO audit of them and their competitors, and find out the “you are here” point on the map, and here’s where you need to go.

And you know, even if you just have questions, we’re glad to answer them. The best way probably to reach us is to go to our website, which is simply Moonandowl.com, and then we’ll also, Troy, put that SEO wheel video up at moonandowl.com/pgm so your viewers can take a look at that.

Troy: That’s awesome, dude.

Jordan: We’ll help out any way. You know, any way people need help, we’re here to serve. We don’t really do packages. We tailor to what the client needs, so we’re happy to help in any way we can.

Troy: Awesome. Man, I appreciate it. Jordan, be well. It was good to talk to you, brother. I will talk to you soon.

Jordan: All right, talk to you, bro. Bye.

Troy: All right. I hope that was awesome for you. I learned a lot throughout that conversation. I hope you did as well and remember to head over to moonandowl.com/pgm for practice growth machine.

All right, that is it for this week’s episode of the practice growth machine podcast.

I wish you well, go out there and grow your practice.

The blog post Medical SEO: An Interview with Jordan Fowler was originally published to: Moon and Owl

Google’s Featured Snippet Update and How You Should Respond 2020

In the past two days, Google rolled out something new. Google no longer repeats Featured Snippet links in Search results. This news is spreading like wildfire in the SEO community–unfortunately, with a lot of poor speculation attached to it.

What is a Featured Snippet?

It's often the first thing you see when you search. Featured snippets are search results that Google selects to show in Google's organic results just below the ads. Google presents a box with a search result they feel answer the searcher's question immediately.

What is the change Google made to Snippets?

Previously, the website that has the snippet listing was also listed immediately below the snippet (repeated as a listing) as a regular #1 organic ranking page. Google considered the snippet Position 0 and the first listing Organic Search Position 1. With the new change on January 23, 2020, there is no "position 0." The snippet is now considered position 1. The old position 1 is now position 2. This means the 2nd ranked term in the SERPS which shows just below the snippet. If you hold the snippet position, you don't get double listed on page 1 as before.

Below is an example of a featured snippet.

Why Are People Freaking Out Over the Snippet Change?

This change means if you have the featured snippet for a listing, your organic listing will not be repeated immediately below it. In fact, it will not be repeated on page 1. For some reason, this is causing some brands and SEOs to "freak out" unnecessarily.

They fear that the snippet will not get clicked. But we do not have enough time to accrue real data as to this being true or not. Remember, this is new to the person searching, too. Don't make a major decision too soon. Allow the users' true behavior to settle down as they adjust to this new presentation of search results.

What Are We Doing In Response to the Snippet Change?

Moon and Owl's SEO Team is very aware of this change. It rolled out on January 30, 2020 (yesterday from the time this article was written). We have noted/tagged each of our clients' keywords where they hold the snippet (and whether they are general snippets or question snippets).

If you hold the snippet, you are still organically placed, just not twice. The link is still clickable in the snippet. It is a shift from Google offering a position 0 AND position 1 to ONLY a position 1. Previously, if your site had the snippet you typically ranked #1 as well. This gave you two listings at the top of Page 1. Now you only get one.

Methodology to Determine the Course of Action

There is a clear course of action to take at this time. We want to work off of science, not hunches. Here is the strategy:

01. We track your click-through rate/traffic on snippet ranking keywords both before this date and after this date see if these numbers increase, stay the same, or decrease.

02. Then, we make adjustments accordingly as the data suggests. For now, the working hypothesis is that we'd rather have the larger box of content when all things are considered. Data might change "all things considered," but we can clearly see that. 

03. Adjustments might include tweaking the schema or marking a page with "no snippet" coding if you hold a snippet but see traffic drop. Or, it might include trying to gain the snippet if the click-through rate (CTR) increases on similar type of keywords. Note: Not every search generates a snippet, but the number of snippets Google shows is growing.

The featured snippet takes up a massive amount of space, especially on mobile. Holding it will most likely work in your favor. The data will inform us of the decision to make. For now, we hold tight.

A Unique Opportunity

This change does present an opportunity to improve your visibility.

By focusing on gaining map pack rankings and getting your knowledge graph showing for important keyword queries, you can become more bulletproof against this change. Your knowledge graph isn't limited to appearing only when your company or brand name is searched. If Google strongly associates a keyword with your brand, your Knowledge Graph can actually show on a high-value keyword query. This is a great position to occupy. We call it "Position King KG" when a knowledge graph pops for a non-branded term. 

 

Whether your knowledge graph appears is impacted by how strong your entity is and how much Google associates your brand with a given keyword.

Entity strategy is one of our core approaches to SEO. Your competitors probably are not thinking this way.

We strive to keep you ahead of the curve. We also make data-driven SEO decisions. If you need SEO assistance, call us at 817-889-1487 or complete the Get Started Form for a free consultation. 

The following post Google’s Featured Snippet Update and How You Should Respond 2020 was first seen on: Moon & Owl Web Design