Welcome to another episode of Live SEO Support!

Live SEO Support is an hour-long Weekly Livestream where our founders, Nicholas Altimore and Chris Tzitzis, take questions from the audience on anything related to SEO.

It’s 100% free, and anyone can join us weekly in our Facebook Group or on Youtube.

But in case you missed us live this week, here’s the full episode:

This Week’s Archived Livestream:

[04:45] (site audit)

Two referring domains, DR 1.3, 2 traffic, 26 keywords. This website doesn’t need an audit. It needs content and backlinks.

[11:36] (site audit) The site is relatively new, and we try to get the on-page SEO stuff right, but our team is quite inexperienced with SEO, so it would be great to have someone who is good at it to take a look. Since we are using MLB already, I guess off-page SEO is less of a concern. We just want to know what we can do more in terms of on-page SEO (i.e., internal linking? meta tags?) so that we can get the best results from off-page/backlink building.

You have a professional-looking site, but the SEO is severely lacking. With regards to your Manufacturers page, your H1 is just “Manufacturers.” It’s not descriptive. Also, your inner page URL is just your domain name/manufacturers. And these are not just normal manufacturers. These are very specific types of manufacturers. You’re not optimized at all for ranking this page for anything. Mark your manufacturers marked as H2s, and make your headings and URL slugs more descriptive. Work on your EEAT. Put your social media links in the footer. Consider starting a blog and using your articles to inner-link to all the other pages you’ve built.

[23:17) (site audit) I’m building the other domain I got from the last Member of the Month prize, so when I do a redirect in a few weeks/months (creating topical relevant on both), I hope it will benefit from the aged domains’ links since I started on a new domain (the branding was really important for me). I just looked at GSC today, and the performance was halved. I changed hosting, and maybe this is a fallout from that since I went from managed to self-managed and maybe screwed something up. If you could help me diagnose if there is a problem, that would be great.

The good news is, you were never really up very high on Ahrefs. Your referring domains are not very high-end, which is a telltale sign that the link profile is lacking somewhere. With regards to anchors, your number one anchor is an exact match with 43 referring domains. This is not natural: a lot of exact-match with long-tail keywords. No branded, no naked. Since you’re in a low-competition niche, all of this is probably easy to remedy just by adding homepage and natural anchors with quality links.

[41:21] How can we make our SEO AI-optimized?

We would advise not using AI at all for optimization unless you’re using a service like Surfer. Surfer recently came out with a done-for-you AI auto-optimized option. At this point in time, trying to optimize or create content with AI is incredibly complex and not dialed in quite yet. It seems that content better resonates in the SERPs when it’s done the old way. Human-created content optimized through Surfer, bringing new ideas to the discussion, is still the best way to go right now.

[50:56] By AI-optimized, I mean that if AI uses our data to generate responses, then maybe it can copy our affiliate links too. What can we do to get our links in the AI result?

This is uncharted territory right now, so we can’t tell you how to get your URL featured by AI. But we guess it would be the same as a featured snippet: You want to rank high for the term and present information that the search is looking for in a simple, easy-to-understand way.

[54:21] What’s the most cost-effective way to fake DR?

This isn’t something we do, and we don’t agree with those who do it because the only thing this does is take advantage of the client. Look at sites with high DR and take note of their organic keywords. See if they’re getting all of their organic traffic from one or two keywords, which tends to happen in a lot of spam sites. When you spoof the DR of a website, you’re just making the product look better than it actually is so that you can charge a higher amount of money for it. That’s pretty much a straight scam. But, if you get fake reviews, that doesn’t affect the product itself. In fact, the product can actually be very good. It’s the same with backlinks: We use backlinks to boost a website, but the information on the website could be very good. We’re just getting eyeballs on the product. Then the user has the option of whether to buy the product or not.

[1:01:02] I still don’t use AI content.

My preferred use for AI content is as a starting point. Don’t publish content that is 100% done by AI. They also don’t do outlines very well. I do the outlines myself, then, with a lot of prompting, I give the AI a lot of parameters to create a starting point for the articles. I then do a lot of editing. AI does save a lot of time because it gives you not just a starting point but a direction as well. Go for 50% AI-written and 50% human-written. But 100% human-written content is still the best today. Just note that I’m focused on building online brands which go beyond content.

[1:16:36] Selling backlinks is increasing DR.

That’s true, but DR is an estimate of how Google sees authority. The goal of backlinks is to raise your real authority, not a fake number that only Ahrefs sees. Also, backlinks are not all created equal. Just because some raise DR doesn’t mean they raise you in the SERPs. The reason ours are high-quality is because of the years of R&D and being able to use them in our own projects.

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