Joe Troyer 1:12
Hey everybody, it’sJoe Troyer, and welcome to another episode of show me the nuggets. Today we have on a fellow SEO ninja, Benjamin golden, super excited to be chatting with him. We’ve been on a couple of calls now super geeking out about SEO. And I was like, Man, I gotta get you on the pod hump and share and let everybody be a fly on the wall. So man, welcome officially to the podcast.
Benjamin Golden 1:38
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Joe Troyer 1:40
Yeah, man, it’s great to have you. So in this world of SEO, like you’ve been around the space for a long time, so have I I think it’s rare when you meet people and you’re like, man, like they’re, they’re crushing it. They’re doing really well. Like they’re on the bleeding edge. And, you know, first impression and chatting with you is like, man, you know, Benjamin knows his stuff. So super excited to have you on and, and to have you share with the pot.
Benjamin Golden 2:01
Yeah, likewise, man.
Joe Troyer 2:03
So let’s, let’s talk about your backstory man. How did you end up in this? This SEO world?
Benjamin Golden 2:09
Yeah, pretty, pretty interesting story actually started online when I was 12 on YouTube. So I don’t know I got my first laptop when I was like 1011 years old. And I found YouTube. I didn’t speak a word of English. I was just like, super impressed by by gadgets. I think it was iPhone, I had no the first iPhone that came out. And I was looking at the the different YouTube videos about it. And I got just super, super curious about that. And then I saw that people were literally getting products to review like gadgets and tech sent to them for free so that they could make content about it. And like being a kid from Slovenia, that absolutely blew my mind. So I said, okay, like, I want to do this, you know, and then I kind of started learning English, I started making some first videos reviewing different gadgets that they had around the house and things like that. And it worked. Like I was sponsored. By the time when I was like 1415, I was sponsored by some major carriers in Slovenia, they were sending me these phones to review. And then I went on to create my first website. Again, I just went to YouTube learn how to create a website. And you know, just wanted to organize my videos at that point. Then what what I started doing is I just saw the kind of the need in the market like these local business owners in Slovenia didn’t really have websites or their website were just absolutely terrible. So I started offering websites to to local businesses. Shortly after that, I realized, okay, people don’t really want a website they want leads for their business. They want to they want to grow their business. So then I got into into Google ads. And I was just doing that for a few months before this realize like, why would I be paying for ads, if I can get the traffic for free with with SEO, that got me into SEO later, I went into affiliate SEO more specifically. And you know, like if you’re if you’re in the affiliate space, you tend to like learn like all the all the different tricks and secrets of SEO and how it all works. So then I started, like working on my own affiliate projects, providing services to other affiliate websites. And then I don’t know, just thinking, you know, like, if I implemented these strategies to other websites that are bigger, they are operating at bigger scales than just on a bigger scale than just some affiliates. I would do like much, much better as a whole. So I just started offering these services to two EECOM sites. And for some reason I got like a super warm welcome by the Shopify community. This was now like, five years ago at this point, yeah, four or five years ago. And since then, we’ve just been focusing on Shopify SEO and yeah, today I run golden Lab, which is an SEO agency. mainly just serving and scaling our Shopify brands.
Joe Troyer 5:03
Awesome, man. Yeah, I don’t know, many SEOs that got their start. You know, being a YouTuber, that’s definitely a different origin story
Benjamin Golden 5:11
was was pretty hilarious. Like looking back, those videos are still live, like, the channel has more than 10 million views of the struggling to speak English. It’s hilarious.
Joe Troyer 5:23
That’s fantastic. We’ll have to link that up in the show notes often find it. But that’s awesome, man. And I love the journey, right from doing, you know, you know, starting as a YouTuber than jumping into SEO, then, you know, doing your own projects, then opening up an agency, right? You know, doing it for other affiliates. I think like, that aha moment, one of them in there that I think is really insightful and cool is like, you know, if you look at, like, who can make the most money? Where can I? Where can I exchange the most dollars? And it’s like, well, instead of working with these affiliates, like, let’s go up the food chain a bit. And like, let’s let’s go work with the Econ company directly instead of through an affiliate, and they’re gonna make a lot more money. Right. I think that’s really insightful.
Benjamin Golden 6:10
100% Yeah, for sure.
Joe Troyer 6:13
So, Eduardo, the chef, producer, will you be putting everything together said that you’ve helped generate, you found a stat 25 million in organic revenue for Shopify SEO clients, and just last two years? Is that right?
Benjamin Golden 6:25
Correct. Correct. This is the stat that hasn’t been updated since the update was at the end of 2022. So I need to refresh it. But yeah, over the last two years, yeah.
Joe Troyer 6:36
That’s awesome. I think your time into the Shopify space do like, was good timing. Right. It seemed like Shopify wasn’t necessarily built for SEO. A lot of people. I feel like E comm weren’t doing SEO. So I feel like timing I think was really important and probably played a part and you’re, you’re you’re welcomed arms. Do you think I think that as well there? What are your thoughts on your timing in the market? Nico?
Benjamin Golden 7:00
Yeah, 100% 100%. Like, now I’m seeing more and more, you know, SEOs pop up in the Shopify niche. Like when I started out like I and this is not like a toot my own horn or something like that. It just, you know, I didn’t really know anyone else in the niche. And part of the reason why I even picked the niche and why was excited that I was welcomed by Shopify is because everyone was telling me you know, Shopify is not good for SEO Shopify is not good for SEO. It’s like, okay, it might not be good for SEO. But what is the reason why it it’s just because no one really looked into it. You know, everyone was just saying, if you want to do SEO, free community to be on WordPress, but you can literally do anything you want except us before adjusting the URLs. In in Shopify, that you can do on WordPress, you just need to need to know how to do it and dive into it. From the rankings like potential, there is no real difference. You can rank just as well, with Shopify as you can with WordPress.
Joe Troyer 7:58
Yeah. 100%. No, I remember that, like, best practice was if you want SEO, don’t use Shopify. And you’re right. Everybody was just like that was their initial gut reaction. And nobody who tried to really solve the problem and you came in and solve the problem, right? Like, well, no, you can use Shopify like you are you don’t need to move and we can help you with your SEO. We know out.
Benjamin Golden 8:21
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know sometimes I just feel that SEOs like live in their own world and kind of do themselves a disservice. It’s like, you know, a big client approaches you and they really want to work with you, but they aren’t Shopify. So what you’re gonna turn them away now, because you know, you’re gonna make a recommendation to switch their entire business off of Shopify, just so that they could work with you. Well, no, they’re just gonna go find someone else who will work on Shopify. Right.
Joe Troyer 8:45
Yeah. 100%. And I mean, there’s, there’s so many stores using Shopify today. I mean, I don’t I don’t know the stats, right. But I mean, it’s got to be the top ecommerce platform. Now, I would assume I mean, I know that there’s others and WooCommerce, etc. But I don’t know when I’ve talked to any e commerce stores and ask them what they’re using. It’s always Shopify almost never hear anything else.
Benjamin Golden 9:08
Yeah, yeah. Same, same here. And I would say like now even majority of people are moving away from WooCommerce to Shopify. And even if like, someone asked me that, there’s just launching their own store. I always suggest Shopify now. Because, like, if you just think about it, like to make a change on WordPress, or even WooCommerce to track your inventory to do all of that, it requires so much work. You need the developer to do literally anything. Right? Shopify just much simpler, especially if you’re starting from scratch. And you’re you’re an author developer, right?
Joe Troyer 9:40
Yeah. 100% Yeah, I think the the marketplace we Shopify is is obviously amazing, and so many integrations right out of the box. Yeah. So I’d love to kind of transition Benjamin I know that you do like this, this audit for new prospects to new clients. That’s really chock full of awesome, quick wins strategies that show the client the opportunities that they’re missing out on. And I think like, as an agency owner, I think like, it’s key to have this to be able to show impact and wins quickly to a prospect helps build, you know, trust, but also retention. And I think that a lot of agencies have problems with retention. And I think it’s because they’re not focused on quick wins. And they’re six months into a client engagement and the clients like, you know, what have you done for me lately? And it’s like, I mean, well, you know, not that much, I guess, in terms of impact. So I love your approach. And I’d love to give some actionable contact anybody listening to this that’s in the E commerce space? To learn from you? Like what are the quick wins in eat calm? And I’d love to just kind of dive into maybe the top three, or the top five things that people should be looking at and doing?
Benjamin Golden 10:52
Yeah, yeah, I’m just gonna I don’t have anything planned. So I’m just gonna say the top five that that come to mind. But I will just start off by saying that, like, don’t treat ecommerce, SEO or any SEO niches, something unique, like the same practices will always apply, right? No matter no matter the niche you’re in. So I would say number one out of everything, just focus on goddamn keyword research. It’s simple as that, like, I see so many people complicating it out there. And, you know, looking at all these different tools and so on, it’s very simple. Just find the right keyword that matches the intent of a specific page that you have, and map that page to the keyword. Right. So that’s, that’s as simple as it gets. And how do you understand what specific search intent is of a keyword? Well, just Google the keyword and open the pages are already ranking because the pages are ranking because they match intent, of course, backlinks help, and all the others, all the other factors help but search intent is the is the most important thing. Right. So that would be like the first thing to focus on. Second, second thing that I would get out focus on, especially from the Quick Wins perspective, would be just essentially like the entire technical SEO and under here, you have like a lot of different terms, I would say especially Shopify focus would be make sure that you’re that you’re indexing like that your crawl budget is optimized. And crawl budget is essentially just fancy terminology for the types of pages you have indexed inside of Google. Don’t index anything that’s low quality. So personally, I like to the index, paginated pages, tag pages, either not getting any traffic, or hives, blog tags, anything that is that is not optimized for a specific keyword. Because like I just had an example, recently, like, one of the sites had about 30% of their total index pages, low quality pages, right? So 30% of the pages were tagged pages are highs, empty pages, and duplicate pages, will literally just no index all of that. And right off the bat, you get 30% extra visibility, right, to your collections to your blogs, to your your product pages. Just just by by doing that. Then you have then you have other things, especially with Shopify, like making sure I don’t know if Joe like what’s been your experience recently with with indexing. But I would say for the last year, two years, indexing has just not been as good as it used to, and making sure that you have the appropriate like indexing tags in the in the meta tags, that your pages can be indexed. And that crawlers can recognize it easily. It’s also super important. Yeah. Other than other than that, I would say you know, other other technical elements, just making sure you don’t have broken backlinks. And by that I don’t mean broken internal links, I mean, links pointing to your to your pages on the site from external sites that are going to broken pages to full force. Because if you have backlinks from external sites pointing to 404 pages, you are not benefiting from that backlink, you’re not getting the domain authority boost. So how to resolve that we’ll just create a redirect from from from the 404 page to the most relevant page with a 301 redirect. Yep.
Joe Troyer 14:24
100%. Now I definitely see that with indexing. We do an audit every month for every client and then every project that we’re working on of the pages that should be indexed versus what’s actually indexed and use a couple of tactics and techniques to try to to try to keep them indexed. And it’s always a battle I think, you know, it’s probably probably close to maybe even four years now. Indexing has just been awful.
Benjamin Golden 14:49
Yeah, I think we’re just gonna keep going down here to be honest, and I want to give a shout out like I’m in no way associated with this with this tool or or in any way but we’ve been using For the last two months, and it’s been crushing it, it’s called Tag parrot. And what it does, essentially, you add, like you add permission into your Google Search Console. And then these, this tool will use Google, Google Search Console API to automatically first of all, check if pages on in your Sitemap are indexed. And every single day we check if pages are indexed or not. And all the pages that aren’t indexed, it will submit for indexation. And he’s doing this for I think, up to 900 URLs per day. And if you have a massive website with a ton of products, whatever, just plug it into this tool, and I mean, just if you have products index that haven’t been indexed before, you can leave your organic traffic, this would be actually my number one thing nowadays like to just implement that. So I think it definitely deserves a shout out. Yeah.
Joe Troyer 15:50
Definitely deserves a shout out. I’m looking at the pricing too. So we do this all ala carte. So we we pull our sitemap go see what’s indexed. With it with a little sitemap indexing tool we build out in Google Sheets, we see which ones aren’t indexed, and we pull that list, we go shove it then in an indexer, and then have to keep checking it and following up. So like it’s a there’s not a very optimized process. So I’m looking at
Benjamin Golden 16:15
the same Yeah, it’s like two bucks per month per site. It’s crazy.
Joe Troyer 16:20
Yeah, so cheap, and sites for 29 bucks a month or 20 sites for 60. I mean, yeah. Great. Shout out. Everybody who’s got the value or the value we’re done here. See you later. Thanks so much, Benjamin. But that’s a great share. Yeah, definitely. You know, big technical issue. I’d love to talk a little bit more. So I mean, we talked about keyword research, we talked about technical, I’d love to talk about crawl budget a little bit more. Like obviously, if things are blatant that they shouldn’t be indexed, then like, I agree with you 100%. No question like, what’s not index the page? What about stuff that just isn’t ranking? Well, like? How far do you take like your crawl budget? How do you write that? Like, it’s like a, like, wrote this post a year ago? And it doesn’t get any traffic? I mean, do you access it right? Like, do you know index it? Do you delete it? Do you really want it like, where I guess like for you, what do you think is best practice these days with crawl budget,
Benjamin Golden 17:23
when like with these pages that I mentioned before, obviously, the indexing them such as tag pages, or these low quality, that’s, that doesn’t, that’s not meant to target a specific keyword. If a content is meant to target a specific keyword and that keyword is still relevant, which means it’s still getting search volume, then it doesn’t make sense to delete the article. Unless you have other issues such as cannibalization and things like that. If you have cannibalization of multiple articles, then it’s best to merge them together and 311 into another What I would do if an article ranked and then stopped ranking, and now it’s not getting any traffic, or if it never got any traffic to begin with. I would pretty much just research why that is I would plug that URL into Google Search Console, I would see for which terms like it used to rank and any dropped off, or for which terms is getting impressions, but not clicks. And and then from there on out, I will just compare compare your own article to the articles that are ranking for that keyword and see what you’re missing, you’re probably missing either some content, maybe you have too much content like so it’s too much fluff. You just need to optimize that content. I generally am not a big fan of content, trimming and removing removing a bunch of content, as like, as I said, as long as it targets a specific keyword that’s relevant to your business, then there’s no point to remove it. But if you have articles such as man, I see this all the time, like top 10 trends for summer 2023. And in these type of articles, which do not target any any keyword that’s out there just for social media. Those articles I would remove Yeah. Okay.
Joe Troyer 19:05
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So I guess zooming back out, we talked about keyword research. We talked about technical. What’s next in the top three or top five things.
Benjamin Golden 19:18
In terms of in terms of the auditing, the initial audit, I would say checking for keyword cannibalization. That one’s been that’s been pretty big for us as well. We have this we have this process where we I mean, just identify like the top performing keywords of like specific page, and then we just especially focus on keywords stuck between position four to 10. Typically, like if you’re building links to those and they’re not moving up, then you’re dealing with some sort of keyword cannibalization. And this is actually one of those things where in Shopify, this is quite difficult because we you know, if you have cannibalization If a collection page and a product page are both cannibalizing and competing with one another, you can just delete one of the pages and then three of one thing to another, right, what we do is we, we apply a canonical tag from the like less important page, the canonical tag pointing to the more important one, that way Google will understand, okay, this is the primary page which we want to power up. The way we do it is with a bit of custom code. Honestly, it’s not the prettiest, but then we just add that custom code in the team that liquid file and we resolve it that way. Yeah, that will be that will be one more thing. Other than that, like from the technical perspective, we can go, I would say, we can go a bit more into like establishing the, like the business in the brand as the authority, which I think is pretty much the main thing that we focus on. But on the technical note, I would just like to wrap up by saying, like, if you if you have hundreds of these different errors on the site, and the different things that Google pays attention to, and you just start cleaning them up one by one, it’s not like, wow, you’re gonna get these these crazy, crazy results from cleaning one up is the fact that all of this compound, and the fact that you know, you clean up all the mixed content errors, all of the cannibalization, all of the broken internal external links, links to redirects, you clean all of these up, and then you just start to compound the results. And even more importantly, like as we all know, SEO at the end of the day, just content and links, there is no secret, but you can maximize and improve your ROI by having the optimized Foundation, which is why you focus on quick wins first. And then you start with the with the actual SEO project, which is the content and links.
Joe Troyer 21:46
Yep. And any tips on finding those pages with cannibalization? Right, yeah.
Benjamin Golden 21:55
Just a tres. Just that trumps Yeah, so just like go under the most important keyword that you have. See which ones are stuck between position four to four to 10. Open. Like if you if you go under your own Site Explorer in a traps, you go under organic keywords, and you go under the like specific keyword, just press like the first, the first button on the like on the right side, the drop down, he has like this graph icon, and it will show you like which which pages are ranking for a specific keyword. And if you see like a bunch of pages like crossing one another, then you can just tell that, you know, one page is ranking on position, like five one day and then another one is ranking on position five. And if they’re always changing, it means that you’re dealing with some keyword cannibalization.
Joe Troyer 22:44
Gotcha. Yeah, makes perfect sense. I know that one of our sites review grower, definitely, we’ve written so many pieces of content and the content so similar. It’s like, I mean, but looking at what’s ranking, like we just follow what was ranking in the SERPs, and yeah, not now. We have some keyword cannibalization we definitely need to deal with I mean, it’s working. I mean, we went from zero to 32,000. Visitors. Yeah,
Benjamin Golden 23:11
I saw that. Yeah. Last
Joe Troyer 23:13
thing videos. So it’s working. But definitely now I was like, man, we need to do some cleanup
Benjamin Golden 23:19
for sure. Yeah, I mean, I would say like all these things, they have their own time and place, right. If you’re focused on pumping out a bunch of content first, first that and complete the, you know, the content plan, then you can focus on cleaning it up on doing the keyword cannibalization tasks and all that.
Joe Troyer 23:38
Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty easy to see that crisscross happening. And yeah, should be pretty easy to spot. Cool. In terms of technical, I mean, I guess it’s more I guess it’s kind of a keyword research and technical. I mean, it seems like one of the most underutilized things. I’m curious, your opinion, and Shopify is just they don’t think about keyword research Shopify owners, I don’t think and like their collection pages. They don’t really treat like collection pages, right. Like as an SEO would they don’t think of them like category pages, and they’re not keyword optimized. And when I look at somebody’s collection pages, I’m like, yes. No wonder you don’t have any traffic. Like, you know, you know, you saw 100 different colors of widgets, but you only have you have none of them as a collection page. It’s like what? I don’t understand.
Benjamin Golden 24:29
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we see it, we see it all the time. That’s why, like, in the in the last six months, we got into different projects where like, literally the brand is launching from zero. And they want everything mapped out. And this is this is like, how can I say without giving it away? It’s like a business that can manufacture whatever they want. Right now that kind of any kind of product in a specific niche that they want. And we instead of just having them launch the store We essentially planned the store around keyword research, right and interlinked all of the main collection pages into the into the like Heather into the heading menu did made like the mega menus and made the the user experience super nice, even though we have a lot of pages interlinked into the manual because as you know, like if you have pages linked in the menu, you’re going to be pushing a lot of Link power to them, which is probably another tip right? If you want to boost the rankings of a page super fast just interlinking it into your Heather Heather manual, because it gets links from every single page on your on your site.
Joe Troyer 25:37
Yeah, 100%. That’s an old school SEO.
Benjamin Golden 25:42
It’s all about these old schools man. That’s what it’s about, like also with exact match domains. Like, whenever I’m listening to like an SEO podcast from someone and that this exact match domains, like no longer work. I’m like, What the hell are you talking about? I mean, that’s that’s literally all I’m doing all the time just buying deathmatch domains. Like it’s work super super well, it’s still just because you have the anchors optimized out of the box.
Joe Troyer 26:08
Yeah, no, 100% It’s huge. Yeah, all your all, like your branded and URL links are automatically promotional.
Benjamin Golden 26:18
And you can’t even get penalized for them.
Joe Troyer 26:20
Yeah. Good stuff. Um, so I guess like would be remissed. I guess like you’ve given a lot of takeaways, a lot of actionable stuff. But we’d be remiss, I think, not to talk about backlinks kind of what’s your What are your go to strategies? What, what are you seeing working these days? How aggressive or not aggressive? Are you?
Benjamin Golden 26:42
Yeah, well, how are you asking for my personal projects or for client projects? Let’s talk about both. Let’s
Joe Troyer 26:49
talk about clients first, I guess. Okay, okay.
Benjamin Golden 26:51
Yeah. So to go more on the white hat side, mainly just been focusing on Dr. 50. Plus, so think like, super legit guest posts, and especially PR hero or quoted anything like that? I know, you’re super big in that. So that, that that works super well, parallel with some tier twos? You know, because the tier two is they still power of the link. And especially if you have like a Dr. 50 Plus link, going to like a money page or anything like that. You can, you can be quite flexible, let’s say with tear tools, right? They don’t need to be as high quality, just because they don’t directly to your money site. On the Yeah, so that’s pretty much on the on the client side. On the personal side, man, like, honestly, 301 redirects. Still, you know, just buying a domain with a lot of links through one redirecting it, creating a fake PR page saying that you acquired this business and then just three, one redirecting the whole domain to this fake PR page on your main domain, and having the fake PR page linked to your old most important money pages. That works super super well. Nisha rates, PB ns, like tier twos to all of the all of these initial rates and guest posts and PB ends as well. That’s that’s pretty much on the on the personal side. On the personal side, I’m just more and more flexible, and I don’t have anyone telling me what they can and cannot do. So I just really just focus on the ROI
Joe Troyer 28:25
on a percent. I love the the fake PR page example. So let’s see, we’ve been I’ve been for review Grover, we’ve been buying been buying some small tools like so like, exact match domain keywords that are in related industry or space. That’s a piece of software, but it makes no money. And maybe it’s Adsense or media vine or something like that, right. And they’re like Dr. 30s, or 40s. I’ve been able to scoop up with winnings from like, you know, HubSpot, and like lots of really premium sites. I picked one up for 2500 bucks, I’ve picked up another one for 3500 bucks. And then just like I framed the tool on review grower, so like, you can’t tell that it’s not actually hosted there. And then three or one day, and I mean just instantaneous rankings and like, well, those links being redirected has been huge. I mean, I always tried to buy domains, but like back in the day, we used to buy a ton of expireds and then when we went more white hat like stopped, right because we can never find stuff that we thought was good enough. But I think like buying under monetized sites is definitely an opportunity. Like for years I stalked like Flippa and all the sites like and I buy stuff occasionally for three one purpose. But people want too much they like their valuations are insane. So I think reaching out to these one word website, one word South Like little tools, you know, asking if they want to sell has been a great, great way for us to get some some crazy value sites.
Benjamin Golden 30:10
Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, that’s definitely good strategy. One, one more thing I also want to want to share with you here. It’s been it’s been working super well for like for the last six months, I first tried this out on like, assess project. So I did the sass company I bought, like, I just plug it into the agency, of course, to scale it and all of these, but essentially, the tool was only translated into four languages, the front end of the tool, but the back end of the of the actual project, the tool was translated into 66 languages. So what what we did is we identified the keywords by by search volume, and all the other target countries. And for for a test, we literally just launched 21 new new languages. Yeah, we just had the site translated into 21 different languages. And in two weeks fifth, I believe 14 or 15 of them are ranked on page one, four for the target keyword. Which brings me to my next point, like anyone can do the same thing on Shopify, because the majority of brands are not like the majority of brands are shipping worldwide, especially when you’re when you reach a certain level, right? They ship to pretty much any any any country, right, more or less. So what you can do is you can literally just use Shopify markets, you can translate the store into all these other languages. And you can then launch a bunch of other languages, so that you have a bunch of other like, you’re targeting a bunch of other keywords in other languages. And this is especially good if you have completed your content plan in English, right, because you can then translate all of the content as well. Right? Then plug all of that into tech part two. So make sure to make sure that you’re indexing all of those into in all these other countries. And like it’s insane, like how much traffic you’re able to get from all around the world, especially for a big scale and you want to expand into other countries and markets. That can be one more theme that one more tidbit that I wanted to share.
Joe Troyer 32:18
So we used to do that. We used to do that a lot with like local lead gen sites, because almost like affiliate sites, like we didn’t have to really worry about fielding the calls or having to speak different languages, right. So but now I’m thinking like, how can we use that? I definitely think we can forget the WordPress plugin that we used to use. I think Neil Patel told me about it like years ago. Ah, h h Liang s lag, something like that. I don’t recall. Is there a tool that you’re using that helps you do that?
Benjamin Golden 32:51
For for Shopify, like for the SAS project, it was all custom. It’s all custom built. So that was a bit of a pain in the butt. Yeah, we with Shopify, just Shopify markets. We use a tool to it depends, you know, client by client, like how, how good do they want the translations to be? We typically suggest using these what’s it called? Threat trends, see AI language translate app in Shopify, it uses AI to translate. And I say, like, just launched with the AI translation, and then get a proofreader to proofread. Right, because you’re just going to be able to save a lot of budget instead of paying a translator to translate hundreds of pages. And yeah, that’s, that’s been our go to.
Joe Troyer 33:38
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s a that’s a thing that works. So well. You know, we stopped doing it. It’s tough to bring that back. No, that’s a great tip, for sure. Bouncing back for a second to your fake PR page. Could you unpack that a little bit? More? So you buy you buy an H domain? Right? It’s got some good links, or Dr. You 301 it? Why not? 301? It’s your homepage. Why? What’s your thought process, I guess on three on wanting to get to this fake PR page,
Benjamin Golden 34:09
just more risky. If you do it on the homepage, there’s, there’s only so many that you can do to the homepage, right. And also, like when you when you buy a domain and you through your monitor, you have anchors that are lower all over the place, usually. And if you just do it to a specific PR page, then you’re only limiting it to that page. But if you put it directly to the homepage, it can dilute your entire like brand profile and a bunch of other things. Not to mention that you know, like at any point, if you want to go back, you can just kill the switch, you can click the domain and delete that page. And it’s like it never really existed. Right? homepage you can sure you can still remove the remove the domain, but it’s the it has a bit of a different effect just because the link velocity like lasts for some time even after it’s removed.
Joe Troyer 34:55
Yeah, makes perfect sense. All right. So I think like one other thing I wanted to ask you You’re just looking at the time here, we’re getting to the end of our time together, I think we’d be remiss to not talk about AI and content. What are your thoughts on AI content these days?
Benjamin Golden 35:11
Yeah, I think it’s gotten a lot better than like a year ago, a little bit less than a year ago, when it first first came out. I really like using it for heavy lifting for for manual tasks, especially for processes. During like, inside of the agency. For content writing, it’s honestly been a bit hit or miss. Like we, we’ve had topics where it’s where it does super well. But we also have topics where you just like, just not weird at all. The main, the main kind of, there are two main problems that they have with it. The first one is the information like it doesn’t fact check anything, he just says random stuff is pulled off of the internet. And usually our data does well, that’s been the first problem. Second problem, it doesn’t know who it’s writing to, or for rather, it’s not really conversion rate optimized, right, you can sell anything, or even get people to opt in with that content. So I think the best way that someone can leverage AI today is to, first of all, like get super good at prompts and using different plugins, which are GPT. For that will be my number one tip. And second, like spend a lot of time editing, leveraging to get the draft and outline and all of these, and then just polish it up. But don’t like just don’t don’t just, you know, create an article, throw it on the site, write an article, throw it inside. I think that’s where people get it wrong.
Joe Troyer 36:43
So no one line prompts, you know, 500 articles published as fast as you can.
Benjamin Golden 36:50
Mean, depends. Depends how fast you want to go up and down. That’s,
Joe Troyer 36:55
I like that. No, I agree, I think I think it’s a great tool. But it’s, it’s not a replacement for your work and your effort. And a lot of the content is very questionable, very shaky. But at the same time, don’t think like, I also think it’s a great assistant. It’s it’s a great for decision making, it’s great to for ideation. I think it can help you with your outlines. And when you’re stuck and you know, you’re trying to write something and you get stuck, rephrase this, how can I say this different? You know, I have I have open ai ai open all day, every day and use it constantly, kind of as my assistant, but I’m not pumping out, you know, pages of content just based on you know, a single line prompt or really any prompts, or maybe some headlines that’s really about it these days.
Benjamin Golden 37:47
Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely super exciting, though. Like where it’s heading, because just like comparing it now to when it first came out. And the differences the difference is crazy. I also found this tool I think you might actually find this interesting. It’s called Hey, gen.com. Alicia just heard about this. It’s you upload a selfie or whatever to it. And then it creates an avatar. And it can you input the text and it can have you speaking Japanese you can anything you want to say it will say and it looks incredibly realistic. Like it almost looks as if you just filmed it. And like I was talking to my brother about this. He’s using it in, like creatives now and a bunch of things. So, you know, it’s crazy. Like these tools are popping up every day. So like it’s exciting, where we’re where we’re going to die. Oh, it’s the kind of scary but let’s let’s say it’s exciting.
Joe Troyer 38:40
Yeah, also scary for sure. Yeah, this was cool. looks crazy. I just pulled it up. Yeah, insane. Definitely worth checking out. I think even like, like D script these days, like you can be recording. Like, obviously looking like at a teleprompter or your script. And then like in posting the script, it’ll move your eyes to look at the camera. Like what like, that’s insane. stupid stuff like that, like crazy impact. So yeah, I mean, I think obviously AI is here to stay. It’s come a long way. It’s not there yet. And I think it will always need some human intervention and some some engineering you know, to get the job done, but you know, we can we can take it a long way for sure.
Benjamin Golden 39:24
Yeah, absolutely.
Joe Troyer 39:26
Benjamin, this has been great. I want to wrap up in asking you one question. So like, I’m an avid reader, but since starting this podcast like gave myself permission to like if a book sucks I just like can’t make it through it like to just put the book down. Like I used to like suffer and I’d like make myself finish a book but I don’t want to read it so I’d be hanging on to the same one for like a month right? So now that I have great people coming on the podcast all the time, I’m always like after them like you know what’s what’s one of the best books you’ve read as of lately that you’d have recommend
Benjamin Golden 40:03
I would say, Wait, what’s it called? I think it’s great CEOs are lazy or good CEOs. I think it’s great CEOs are lazy. My one of my all time favorites would be hustle hard, hustle harder, hustle smarter by 50 sound like it’s a it’s a very, very nice book. And I just bought yesterday, I think it’s unleash the wolf within unleash your inner Wolf. Buy, buy buy more. If you know those
Joe Troyer 40:35
are three that I haven’t I haven’t went through. So thank you
Benjamin Golden 40:38
much appreciated. Yeah.
Joe Troyer 40:41
So Benjamin, if somebody wants to connect with you after the show, they’d like to work with you or just follow you and what you’re up to what’s the best place for them to reach out to?
Benjamin Golden 40:49
Yeah, I would say just Google Benjamin goals. And you can find me on LinkedIn on Facebook or just golden web dotnet if you want to reach out and check out what we do.
Joe Troyer 40:59
Perfect. So if you guys are in Shopify, definitely check out Benjamin or if you’re an old school SEO, an old soul like we are. Definitely go check him out. He’s up to some awesome stuff. Definitely worth follow. And Benjamin man, thanks. So thanks so much for coming on the show.
Benjamin Golden 41:13
Thanks for having me.
Joe Troyer 41:15
Alright, guys, see you later. Thanks for tuning in to show me the metals.
