Latest / Semantic SEO Podcast / Building Topical Authority from Zero: Cornerstone SEO Strategies with David G Quaid (James Dooley Interviews David G Quaid)
Transcript
- James Dooley: Building topical authority. It's a very, very big topic of conversation with regards to semantic SEO. And today I'm joined with David G. Quaid, an absolute legend when it comes to SEO. And there was one specific episode that I absolutely loved on The Edward Show of what you spoke about where he was moving through the traffic tiers. And I think Edward was asking you a question of if you wanted to start ranking for a specific keyword, would you go straight in writing about that topic? And I think it was about payroll software, if I remember rightly. And you started to explain, no, I wouldn't start there. I'd start here and I'd work my way over to then build those contextual bridges to get there. And I want to break that conversation down. And I want to get you started by saying, when you're building topical authority, how important is it semantically to connect these dots together? David G. Quaid: It, it's absolutely vital, especially if you're cornerstoneing, right? Especially if you're coming from a position of no authority. If you're a content writer at a huge brand that has a lot of traffic, you know, you've 10,000 backlinks, or you're a web engineer in SEO, you have to remember that your point of view is very different from everyone else. You're, you're in the top 10%, right? And, or probably even the top 1%. You know, the, the internet, especially in Google's mind, is a pyramid, right? Where that top 1% is getting most of the traffic. You know, you look at some of the pages, they've got a one-word slug. They're ranking for 10,000 different phrases. All of the traffic's coming in. People at that level need to be hyper-focused on engagement. Where, how much are people reading, bouncing, technical SEO, but that's not how that... That's not how you build up there. And that's the problem with how Google works and how keyword research works. And I think a lot of people who get to work for these brands, they're very, very lucky. They're in a privileged position. But that doesn't work for newbies, right? So in that case, what we were doing is looking at all of the keywords that contained, I think, payroll and software or payroll and CRM. And what I was starting to do is look at what keywords have the highest volume but the lowest keyword difficulty score. And it's very difficult to do this without tools, right? Like, I, I, I think most people should avoid paying for an SEO tool until they understand the need. But this is a specific need. And so Google looks at keyword relationships using actual words, right? So I don't think that Google, until a different part in the lifecycle, understands that, for example, cars include BMW and Mercedes. But if you're building web pages and let's say you're, you're, you're a motor factor or you're selling car parts and you're selling, you know, BMW brake lights and BMW panels and BMW, um, spark plugs, Google looks at the overlap of the keywords at literally at a word level. And so you actually have to start mapping that out. And I, I, I remember Edward was asking this question, why, why can't we just go in for the money word? You can if you're doing paid search and you can if you're already ranking, but if you're not, you got to take a step back, start at the bottom. That's why PAA is good because you've got a lot of frequently asked questions. Once you start getting clicks on something to do with BMW, that's when you have topical authority. So, you can't build topical authority by claiming to be an expert, by posting a list of all of the podcasts you've been on, right? The way Google sort of, like, understands or, or the litmus test it applies to, has your social media campaign been very successful, isn't by going through your social media campaign and looking at everything you posted. How many robots up-liked it? How many links did it have? How many comments did you get? If your social media campaign is successful, did people search for your name? That's the litmus test, right? It doesn't have to work out that you were on TechCrunch and you were on, um, The Sunday Times and that you were quoted by The Telegraph. Did people search your name is, is a real outcome that Google can measure. And so that's when you have topical authority. When you start getting clicks for a topic and then you can share that. To me, as an SEO, links are the pylons that carry and transmit authority from page to page internally and externally. And that's the relationship between the pages. And if that relationship is there and that page matches that, they will lift each other. And that's effectively how you cornerstone your way into Google. James Dooley: Yeah. For anyone that doesn't know, because you mentioned there cornerstone and cornerstone content, can you just briefly explain to the listeners what cornerstone content is? David G. Quaid: Yeah, I think it was Yoast, um, or Joost from, um, from the, um, what is it? WordPress plugin Yoast. And so he described it where you start with the lowest, least difficult keyword, then the next, then the next, then the next, and you keep going up until either you stop, in which case you've gone up one too many and you come back. And so you keep going like that. And if you want an, um, an exercise in, in seeing that, I've been doing that with my own blog on PrimaryPosition.com. I started this two years ago. Charles Floate actually tweeted about a month ago that the SEO value of cornerstoning like that on my blog is now worth $150,000 a month. That's how many keywords I rank for. That's what it would cost to buy that traffic if I did it in paid search. And I started with very, very basic keywords and built up and built up and built up. And I made sure all of them were related to things like Google, GSC, SERP reports, search engine rank reports. Taking the easiest ones and slowly building up and up and up. And it's very methodical. It's very time-consuming because I didn't buy any links. I only have like a thousand links and it's a 22-year-old domain. It's not a lot of backlinks for a domain. Uh, so I know, no, I'll never get in trouble with Google for buying backlinks. And so to me, that's how I've always done SEO, just laying down the first cornerstone, putting the next one on top, waiting a week. If I'm not getting clicks, I don't go any further. I either start a new topic cluster or I go back and correct where I misread the authority required for each one. Um, and it... I think the, um, on top of, um, Yoast, there was another one back in the heyday, must have been 15 years ago, and they called it the SEO Avalanche approach. Guy Chris Carter. And he was, he said the same thing where you start where, where you can win and you, and you build up, you build up like your traffic tiers bit by bit by bit and you keep, you keep moving forward on it. And I think people misread what he was talking about when he was saying it and just thought it was just based on, on traffic numbers and search volume, where it wasn't. It was on keyword difficulty, on which ones you could win on. James Dooley: But I want to, I want to challenge you a little bit on the... When, when you're, when you're decided, okay, I want to move into this topic and I want to start on keywords I know I can build up from. How are you determining the keyword difficulty score for which ones you should go after to start with? Obviously, you're going after search volume with the lowest kind of keyword difficulty, but are you looking at... Because there's several people that look at, like, keyword difficulty using Ahrefs, and that's mainly on link data. But then there's some that looking at on, on maybe using that from a link data point of view, but then looking at, is the keywords in the title tag? How easy is it? How relevant is it? And stuff like that. How you determine keyword difficulty? I think you were saying you also have your own tool to help with that too, right? David G. Quaid: Yeah. Which, which I think is super cool. Um, so I think, you know, I read so many people's, um, posts every day that are starting out in SEO and they start with, you know, I did this, I did this, I did that and Google won't recognise it. And I'm like, it's the same as running a race, right? Who... If, if the guy beside you is faster, it doesn't matter if you turn up with a brand new, newer pair of Nikes or you've got 10 more fans in the audience, right? So the first place you have to look is who's competing, right? If, if, if Microsoft, Google and Citrix are there, well, good day. That's, that's that close, right? What I will do is I'll also look at, for example, what page from Microsoft is ranking. So if, if let's say, um, I want to rank for load balancer for Microsoft Exchange and it's just a Microsoft page about load balancing, then I know I've got an in because I know that Microsoft don't really do a lot of SEO to that level and I know that I can win by precision. So what you were just saying about the page title and the document name, as Matt Cutts said, Google was built by a bunch of Unix engineers in the 1990s. They look at the document name as your primary relevance. Google can't really assess content quality because I could, I could have the worst English in the world, but I could be the only person who knows how to build a, a moon base on the, on the moon. That has to be the best content on it. Whether I've broken every grammatical error, I haven't used the Oxford, uh, comma, it doesn't matter, right? That's not what necessarily makes... It does to others, right? Some people might bounce because I don't use the Oxford comma, for example, or I overuse it. And so these are very subjective things that win out in click-through rate rankings, right? But coming back to keyword difficulty score, I will look at, can I use precision to outmanoeuvre Microsoft? Which I've done with Google and I, again, I demonstrate this on X all the time. Here's how I got on top of Google for this particular phrase, right? This narrow phrase. And then as I start getting more and more clicks, my topical authority goes up. I don't call... I don't speak a lot about specific tools, but I use Semrush quite a lot. And I think Semrush has got two things that are cool. One is the keyword difficulty score looks at the domain authority of the sites ranking in that index. They also have a personalised keyword tool. It was one of the first AI tools that they actually brought out that when you put in your domain, it personalises the keyword difficulty for you. And you'll often see, and I was really surprised by this, because I would see keywords that were maybe 15, 11, very attractive or wanted to go after them, but my personalised keyword score could be 60, 70, 80. And it was, it was, it was accurate enough to use as a good guide. And so, you can go and build two or three pages, right? I... It's kind of like being able to go to the casino and enter four different roulette tables. Um, but you don't lose any money if you get one wrong, right? And I don't think people realise, but that's, that's why scaled content and pSEO is so successful because what they're doing is they're essentially going to every single table and putting a bet on every possible permutation. And that's why I think Google hates scaled content so much. It's, it's playing into... They open the back door to let people cornerstone in, right? And, and, and to not have as many backlinks and to, to reduce the over-reliance on backlinks for entering particular indices. Um, and scaled content, I think, takes advantage of that. But that's why cornerstone works. You, you, you need to look at who's competing, what's their relevance to it, can I outmanoeuvre them? It's all about understanding the basic fundamental mechanics of a search engine. That's... James Dooley: I didn't actually know that Semrush did that. There was the only tool that I remember, and this is what made me create our own in-house keyword difficulties tool, was... And we've got it at domain level as well, exactly like what you're talking about. There's a tool, I don't know if you ever remember this, called MarketMuse. It's still there and it's like a, a correlation tool, um, and it does it very different to, let's say, OnPage.ai or Surfer SEO. And it does it on, on topical clusters. And that was the only tool I ever came across that had a keyword difficulty score built against your existing domain. So it knew what you was ranking for and then it would literally come back to you and say, for your website, here's six articles that, that I believe you can rank in the top three for now if you publish this title and this title and this title. And it was within a cluster that they'd already kind of built out. And I was like, wow, nobody else has got that. And then when I started to reverse-engineer how they was doing it, I'm like, I need this. I need this myself because it was too costly as to run it against the whole domain every single time in MarketMuse. It was costing, I think it was something like $12,000 a month and I only had like 30 domains in there. And I needed it for hundreds, hundreds of domains. I'm like, I need to create this myself because there are so many moving parts to how it works. But it was to do with exactly what you talk about. And this is where I love that episode and I've spoke to you quite a lot off air about the position of literally you can change and modify it. Or you can go after the exact same, like, exact same keyword, but just change the intent of the page and do an antonym. Like, why you should use Bet365, and it's not ranking. Okay, why you shouldn't use Bet365, and it's still going after the, the, the entity of Bet365, but you're just changing the intent of the search. And I just loved it how you, you, you build it. You build it. Whoa, I've made a mistake. Take a step back. Let's reword this. Let's, like, reoptimise it. Let's change the title to be the X, Y and Z. Let's do... And I thought not many people talk about that. And then you then talk about... Here's one for you. Majority of people in the SEO community think topical authority is topical coverage, and it's not. It's completely different things. Topical authority, it's topical coverage plus historical data, which comes from traffic and links and socials and engagement. And they forget that part and they just do topical coverage and they scale it and go, "I've covered the topic in its entirety, therefore I should rank." And none of them have got traffic. And you're like, no. That's almost what you're talking about. Scaled content abuse. You just mass created everything. You've not worked through your tiers. You don't have the traffic, which then builds up the authority for that topic of what you can have. And then you can then start building up other terms around it. David G. Quaid: Yeah. Don't, don't be afraid of Google, right? Don't, don't think that it's watching your every move. Um, when, when I, I help a startup like a Cloudbrink or, um, a CyberSaint or a Kemp or, um, all of the other ones, we, we're, we're still, you know, we're starting with domain authorities of four, five, six, and the CEO wants to rank for a term that's owned by Citrix or Cisco. And so we have to... You, we don't need to rank for everything they're ranking for, right? We're not trying to outrank Cisco as a whole. But if we want to rank for something like VPN versus ZTNA, we need to be on page one. And so looking at how they've structured their page titles, looking at how they've structured their slugs, they've got, they've got the hundreds of thousands of backlinks that everyone else has created, their PR teams, their other social media marketing teams, right? All the companies they've acquired, all of that aggregated authority. Sometimes it makes them lazy. Sometimes it makes them, you know... To a lot of web engineers and web architects that I meet, they look at SEO through the lens of, of, of page speed and of, of, like, what are the things they can do that brings a macro traffic growth. I'm looking at a page-by-keyword level, right? I'm looking down at the, at the cellular level. And so I just need to get in for that one keyword. And I'll do that by building my own page clusters, getting keywords with the words I need. And then my last page, the money page, link all of those pages to it. And because I've concentrated so much authority on those keywords, I can come in right above them. And yes, it might take two months. Um, and sometimes I've got to repost the same page 12 different times, right? And I know that I have to remove it completely from the index before I repost it. But I know that Google do it. Sometimes when I speak to people and I'm helping them out for free or I'm speaking to a new client and I'm like, "We've got to unindex this page and republish it." And they're like, "But I'm gonna lose what I have." And I'm like, "It's an engine. If we feed the data points, the algorithm will put us back where we need to be." And if you, if you're not afraid of Google, I think that's the worst thing you can be as an SEO. I'm not saying disrespect it or violate all those rules. I'm saying respect it, but don't be afraid of it. Then, then you'll start to move the needle. James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And then with regards to, um, the topical authority, obviously I want anyone who's watching this, I want you to check out a link in the description where I don't want you to talk too much about the People Also Ask that builds up instant topical authority because there's a whole episode with you and Edward Sturm on it. I think it's an amazing episode kind of on there of building up the topical authority. But one of the main reasons why I wanted to do this episode was because the amount of times I get asked, could I build a site now in the finance niche, or could I build a site... And they're looking at a main category. Yeah, but I've no domain authority yet with regards to, can I, can I still enter that market? And I'm like, there's so many longtails you can start with and build yourself up with. Can you, if someone asks you that question, could I start to rank in finance, let's say, now, knowing what you know and knowing, okay, you need to work through your traffic tier or the keyword difficulty, can you explain why anybody even still today can enter any industry as long as they start understanding to build through those topics and make certain they can win by doing cornerstone content or the SEO Avalanche approach? David G. Quaid: When you look at the, you know, the big banks like the Lloyds or Barclays, when they build pages, they need 10,000 people to come to them or they're getting fired, right? No, no one's putting their hand up in a meeting and saying, "I got 10 extra visits a month," right? They're, they're going out the door very quickly. And so, because of things like cannibalisation, they can't pick the skyscraper model. So the skyscraper model where you... The idea is that in, in tall city, in big cities, people look at the tallest building and they gravitate towards the highest rooftop. If, if a Lloyds or a Chase or Barclays picks a skyscraper model, they can't also pick the longtail model. The two are normally incompatible with, within related semantics, right? And so if they, if they're ranking a page like best business credit cards, you could come in under best business credit cards for LLCs or sole traders or market traders or whatever. They typically can't choose both. And so that's why it lets you come in through the side and that's how you can do it. It's not immediate. You may need to deploy the PAA hack, which is very simple and it's well covered. Um, but also because for them it's so much effort publishing extra pages with so little return. But as a small trader, if you're only chasing a million pounds a year, it becomes so much more worthwhile. And if you do it big enough, maybe they'll even buy you. But also, I think that Matt Cutts said that something like 25% of, of search every day is new search. Search that they've never heard of. So none of these content developers, no matter how good they are, none of them can predict the new searches that are coming up. So as the market volatility happens, as we now get into $2 trillion valuations for Anthropic, all of these new words are coming into the market. So if you just sit and watch, um, Bloomberg or listen to the BBC and, and, and their financial channels, as new words coming into play, people are Googling them. They're on their laptop, they're on their, um, iPad, or they're on a flight, and they start Googling these terms. These are being created all the time that you can go after that nobody's making a play for. Google will find a page to show, but it's a relevance engine. Um, one of the things that Martin Splitt mentioned in one of their videos last year was, "We will always show the most relevant page even if it has the worst UX experience," which was an incredible statement to make that I think a lot of SEOs just let... Didn't really appreciate what he was saying there. James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And that's where the position comes in. I want, I want one last thing, and this is... Try to explain it because I, I actually don't know the full ins and outs of, of exactly why, and we've tried it several times. In the iGaming space or in the, um, in the casino space, there always seems to be... You speaking there about the skyscraper approach or the longtail approach. There always seems to be a strategy of either you go after free spins, which is like... And within the free spins cluster, you've got, like, 10 free spins, 20 free spins, 30 free spins, 40 free spins, all the way up to 500 free spins, right? And you get some webmasters that just do one page for free spins and all the rest of them are H2s on that one page. Now that page can rank for the primary keyword of free spins, but it struggles to rank for the longtail for, like, 250 free spins. Where you have other webmasters or affiliates, and what they do is they do the main category of free spins and they mention them all briefly and then they link down to 10 free... They've got a dedicated page for each one. But those websites never seem to rank for the primary term of free spins, but they do pick up the longtails for, like, 250 free spins, 300 free spins, 500 free spins. And at times you've got to choose that one or this one or the other one. David G. Quaid: Mhm. James Dooley: Why? Why is that? Can you try and explain that to SEOs that might be listening in on this? David G. Quaid: Yeah. So, this is actually one of the areas of SEO I spend the most amount of time thinking about and where I come up with these strategies from. And so for something like free spins, that's where you will have the highest PageRank authority pages who also have history. And all of the keywords that, that form longtail all give upward authority or topical authority to the main term. The reason that your affiliates and your SEOs will come in under, under the longtail is for the same reason. One, they know that the skyscraper page can't do that because it will cannibalise with those other pages. So, if you've got a page free spins and then you try to do free 500 spins, free 100 spins, they will actually block, block it. So, they have to leave them out, right? And so, essentially, they built the skyscraper. They're ranking for the primary keyword. It comes down to precision. And so the way I've always thought of it is if your page slug is literally free spins and your authority for free spins is, say, a million points, your authority is 100%. You therefore get 100% of your authority in the, in the position ranker, right? So you're familiar with, um, AdWords, right? So your quality score multiplied by your dollar bid rate equals your ad rank. So, if it's $50 and you've got an ad score of 10, it's 500. If your quality score is five and you're bidding $50, it's position 250. So, you're automatically lower. The same thing. So, if I create a page about free 500 spins, I get to use all of my authority, but it's for the free 500 spins, whereas the other guy only has a small bit of that authority because his percentage relevance is, is deprecated so much. And that's why they're able to rank and that's why they're not able to rank. And unless they can do H2 alignment, you know, building different headers and try to win, that's why the other guys get to win. And there's a... That's a constant battle. And that's why you see the, uh, charts in GSC go up and down. It's about the relevance and the authority to that relevance, how much you get to use both. James Dooley: Go on. Sorry. David G. Quaid: I, I think it's, you know, when, when people say Google rewards big brands, I get it. But Google's also a big brand breaker. I mean, how many brands have been destroyed and how many brands have been created in the last 26 years, right? When without Google, how would guys like you and I get to stand on an international stage and build businesses if it was just Microsoft and Apple, right? James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And this is why I, I love this episode about the position. And I, I, I seen you talking about that and do you know what? It was a light bulb moment. I, I knew it, but I just never kind of compared it to the quality score. And I think you were talking about EMDs and you were saying, why, why would you not create an EMD and run ads to an EMD? You're going to get quality score. The quality score is going to be the highest. So the ad rank then you're going to get 100% of relevance being passed through, which means directly it's going to cost you less per click when you're running PPC. And I'm like, I never... I'd never referred to it comparing it to that. And I'm like, that just makes perfect sense. I knew the position and the relevance factor then give the full weight of the relevance and the power. And this is what our keyword, kind of keyword difficulties tool did, but I'd never done it on the ad rank. And I thought, ah, that's a clever strategy that I like. I like what you've done there. And this is why I'm going to end it there. This is why people should be following David Quaid. And if anyone doesn't know the best way of reaching out to you, what's the best way of getting in touch with you, David? David G. Quaid: Probably LinkedIn or, or on X. Um, so I'm on David Quaid on both. Um, and I think some of the best conversations around SEO and GEO are happening on, on, on X. James Dooley: Yeah. Okay, perfect. Sounds good. Well, David, it's been an absolute pleasure and we hope you like this episode about building topical authority. Thanks, James.