Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another episode of NachoTuesday and today we're going to be talking about the biggest SEO trends of 2023 and today I have with me carsten who works with morning score he's the CEO over there and without further Ado I'd love to hear an elevator pitch for what morning score does and learn a little bit more about you as well Carson all right I'll start with myself I'm a I'm a Danish guy um you know from Europe and I've been (00:34) doing business for 10 years I started an agency around high school that went really bad then it kind of you know it ended up being okay now there are 50 people and I'm a partner but I'm not involved anymore but through that agency I learned about you know the really big pain in SEO which is that everyone's confused about it and it's why we built this tool to gamify it to make it easy to yeah just to make it a journey instead of a database because if you use tools like hrefs some of our competitors (01:04) you are basically it's a great great products by the way but there are databases and we're more like a project management tool that tells you how to get from a to c so yeah that's the pitch I guess that's great what kind of uh key features I guess would you guys does morning score have that you'd like to share with the audience yeah so the I think the coolest thing is our missions and how you know so that's basically suggested tasks that are quite intelligent to be honest I always get (01:30) surprised like whoa how could we suggest this it's not necessarily AI but it's big data and it's clever algorithms that's basically tells you what to do with your SEO so fix this problem over here or build this link here or you know whatever very concrete stuff and once you complete these tasks these missions you level up and then your space City grows in the background it's all very cool and yeah so yeah it's like a game but you make money when you complete this game yeah yeah everybody wants that (01:58) right yeah yeah that's game of all yeah yeah and we all kind of grew up on video games too so you know that's why gamification has been such a popular Trend over the last few years um it just really resonates with us I mean I'm 37 but I still I'm still a gamer at heart oh yeah if I had the time I would be I'd be gaming oh I just picked it up recently uh I'm gaming a lot again oh well when I can right not to get too off topic but uh what game are you playing oh last time I played Doom Eternal holy (02:28) crap that game is crazy uh just to actually I I shouldn't say this but I played during work when I have in the afternoon there was this thing where you lose energy it's a famous thing it's you know scientists talk about it and I just got it that you know friend told me maybe just play a really adrenaline-like game and I tried playing Doom Eternal like 15 minutes in the afternoon and my energy is back you know so yeah that's actually a good tip that's a good point actually you know a lot of people you (02:54) know might think you know drink more coffee or something like that but yeah you know it's really you know changing your mindset goes a long ways actually to uh kind of reinvigorating yourself especially in that last stretch of the day uh just even if you go for like a little walk outside just change your mindset from uh you know living in your inbox or you know working on a project maybe that you've been focused on for a couple hours just you know take a break you know maybe play video games something one of the things that worked (03:21) really well better than working for me but you know everyone's different yep the same then great point so SEO has been around for a long time obviously everybody's always saying how do I get to the top of Google search results uh so what what's changed in the last few years though like is there any strategic opportunities a marketer should be aware of today for SEO that you know they might not might not realize yeah so the main thing is that Google one um so any if you followed SEO in the last year (03:51) you heard about the black hats and the white hats but basically there were the good guys that were following Google the white hats and the black hats were like you know they were trying to trick Google and what I see everywhere now is that everyone all the experts what they're basically doing is that there's they're basically screenshotting or sending links from Google's Official Guidelines they have these very good guidelines now that that they you know where they tell you what to do and that's basically it (04:18) now and that sounds a bit boring so where are the opportunities right but there are still plenty of opportunities especially because a lot of seos don't know how to be a good white hat you know they don't know how to follow the guidelines in a nice way so actually right now I would say it's all about doing what Google tells you to do sounds a bit like you're that you know kid in class who's always have their hands raised and ready to answer but but you know you're you're going to (04:42) be the nerd now and if you do what Google wants um plus a few other things like building some great backlinks we can talk more about that um then you're actually going to do very well right now so so that's my main you know we can dive really into it but that's like the thing yeah let's get into it uh so what kind of what kind of things does Google really like these days I mean content's a big one um you know content down the right way of course not AI generated yeah yeah yeah maybe some more specifics on that (05:12) for some of the people that follow us yeah so I almost hate to say it because it's so boring but eat because some people heard this before it's this eeat um but I'm gonna make it very specific so it's less boring um so basically what you want to do right now if you don't have an author page on your articles on your website so if you have a website with articles or landing pages that you want to rank on Google for specific keywords you want there to be an author like so in my case I know I could share it my screen if we (05:45) want but in my case on our blog all of us that produce blog posts we have a you know you can click on the author it's in the top of the blog post and then you can see the bio and you know what what other blog posts have that person done in WordPress it's like feature you can easily get and in most CMS um so that's like that's maybe not a 2023 kind of thing but I'm just going to say it now because it's so important now and that buyer should link to external like LinkedIn Twitter whatever social media accounts (06:15) you have that are active that would be a great thing to do um and following up on that have an about us page that's actually you know transparent to tell us who is behind this company what's the history of this company where's the headquarter located because actually really a lot of SAS companies that I see they don't even tell you where they're from because all we're remote we're Global yeah but you have an headquarter somewhere and Google wants to know because they want to know exactly who (06:41) you are and the more trustworthy it can get the better so that's really what it's all about if you want to rank um not all about but that's an important aspect of it now a lot of people is to show yeah it's a show that you're real uh like something like what we're doing now you know real people having conversation could be uploaded to YouTube then it could be linked to the website it could even appear on a blog post on a website it all helps and then you would be the author of that blog (07:08) post it would all help build the credibility that this is real uh and that's what Google's looking for especially now with AI um yeah not not shortcutting it with poor content as well um I I've even heard you know lately we've been trying ourselves actually is taking these webinars that we do here and kind of a nice little hack is that we will create a transcript for the uh for the for the video which produces yeah you know a lot of great content obviously that comes out of out of these great discussions here and yeah we put (07:36) that throw that right up on our website with the video and it's just you know it makes sense right a transcript to go along with the video but it's also a lot of great content that can help us rank yeah and that could help you rank for all kinds of long tail keywords even Sometimes some some very competitive ones um so so yeah you've got it that's that's a great tactic and yeah so that is definitely becoming just like Central it's not even the new trick because it's been there for a long time (08:02) but it's just like if you don't do this if you don't build Authority like the things I just mentioned by the way having a good contact us page is also part of this also recommend doing that um and updating all your social media profiles linking back to the website from those profiles so I think I've given you like a five-point list now of things those are all things that you just gotta do right now uh and most I would say most SAS companies do it but to be honest we didn't do it uh three (08:29) months ago we forgot to include these author profiles in our on our blog and as we included it we skyrocketed on some of our rankings so that was really nice to see and actually we've had like people on LinkedIn share our posts and say hey this cool author uh made this cool post and because it linked to my LinkedIn profile they could like you know tag me in it I was like wait okay cool there are side effects to this you know what about the technicals a lot of people you know just think it's all about backlinks or just throwing a bunch (08:59) of content up on your site but a lot of a lot of websites actually do a very poor job with some of the technical aspects of SEO like size images uh what other what other pitfalls do you see for a lot of a lot of websites that might get them caught and do you know not ranking well as Google because on Google because of it yeah so technical is always a thing um I wouldn't actually say it's the main problem uh that most websites the most websites that I come across they struggle with content and links so those (09:30) are the two things they mainly especially if they're smaller companies they always struggle with link building especially and I mean like natural good links that's that's hard for for a lot of people I actually teach a lot on that on YouTube as well so I have free links that I teach people how to build and so on um so but yeah but yeah that that's a big thing um in terms if it if I want to dive into the technical stuff that's often a problem it's speed so not having a fast enough website and Google has become (10:00) quite nasty lately I mean they're they're they're tightening the boat in term or what's the expression they're tightening up in terms of what they accept as fast enough yeah so now we have to be really fast I mean we had issues lately we just fixed it and now we're green on Google's uh you know on on their score um but they check on a very slow 3G Speed on an old mobile like that's their base that's their Baseline for for mobile speed and then they say um you got to be the whole side the main (10:32) part of the site gotta load within two and a half seconds on an old 3g connection old mobile phone I mean so so that's the that's the you know criteria and and so a lot of yeah you can easily check that yourself if you Google Google speed test or something like that you'll you'll find it yeah there's a lot of free speed tests and websites out there as well too does does your uh does your platform have a speed testing feature yeah it does yeah yeah that's great yeah it's definitely a great place to start um I (11:00) guess they're trying to serve to to the lowest common denominator there so uh keep that in mind when designing your websites uh lowest common denominator there yeah yeah I guess what else do uh most businesses get wrong about SEO wants to go out and they say we're gonna We want to rank higher in Google we're gonna go do some get some backlinks or whatever um what do you see most companies do wrong I mean obviously bad backlinks is one of them yeah well they either don't do anything so a lot of companies talk (11:29) about SEO like oh we gotta improve our SEO and then uh nothing happens or they they've okay so this is my this might not be something they do wrong but but it's a wrong approach so I talked to a lot of people who are scared of SEO so they don't do it or they they're like looking at it and they're analyzing it but they don't touch it because they're like oh that's for the pros yeah but to be honest SEO is super easy um you gotta get into it a tool like ours helps because we're built for (12:02) um I mean we're not only for beginners but it a lot of beginners start on our tool um and the point is that SEO is just like writing content it's just like writing a LinkedIn post or whatever else there's nothing more to it um of course there is so many things you can nerd and there are so many things you can get into but most businesses that I see they're in not very competitive Niche Niche so they they would be like um startup doing I don't know shoe polishing or whatever like a new product (12:36) for that it's like the competition for shoe polishing in Germany or in a in an area of Germany or wherever it's not that big so of course if you're gonna go after YouTube or you want to become the next video you know site or you know if you want to go for a casino or whatever yeah it's gonna get tough but most companies are not in a tough industry and all you need to do is start producing interest in our articles that are answering questions that people might have and you probably know most of (13:08) those questions already um because people ask you you know on sales and whatever yeah that's a great point it's uh it's really about you know the most basic stuff uh getting getting that right making sure that your sites your site speeds loaded quickly it's there's not a there's not too many technicals to it which I think is what scares people they think in in terms of SEO not in terms of the content and just doing some of the basic things like having the profiles um you know on the blog post there uh (13:36) they think you know it's this mystical like technical uh experience required type of a job but you know it's really the basics that really make SEO work for most companies these days yeah yeah and Google wants it to be like that uh you remember in the beginning we talked about you know how Google is forcing their will and they want everyone to be able to do SEO because they don't they want the company owners to just write you know about what they do who they are and then be ranked for that so you got to remember that Google (14:04) is on your side not on the pros because they don't really like the pros because the pros will try to you know people like me we always try to find Corners how can we you know out manure Google and they don't like that yep that's a good point so a lot of companies are really budget constrained and you know obviously SEO is not overly complicated and it doesn't cost a lot of money to get started in many cases they could use a tool like yours to really kind of get a get a pulse for where they're at (14:30) um what other cost effective SEO tactics would you recommend uh for for a startup maybe they don't have the budget for a you know maybe a writer right away um yeah so I would say I'm going to get very specific now so I'll try to do it slowly so if you're a startup you probably don't have a lot of backlinks so links from other websites to your site so try to get the first 50 backlinks and do it through not paid media and not paid links do it through organic links uh with morning score we have like the (15:04) first 60 links that we show you how to build inside the tool there's like these guides like PDFs and everything that show you one two three so you could do that there's also a lot of you know uh like techniques that we teach you how to find free links um but you could also even just Google the topic like how to build free links to my startup and there will be like guides on Google as well not all of them are good but there are some um so get your first 50 backlinks um and just because you as a new company (15:36) Google doesn't care about you so you need some starting point you need someone on the internet to say hey this guy exists this company exists and then from there you're going to start then I would start producing some content maybe some blog posts about what you're doing um actually the first thing I would do is what I call money I would go for money keywords so a money keyword is something like flowers Boston or send flowers Boston even better like it's something where people probably will pay (16:04) money for whatever they will you know what will appear and the results versus design uh or something like inspiration for Designing flowers or whatever you know like that's not a money keyword something that shows more clear intent yeah so very clear intent and simply just what I call Money keywords are where I would start even if the competition is a bit higher you want to build the keywords for that so in my example it would be something like rank tracker SEO tool best SEO tool those are really hard keywords rank for but I (16:37) should still try because believe it or not but some people do go on page two or three of Google when they research suppliers they don't all stay on page one and those few percentages of people are still you know potential customers that you should get in front of so yeah definitely go for your money keywords first and then after that you know once you've found you know those main keywords that you think people are looking for when they want to buy your service you can start going into more research-based keywords so when people (17:05) want to have questions answered um yeah that's a great Point um so what do you see of uh SEO evolving over the next few years I mean that now that Google's uh really you know dialing it back and making it super simple and streamlined uh do you see any anything coming up in the next year or two possibly with all this AI generated content coming out yeah yeah well they just had a big conference six days ago um and they're basically going to introduce AI into the search results um generally I believe the pie is (17:38) getting bigger I don't think there's going to be that much traffic from SEO going away I think more like the kinds of searches that you would do on chat GPT today is the ones that Google wants you to do on their service so a bit more long prompts where you really want a deep answer for you know or whatever it is where you know currently Google is really good for product search answer search um basically you go on Google because you want something done or you want you want to find something and AI is not (18:10) better at that than Google but Google wants everything they want both the AI and the search so what you're going to have to compete for in the future is also the AI answers on some terms but if you imagine something like best laptops 2023 the AI can help you answer that question but you're always going to want to see either the laptops or the websites and you always want to compete that's always going to be a competition of you know optimizing for getting into that search right um so I think SEO will change with AI in (18:41) the coming years but I don't think the the basic principles the basic needs that people have to find products online or find services online will change or information and that regard that's a great Point um so don't short Google stock right now um no stock tips here yeah I like that point uh about the pie getting bigger you know there's just more tools out there now for people to get answers and you know to your point about AI there's you know it gives you very robust answers that you know a (19:15) search result necessarily can bring forward but people still like search for just getting a simple easy answer like you mentioned um if you're searching for products or content it's just so much easier to go to Google already but if you need a you know open AI to solve a coding problem for you if you if you already completed your clients until to complete the rest of it uh then you know it's probably a better choice for that but um different use cases yeah and then you've got to ask yourself how much (19:41) money is there in solving code problems I mean us we're here today because we're talking about generating money for your for for your business through SEO right and a lot of people in SEO are afraid right now but I'm like AI is just taking all the stuff well some they are taking some stuff that are that there are money in it but most of the stuff that AI is taking these literally just you know answering questions and helping you understand the world that's not where the money is yeah yeah it's really helpful there's there's (20:11) other you know ways to use it I've uh you know seen a lot of developers use it as kind of like a code assist but it's really just making them more efficient right they're able to get more and faster but you know it's still a human doing doing the work um but you know it's gonna be exciting regardless to see what happens over the next few years yeah I mean for sure we're we're keeping it very you know focused eye on it and we we're for I mean once Google releases the new AI stuff we're going to be up there and you (20:36) know support it with our tool and so on so because I think all SEO tools we're looking at it and we're like okay this is gonna be big that's exciting what do you guys have coming out next for your tool if you don't mind sharing with everyone well we just released a 3.5 version 3. (20:54) 5 uh yesterday um and that was the biggest release yet I think with search console integration so Google's own SEO tool that we now integrate with it so we get all the sweet data from Google combined with our data um so yeah that's that's a lot of a lot of people ask for that um so the next big thing for us well I think around summer we are definitely going to do a big first big you know AI release in terms of supporting the new stuff from Google uh I can't say for sure but we're definitely looking into it (21:23) um other than that is like improving the intelligence of our tool also with AI and you know these missions that I talked about they also have to be even more intelligent so just overall improving intelligence and data qualities is a big thing yep yeah especially the data quality right and you guys really specialize in that um unlike a lot of other platforms um I guess what other tools should marketers look for for SEO I mean obviously your tool can do a lot it's a lot more comprehensive than a lot of the other tools I've seen out there is there (21:53) any other basic tools that people should be aware of just to kind of keep a pulse on their SEO oh there's a lot of great Tools in SEO um so I actually wrote a blog post with like 25 tools that I use um most of them free um so something like just image compression if your website doesn't do it for you most websites don't so there's like a lot of great image compression websites out there where you just upload your images and it sends you back like a smaller version so it has less kilobytes less megabytes and Google (22:26) likes that because that makes your site faster um so there's one called compressed png.com that I really like to use it's the best I've tested not many people know about it um yeah and oh there's so many tools I'm a bit like which one should I um well that one's helpful I I haven't even heard of that one actually too but I'm you know there's other tools that I've used in the past very similar to that um but you know that's a good starting point right there um um I guess uh could you give us an (22:58) example of maybe an ultra successful SEO strategy that you saw a company deploy and and what made it so successful yeah yeah that's a good one um so and I'll I will just give you my own because it's quite funny um perfect so because I know a few others but this one is my own and I have not many people know it so I had one of my employees he's a kind of hobby photographer and he had all these photos lying around of things he's he's shot and there's this website called pixels p x e l s.com many of you might know it (23:36) because you can find free stock photos there that's one of the tools I would recommend by the way to find photos for your blog um but what people don't realize you can become an author very easy you can create a profile you can upload if you have good quality photos or you have a friend who has them and and is okay with giving them away what you're then going to do is you've got to attack them really well because the platform allows you to tag it so I had a seal in Denmark so I said seal Denmark Copenhagen blah blah I put all (24:05) these like little tacks and that really helped it get found on search and then it got featured on their website now it has 25 million downloads this stupid little seal oh cute um and the trick doesn't stop here well the the profile itself got a lot of Link juice and traffic through it but the interesting part is you can reverse you can image search on Google so if you if you go to Google there's a button like a little uh icon where you can search for images then you can search for the images that you upload on pixels that (24:37) you've seen other people download and people will have used those for their blogs now this is a I call this a Trojan seal because we're invented by my seal I didn't think about it was like came to me afterwards like wait a minute I can do this maybe fills it gets in there yeah the Trojan seal from the Trojan horse of course as well because what you're going to do is you're going to start writing those blocks and saying hey cool to use my photo um but you know you got a link to me because this photo is mine and you're (25:04) okay you can use it but just got a link back to me and so you get a link just in the caption just below the the image usually in the top of the of the blog post I gotten from some huge websites like culturetrip.com and so on like some of the biggest travel websites in the world but also like business blocks because we uploaded a Macbook that got huge so a lot of PC and business blocks that we got links from so yeah wow that's a nice little hack actually I don't think a lot of people know about that no that's a it's (25:32) a little one for me you know a secret one keep that in mind everyone uh so do you do like a reverse Google search to kind of keep tabs on who's using the image or and then reach out yeah yeah and you don't need to do it like often you can do it like every half a year and you can just reach out um but of course if you want to do it fresh you know you can do it often depends how much time you have um yeah so everyone keep that in mind uh reverse image search as well so you can see who's using that photo then I love this (26:02) hack actually obviously using it myself if you don't mind yeah do it man I didn't credit in the photo too yeah that would be great um so I guess what uh failure comes with any profession um you know and I love to talk about failure I'm an entrepreneur myself I've won I've lost yeah and I'd love to chat with other entrepreneurs about you know some failures that they've had and now any great lessons that you've walked away from that with yeah yeah well the question should be which failures (26:32) didn't I come across or do myself but I mean a recent one because I'm 32 now I'm supposed to know better so just a recent one um when we released morning score um the SEO tool we're talking about um we had a six months better but as always we got delayed and the product wasn't good after the six months was over but I had told my investors we were going to release this and this day and I was this in my mind I was like when I say something I gotta do it that was a core value to me but turns out was a stupid value because I could (27:10) just have called my investor I found out later that he wasn't totally okay with it and asked for a bit more money so we could wait a bit longer and not release a shitty product yeah so we released a bad product and we had 4 000 beta users who were okay using the beta and they were testing they were giving feedback because you know it was free um but it was not a paid product yet and of those 4 000 people we got 20 customers it's like worst conversion rate ever um and the worst part was that all the hype we had a lot of hype before that it (27:44) died and there was just silence for six months I couldn't get anyone to tell me why they went by it was just people were like oh this is awkward this this product sucks I knew it wasn't good but and then you know we eventually released version 2.0 which turned the ship around and saved the company but that was the big lesson there is well to be honest a lot of the failures I've made in the last five years was listening to the common advice and that's really something I'm trying to undo now so (28:16) um there's so much common advice for startups that's just so wrong like this one that I followed here was ship fast and it's like this Silicon Valley oh you just got a ship and I'm like yeah you can also just ship and sink you know yeah and that's what we did it's big on reputation too right so it's better to do it right or not do it at all and you know it's not that big of a deal to delay for a little bit in fact you know most products usually take longer to get to Market than we originally think (28:44) anyway right and and so having this artificial timeline in your head is now usually not the right way to go no that was a big fail uh so yeah I think this company right now we have almost a thousand customers I think we would have been at 2000 now if I wouldn't have made that mistake because we had so much hype and we just it's hard to come back you know once you've missed a huge opportunity like that but you know it is what it is yeah I've been there before too so I I feel that we uh we launched a uh Hardware (29:14) product uh years ago and uh the business model wasn't right because you know we were kind of I was kind of saying to my partner I was saying uh people don't want to pay for software right uh yeah when it comes to a hardware product um so you know they wanted to charge like a monthly charge for the software and I was like people don't want to pay for Consumer software a mobile app on a phone right pretty much and I'm like you gotta find another way to make money like it was a mobile phone that we (29:40) launched and and I was like you know what are people used to paying for like on a regular basis for mobile phones like mobile service right so if you bake that into it and bundle it people are used to paying for that so that makes a more you know more sense as a business model yeah reoccurring Revenue model so when it launched you know a lot of people don't want on a bike because you know they have the psychology in their heads where they say you know I'm not I don't pay for apps apps are supposed to (30:05) be free on the phone you know even though he spent all this money building the app and everything and you know you see a value in it but um it's just you know the way the way things are when it comes to mobile apps and so that's like they're just laws in this universe that you can't break and apparently this is one of them and it's better to you know do it slow roll and you know don't launch it too fast and and uh you know maybe do a closed beta with just a small group of people get feedback you're exactly where you need (30:30) to be with your product before you do the video coming out and there are so many people who want to help out in a beta and get free if they can get free access and so on and get some perks I mean yeah you don't want to mess with that you want to keep it going for a while because that's that's the Magic in the beginning that you can kill yeah and a lot of people just like to help out you know they like to be the first to get their hands on a product and kind of you know feel like yeah Journey kind of (30:54) you know figuring out how to how to fix things and then they see their their feedback actually get utilized and you know they they tell their friends someday they're like hey I hope to launched that product or I gave these guys this idea and you know now where they're at yeah that's that's true and that's certainly the case for us I mean our customers build half the product so that's that's always good to have um but still to this day I mean just today I got feedback I'm like writing it (31:21) down okay that goes into the release oh man yeah and they they're just a wealth of information too and most people just give it to you they just give it up because they just wanna I mean they want to see the product better and uh for themselves as well too right so yeah yeah I love collecting feedback from customers and putting it into action um great so uh I guess what's uh one one thing more uh potential customers should know about Morningstar and why should they pick your platform over others well it's morning score that's a common (31:50) one but um so well the biggest problem in SEO as I see it is that people don't are not motivated to get it done and they're not helped to get it done morning score solves that for you you get those green check marks you level up you build your space Empire inside our tool and then you make money in real life I mean we are a little bit like we're trying to build like the magical Universe of SEO where our competitors in my opinion are a bit like Dusty databases that I mean I get tired when I work in those (32:24) um I mean I love I love some of our competitors they're great but I want to trash them but if you really need some motivation to get going with SEO you should just try money score for 14 days for free no credit card so that's actually it like it's so easy to get started and test it and if you don't like it well you're still our friend yeah and I think you brought up a good point actually you know what I see with your platform is that you've really you've really made the user experience (32:48) you you made the product very user friendly for people and you've in a way kind of demystified SEO right so you've created this tool that's fun easy to use um it's it's very visual it gives people you know a easy visual understanding for what what they need to improve what they've actually done the checklist of items and it sounds you know like it you know all the people that get scared of the term SEO like it's a more complex than it really is I would probably love to use your platform actually because it (33:17) seems like it makes makes the uh the world of SEO a lot more relatable to them that's the that's the dream that's what we're going for on and yeah we have a lot of happy clients these days I mean I'm not gonna brag but it's really fun to see these people who didn't know much about SEO and now they're like pros and getting so much traffic it's it's amazing that's great well Carson I really appreciate you coming on today and uh morning score um for anybody that would love to check (33:43) out morning score and get your SEO game right uh this is the right platform to do it uh check it out today in the uh nacho nacho B2B SAS Marketplace uh once again Carson really appreciate you coming on today and you know exciting to learn about your tool and a lot of other great SEO tips that a lot of our community members should follow and start implementing today yeah thanks a lot for having me likewise thank you so much Carson yeah good