💷How To Monetise Your Website in 2024 | Insights from James Dooley & Karl Hudson💷

James Dooley: It's hard to do the clap because the mic's like yeah I can't actually.

Karl Hudson: Yeah right. Top five things that SEOs do not do. Mr Dooley, what do they not do in your opinion?

James Dooley: I'm going to go against the grain on a few things here. What they don't do. Disavow is definitely number one. People don't realise that disavows work. People think Google is good at ignoring toxic links. The truth is they are very good at ignoring toxic links to a degree until it becomes a problem. When it becomes a problem it's too late. It's there for you to use so use it. Get rid of the toxic links. I'm not asking you to disavow links with power and trust. Remove high toxicity, low power, low trust links. People don't do it. If Google gives you a tool, why aren't you using it?

Karl Hudson: Pretty much.

James Dooley: Don't get me wrong, I don't believe everything Google tells me. People think uploading a disavow admits you're doing spam and you'll get penalised. It's not that. I have test data proving it works. It annoys me when someone says they did a disavow and it didn’t work. What tool did you use? They say Ahrefs. You're not using the right tools. It's like doing GSA and saying links don't work. Or people argue disavows don't work when they've never done one. It's frustrating. So that's number one. Number two is E-E-A-T.

Karl Hudson: Yeah.

James Dooley: I put these as number one and two because Google is still giving manual unnatural link penalties. That tells you they're looking at toxic links. And with E-E-A-T, we're seeing transparency penalties. People don't talk about this enough. I've only seen it personally in finance and Google News. I assume it's in YMYL niches too. We've had transparency penalties come through which tells you it matters. I was recently in Chiang Mai and Cyber Shepherd, a Google quality rater, told us things Google asks him to look for. It's straight from the guidelines. Tick the boxes. It doesn’t cost a lot.

Karl Hudson: People just chase quick wins.

James Dooley: Exactly. Treat your site like a real business. That’s number two. Number three is content pruning. People obsess over topical authority but misunderstand it. Topical authority is topical coverage plus historical data. People think scaling topical authority is publishing loads of content. They’re only scaling coverage. No traffic, no historical data, no links, no shares. Thin content. No information gain. They’re using correlation tools and producing copycat content. Not good enough. Some pages need to be removed so the cost of information retrieval is cheaper for Google than for your competition. That’s number three.

Karl Hudson: Yep.

James Dooley: Number four is SPOS and RDF triples. People will ask what that even is. Semantic SEO. Entities and semantics. SPO means subject, predicate, object. The way you structure sentences to get more information gain. Everything comes down to cost of information retrieval. If you get more RDF triples in your content, you rank better. It's a fact. You can add semantic triples, add entities, and rankings improve. SEO still involves maths. Google's algorithm is still an algorithm. People think it's only about good content for the user. It's also about semantics, entities and SPOS.

Karl Hudson: Yeah.

James Dooley: Google primarily uses SPOS, not SVOS, but both exist. Last one is CRO. I'm blessed because I have Rick Op Stat handling a lot of my sites. He gets sites built correctly, call to actions in the right places, brand, UX, everything.

Karl Hudson: Are CRO changes keyword-specific?

James Dooley: Yes. Certain intent keywords need buttons or layout in different places. Another CRO expert is Kurt Phillip from Convertica. Brilliant. Massive uplifts for Shopify, WordPress affiliates, even display ads. He places ads better for higher revenue. Freelancers should use him. Too many people ignore CRO. It's vital for leveraging traffic.

Karl Hudson: I'd add monetisation. SEOs don't look at monetisation enough. Affiliates are tunnel-visioned. They don't build email lists. They don't create products. They don't cross-sell. They don't monetise pixel data. It’s huge. Monetisation could be a two-hour podcast alone.

James Dooley: Monetisation and CRO go hand in hand. They’re both important.

Karl Hudson: Out of your list, would you change the order?

James Dooley: You could put monetisation higher. But content pruning and disavows are probably tied. They’re all important. The real issue is that people aren’t doing any of these.

Karl Hudson: What's one pet hate – outside the top five?

James Dooley: So many affiliate sites have been hit. They’re demoralised. No traffic. Google smashed them. I ask if they've set up Bing Webmaster Tools. They say no. They set it up and suddenly they're getting 1,000 clicks a day. Optimise for Bing. Some sites earn £10k a month on Bing alone. Use Bing for keyword research. And buying an old domain and 301’ing it works better than ever. Even if it’s tanked in Google, Bing still loves links and link velocity. If you’ve been hit, buy a relevant 301, map it, then optimise for Bing while fixing Google issues.

Karl Hudson: One thing people don’t do with links is use enough nofollow links. People obsess over dofollow. Yet they brag about getting Forbes links… which are nofollow. What’s the logic there?

James Dooley: I agree. Nofollow links increase rankings. I've tested it. One site in the lottery niche ranked with ten nofollow links. No dofollow links at all. Google still crawls nofollow. So why leave a footprint by only building dofollows?

Karl Hudson: Let us know in the comments what else SEOs aren’t doing in 2024. Subscribe.

James Dooley: Good. See you soon.