Many businesses struggle with understanding SEO and trying to implement the right measures to gain value from it. Don’t respond to that sketchy email telling you how bad your site’s SEO is, listen to this episode with our amazing guest, Kevin Roy, an SEO master! Learn how to properly assess your site’s SEO, understand the principles behind SEO, and what to do to get the most out of SEO and get your site to the top of the SERP!   Busted Myths: Unsolicited frightening emails that you get about how bad your SEO rank is are complete crap. These reports, if even accurate, are only a small part of the picture. It’s more important to look at your website’s results than its SEO rank.   Takeaways: Latent Semantic Indexing is one of the ways that Google decides the relevance of a keyword phrase. Google looks for other keywords on a website that support the keyword phrase searched for and considers it when ranking. Google has two jobs, keeping a person using google and satisfying the user, which in turn keeps them using Google. This guides everything that Google does when it comes to SEO. SEO ranking can be broken down into two buckets, the Technical Bucket and the Relevance Bucket. These two buckets are what Google regards when ranking websites. The Technical Bucket includes a site’s speed, mobile compatibility, security, etc. These are all things that improve a user’s experience and Google rewards sites for having a better user experience by ranking them higher. The Relevance Bucket is focused on the instances of the keyword phrase, keywords that support the keyword phrase, and links pertaining to the keyword phrase and its supporting keywords. Some companies panic when they hear that google updates or changes its SEO algorithm every year. About 80% of these updates are just to find fake websites and auto-generated content, so companies don’t have to worry about them. It is important to understand that “buying links” or trying to cheat the system using auto-generated fake content and backlinks doesn’t actually provide relevance or real results and by engaging in this you run the risk of getting caught by Google.  An interesting trend to watch is how apps like Zillow, Truly, etc., not Google, are where people are actually searching for real estate. The same idea can be seen in the world of dating apps, Airbnb, Boat Trader, etc.   Quote of the Show: “If you understand the principles behind SEO, then the methods will start to make sense, but a lot of people try to learn the methods without understanding the principles. So understanding the principle allows you to call bullshit on a lot of the methods” -Kevin Roy    Links: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kevincharlesroy Twitter: @greenbananaseo Ijustmetkevin.com Company website: https://www.greenbananaseo.com/   Ways to Tune In: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hard-corps-marketing-show/id1338838763 Amazon Music/Audible: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/37228621-2f9c-4905-a223-1844effb49dd Spotify:  https://open.spotify.com/show/1vVLpNI1LssMTiL6Kdsamn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-hard-corps-marketing-show Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/m/Im7mytmu2wa2mekhoeixlja5hpe?t=The_Hard_Corps_Marketing_Show YouTube: https://youtu.be/8AGOmEYoMVI