 Okay, let's just take it. Hi everyone, thanks very much for having me. So, this is the second time I've spoken in a voice account. Which is, and I've got the t-shirt to prove it as well. In 2019. All right, so, that's good. So, just a quick bio. My background is SEO. I've done it for a very long time. And I work for a big French ad group. And I manage the SEO for very big Hong Kong brands, like AIA and many others. And I've worked in many different niches. So, that's what I think. What is this talk? So, this talk is all about taking data from Google. And then spinning it. And then putting it back up to Google. And then benefiting from that. So, really, this presentation is about taking data. And then indexing it. Or basically improving it. And then indexing it. And then getting traffic. So, how does this work? I'm going to give you an example. And then at the end of this, I'll give you some real examples of the directories that I've built. So, first off, we need to think of a niche. And for this example, I'm going to use SEO agency Hong Kong. So, what we're doing is we're taking all of the GMB's Google My Business profiles. And we're going to scrape them. And then we're going to spin them. And then we're going to put them back up on Google. So, the first point, though, is to think about the niche. So, maybe just some ideas are solar energy, junk boat rentals, locksmith plumbers, whatever it is. Whatever niche you're in, this can work. And you can get traffic. So, let's talk about the process. So, step one. There's four steps to be. So, step one, data scraping. The tool that I recommend is called phantombuster.com. And you can get a free account. It's very affordable. It's only like maybe 40 bucks a month. 50 bucks a month. But the app that we need within the application is Google Maps Search Export. And that will then scrape the listings from Google Maps. So, the data that we're going to get from Google Maps and all of the business profiles, for example, the types of the business, the URL, the ratings, and all of that kind of thing. Everything you see in Google Maps, we can extract and download for our own benefit. So, the niche that I'm going to do, for example, is Hong Kong SEO agencies. So, on Google Maps, Hong Kong SEO agencies is going to list all of the businesses which have profiles labeled as Hong Kong SEO agencies. And I'm going to scrape all of the businesses which are listed in Hong Kong. So, what we do is we copy and paste the URL of the Maps, and then we put it in the tool. We launch it manual, and then we click launch. It's really, really, really simple. You just have to watch the video on the site. It takes two seconds, and it's very, very easy to do. So, there you can see it's scraping the data. And so far, you see at the bottom of the slide, that 120 or so businesses were scraped, which is exactly what we want. And then we can download the CSV file. So, this is really quite super, super basic stuff. There's nothing complicated here. So, step two, data hygiene and data enhancement. So, we open up the CSV file in, for example, Google Sheets. And then we have all this information, which is all very useful, like the category, the address, all of that kind of thing. But what we want to do is we want to improve this and add value. And then I'm going to get into the SEO bit about this shortly. So, we want to add value to this data that we've just downloaded. So, fortunately, we can turn to AI and, for example, chat GPT can help us with this. What we want to do, and what's missing here, what's missing from this data is, in this example, what's missing is the description of the business. We don't know all of these URLs. We know that they're like an SEO agency, but we don't know what specialization or their background or whatever. So, we need to get that data. And to get that data, there's really three options that I see. Maybe there's a fourth option. I don't know. But the three options I see is, number one, you can go to a human being and hire a virtual assistant to manually copy and paste the props into chat GPT4. That's the basic way of doing it. The second option is to use an adult-like sheet GPT, which is very nice and works great. And then the third one, which is my favorite, is to write a Python script, which will do this for you. Because with a Python script, and by the way, I can't write a single line of Python, but I use a little bit of it. I use chat GPT to write Python scripts for me, and then you can have a file which just has the props. So the prop would be, for example, visit this website and write me 80 words on what this website is about. Then you do that 180 times. Now, why is this important to talk about data hygiene and data hygiene? It's important because I write tens of thousands of words of content every single week using AI. And what I do is I basically use AI to generate the content, but I then remove the footprint. Because the best way to explain the footprint is like an auto prompt on your phone. So AI just predicts the next obvious word in a chain. So it's really good practice, and this is my personal opinion. It's very good practice to spin that. So once you've generated the AI content, it's not good enough. You need to paraphrase it, which is spinning it. And for those that don't understand that, paraphrasing is this. So I am speaking at WordCamp 2023 in Hong Kong. By the way, this isn't AI. This is really, really, really old technology. But this tool is called QuillBot. It's a very good tool. And it spins it. And it's exactly the same meaning that the benefit about this, what I'm saying, is it makes it more human because humans speak in a strange way. Like the way that I speak is unique. The way that your speak is unique. See that fingerprint? It's trying to remove the AI obviousness of the content. So now we have spun the content. By the way, there's 50 slides. So I'm going to talk about classes here. So now we've got our descriptions of our SEO agencies. And then we can just go and create some slugs. That is if we want to have individual pages, like a massive page website, that's what we need to do for that. Right. So now we have our data which has been enhanced and we've got our AI content as well. So data upload. Do you guys, if anyone technical will find this incredibly simple? And anyone who isn't very technical, please don't be scared because it's simple. The plugins I've used before, like I said, I'm going to give you examples of directories that I've built. So two plugins that I recommend are WP All Imports and WordPress Pods, which is custom, which is basically like ACF, advanced custom fields. I just prefer pods. So the first thing we do is we create a custom post type, which they call a pod. And we create the singular label and the plural label. That's all we do. We just create the pod. Once we've created our pod, then we need to create the template for that custom post type. And what we need to do here is to match the fields. We have to match the fields to the Google Sheets. So we then upload the data, the CSV file that we created. Just to go back one slide. Here we create the template of the fields that we're going to use. We upload the data and then we then match the fields. So this is the template that we create. For example, websites, description, title, reviews, anything you want. And then when you upload the data, you simply match the fields. The basic stuff, you just match them. Once you've matched those fields, then you upload and that's it. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. I always recommend doing this on a test website just to make sure that it all works correctly. And then upload it. It's not complicated. You'll get it. So, indexation. This is my expertise. This is what I do. So indexation means basically it's getting your content into Google because the issue at the moment is every single day, you know, millions, trillions of words of content have been produced. Google will not index it. It has to be unique, it has to be interesting, and it has to add value. So what we've done is we downloaded data from Google. So why should Google now index content that was simply taken from there? Well, we're going to figure that one out. So some ideas to get the site. If it's a fresh domain that Google knows nothing about, it won't trust you for a week or it could be one year. It won't trust you. The ways to get your website indexed and online and getting traffic is here are the top five tips. So one, to create Google Search Console accounts in GH4 and then submit your site map to Google Search Console. Submit the home page to an indexer tool like Omega Indexer, which is a very nice tool to get content indexed. You can submit the home page to, you know, Reddit or Twitter because very simply, Reddit gets crawled millions and millions of times by Googlebot. So it's not going to hurt. Try and get backlinks. I'll talk about them in a second. And then another good idea is to create a press release which you can get from Fiverr or the JIT, these two services. This can cost like $30 and it's a very nice way to get the site indexed. Or this is another way of getting the site working in each of these. Go and buy a website with traffic, which you can buy. A very good place to buy them is Facebook groups. This is typically very expensive. These are, you know, five, ten, $20,000 to buy a website with traffic. But on Facebook groups, Discord channels, people are selling their sites. A lot of people give up with their business. Well, that's where we can jump in and then take that. As long as it's in our niche, we can buy that website, put it on directory and this is one way to get traffic. So let's talk about SEO because this is my specialization. It's really not that complicated. A lot of people overthink it and they try and get really creative and crazy ideas and so on. It's not that difficult. And the reason why I've put it, the cards up here is because it's like playing poker. But the difference is I can see your cards and you can see my cards. Why? Because the search results, this gives you the answers. All of the answers are here. Plus I can look at your code, I can look at your back links, I can look at your keywords, I can look at the types of keywords, etc. The very simple way of doing this is like this. Can you honestly put your hand on your heart and say I can beat number one position because I have better content? If the answer is yes, go for it. You probably will. If you feel that you can't, like if you're competing for Amazon sneakers, it's not going to work. Don't bother with it. One tip is this. If Amazon has an answer by Quora or Reddit, then that's good news. That means you can probably win that position. That's just my personal belief. Let's get back to our directory website. The other technique which works, which is very, very 101 SEO at the moment, is what's called topical authority and content clustering. What that means is that we just add authority to the overall concept. This green here, for example, could be the database directory that we filled. To explain this better, this should explain it better. Imagine that we have... This is our image. We have the Hong Kong visa immigration e-gen. That's what we want to get indexed and getting traffic. We can create content that all answers aspects to that topic. Why? Because it adds authority. Each of these can have a certain amount of... If this brings in 30 clicks a month, that's fantastic. That's very good news. This brings in 30, this brings in 100, and this brings in 10. That's good because Google says, okay, this guy is covering all different aspects of the subject. I'm going to give them a chance. That should definitely help. That makes is very, very important. Some people believe that they're losing importance. As long as there's a good link. For example, a backlink from SEMP is always going to be better than Henry's junktruises.com. That's a fact of the matter. There's many ways to get backlinks. Frankly, you can pay for them. You can do guest posts. You can do parasite linking. You can get very creative. But for the purposes of time, I won't get into all of these tactics. The thing to say about links is this. It's a signal of popularity. It's as simple as that. The more links you have, the more basically it looks like you're a popular person and Google wants to know about it. But one link from the SEMP can be worth 100 crappy shitty links that won't do anything. So that definitely helps with indexation. Just a quick word about this. Google releases its... It has to release its patents publicly because that's how the patent office works. And a very, very old patent was all about seed sites. So what's a seed site? Google bot that controls the internet and indexes the websites, it doesn't start at my blog and it goes all the way up and down the internet all day long. It starts at a seed site and an authoritative entity. So for example, if you're in a fashion niche, Vogue.com is a highly trusted entity in fashion. So the Google bot will start its journey here and then it will then go out and see who's linked to Vogue.com. So you want to try to be as close as possible to an authoritative website because, again, this isn't complicated stuff. It's just the closer you are to a niche specific entity the better it is for you. Well, so let's talk about some examples of directories that I've built and there's four of them. So the first one is growthhack.hme which is a kind of a SEO agency that I used to manage about three or four years ago and everything that I've told you about it that we're uploading, it worked really well. So the top page all of these screenshots are from this morning and last night. The top page is this Hong Kong SEO agencies directory and currently the keywords with this domain are Hong Kong SEO company, SEO company Hong Kong, Hong Kong SEO, blah blah blah and all I did was I just springed everyone else's directories, I've stopped the content and I re-uploaded it. Last night's so this tool is quite interesting because Google is always testing, it doesn't just give you position three and good luck to you it doesn't work like that, it's constantly it's constantly testing different results. So for example this tool has 10 IP addresses so there's one person in the entire one person in cycle, three people in central and then it finds the average so for Hong Kong SEO company most people saw me in position two some people saw me in position three the desktop Hong Kong SEO the websites which I built using this directory a few people saw me in position one and a few people in position four and so on, you get the idea it's all about volatility so this website here SEOhero.io what to do. For some people position two, some people position 11 so anyway, this is another discussion I'm just showing you this because it works the point here is it works and there's the screenshots of of this. I'm not showing this to show off or press or anything like that because the truth is I honestly I've done nothing to this website for one year I haven't touched it, I haven't written any content I've done nothing and it's still very high in search engines for Hong Kong SEO again, all I'm doing is validating a theory that this works now, will it work forever? definitely not because Google is constantly doing different algorithm changes all the time I'll talk about this in a second but anyways, what works today will not necessarily work tomorrow however, this has state consistent so it's a good tactic another example is typhoon.hk I got the domain because I just think it sounds cool to generate it and I did exactly the same thing again, identical process with the same tools and all of that and so one example that the niche in that website is drone shops in Hong Kong and so 10 people see me in position one for drone shops in Hong Kong so it's even above the dji.com website and even above fortress so again, it works mobile repair shop 3 people see me in position 5 and look at this guy, he's even got a website devoted to phonerepair.hk.com and I'm beating him with this tactic and then crack mobile phone screen in Hong Kong another example is there's Korean this is just a kind of test I was doing getmekimchi.com and it's a mass-picked website which is targeting the US it's on a US hosting and you see the structure is very nice and clean, this is the kind of thing which Google loves, it's just make Google bots life easy, make it really really easy to understand the content and you'll never go wrong with this so this website is if you type in Korean stores in Texas it does pretty well and this content is I haven't touched this for about 2 years and it's still, this is only like yesterday, and it's still doing you know, okay and this content is not even AI, it's horrible, it doesn't even make any sense but they're ranked okay, so Will this work in 2024? yeah, kind of, gotta be a bit careful it really depends on the niche you're in because there's a lot of updates like every single week Google will kind of tweak the algorithm it won't announce it, it'll just do it but it does announce the core updates which are exactly what we think that is they're the big important updates but one thing which I believe and I do see it all day long is that I just believe that this helpful content update this is going to become more important next year because of the amount of AI generated so that's really important to talk about this is interesting so with the algorithm updates Google gives you some documentation and in January of this year, Google says that we want to see helpful content written by people by human beings for people this is January, in September they changed their tune now it's helpful content created for people not by people so now they're beginning to say we can work with AI but it's going to be helpful useful, that's the important thing I think I spoke about this earlier but we want to remove that because this is my personal opinion we want to remove that footprint of AI using that tool or a paraphraser just to make it more human and this is really big, there's human verification so what's human verification? human verification is called EEAT which is experience expertise authority and trust what is that? that is this, it's human verification because a human being it can't go on a holiday it can't buy a handbag it can't do any of that, we can and typically a human likes to read about the human's experience so this is really important for your content and any business that you do with any aspect of digital marketing to get it in there so how do we do this EEAT again, not that complicated ideally you have a real human working on your brand alright and ideally hopefully that human has citations and credibility online, so for example is a human being that's written an article if they've written it before or they've been quoted or they have a reference or they've tinned so for example, I'm now on Hong Kong website, this is really good because it means that I can link to that so Google knows that I am a real human being and it will connect the dots and it will give you the benefit and that means that you can beat you can beat your competitor by doing this human association so if you want to use schema which I'm sure you will know about which is a little bit code which tells Google hey, these words are a human being's name so SGE SGE is a search generative experience which in Thailand this was launched in Thailand two days ago so it's rolling all around the world and this is going to change everything or not, it really depends on many many things but one of the challenges for all of us in this room if we have digital assets which I'm sure we all do is the first of, one of the thick fears is zero conflicts because if I get the answer what's the point of me going to your website but it's slightly another subject for another time but in summary so far the concept and the method that I've shared it works today and it should be okay for you and the final thing I'll say is that it really really depends on the niche that you're in the more kind of long tail and uniqueness then the more that your directory can actually add value to the conversation and you should do okay that's it okay thank you any questions or could you tell us more about the long tail yeah could you tell us about the long tail of Q and Q and why is it so we can get more value to the conversation yeah okay so let's add more value to the conversation because it's a good question because if you think about it AI people are simply taking existing content and they're just basically doing writing the same article for example top 10 junk trips in Hong Kong it's the same content adding value means introducing new concepts and new ideas to the conversation that's much more interesting so the directory piece I did that I've shown maybe it's not enough to simply just write content about the business maybe just try and consciously make that conversation and say that these 10 agencies are similar because of this reason they are pioneering AI in Hong Kong which has these results for that industry in summary what I'm trying to say is just add value to the conversation make it interesting as for long tails long tail in my opinion has a lot more clickability and intent because if you rank for hotels in Hong Kong for example figure that example if you do like car hire in Hong Kong it's okay but if you rank for car hire in Lantan or car hire in Shenwan for example that's someone who wants to hire a car in that place so there's more intent Thanks everyone