From Trial Attorney to English Teacher to SEO Expert

Kyle told me he got into SEO about 11 years ago. I asked if he was transitioning from something else or if that was his first thing.

In a previous life, Kyle was an attorney. He was a trial attorney and was in court every day. He did that for about four years, then took a year off. That year off turned into five years off.

During that time, he was teaching English in South Korea. While there, he started a web design and development company on the side. That grew, and from there he got into the marketing aspect of it. He was a much better marketer, or at least a much better SEO, than he ever was as a general contractor for websites.

This was back around 2010. He started a company in South Korea with a Korean business partner, and it needed a pretty complex website. He had to go through a lot of developers to find a group of guys that could actually do it.

Once he had them, he realized they'd built this site and it was really complex. More complex than any other website out there. He had this core group of guys that could build sites, and he was like, well, maybe I should just general contract websites. That's what he started doing.

In that process, he heard of this thing called SEO. They built sites for people, and he was like, maybe we could get $100 a month or $200 a month out of them going forward, providing hosting and tech support and then also SEO.

The Indian Jail Story

Here's where things get wild. Kyle brought his brother in. They decided to open up a company in India. They got raided by the police, and his brother ended up in jail.

I had to hear the full story.

They were told they were going to get a shakedown from the police because that's just how it works. A shakedown for a bribe, for money. That's how business works in a lot of the world.

The police show up at the door. They knock and say they'd like to see the papers. Kyle's brother says okay, here are the papers. They say these are the wrong papers. He's like, okay, how much do you want?

But instead of asking for the bribe, they put him in handcuffs and throw him in jail.

Then the chief of police goes, look, these could be the right papers, I don't know. But you have two choices. One, you can leave town tomorrow. Or two, you can sit in jail and wait for the magistrate to come, and the magistrate will sort it out.

Kyle's brother goes, well, when does the magistrate come? The chief of police goes, I don't know. Kyle's brother goes, I think I'll leave town tomorrow then.

He gets back to the office. Their employees have fled because obviously they don't want to be involved in this. He grabbed what he could, and they got him out of the country. Because they didn't have any employees, they were hemorrhaging clients.

Kyle's brother goes, look, I can take these four because he can code. Kyle doesn't code. They had just taken on a few SEO clients. Basically, for Kyle to pay rent next month, he needed to learn SEO that day and figure out what he could do to keep those clients.

That's basically what he did. It turned out he was pretty good at it. He was able to reach out and get some more clients. He was very fortunate meeting his business partner on a project, and they decided to start an agency. They actually worked together for about a year before they ever met in person.

Kyle said when you tell the story of your life, one, you're always the hero. But two, it seems linear. In the moment, there were a lot of ups and downs. Getting his brother out of India overnight was not a fun or cheap experience.

He put about $30,000 into that company, and that was a point in his life where he had $31,000 total. Falling back on law was an option, and that's not the worst fallback plan, but it was something he didn't want to do whatsoever.

So he figured out how the SEO game works. He took to it rather quickly. The rest is history from there. The agency took off, and from the agency, the other companies all spun off.

Building the Agency to Sell

I asked Kyle when he first started the agency, did he think it would ever get to where it is now? Did he have a big vision for it, or was it just something to do?

The company was started with the idea that it wasn't going to be a forever job. It was going to be built to sell. They did a merger about a year and a half ago, which was nice.

Now he's on the board more of the agency than running the day-to-day. But that took about eight years to get to that point where they actually had something that could be acquired or merged with another company.

It takes a lot to figure out how to run a company. Most agencies are just a book, and that's not really something anybody wants to buy because they could just do marketing and get your book.

Structuring the company in a way that it would be something somebody would want to merge with took a lot of effort and time. You have to figure that stuff out. Having the structure in place, having a repeatable sales funnel in place, a sales team where you have steady leads and you're closing things. Also having IP that goes with the company as well.

Those things had to be established in order to have an agency that could be merged or acquired. There was a lot of work that went into that. In the process, realizing this wasn't their forever company is where they were encouraged to start Page Optimizer Pro as a separate company. They peeled that off of the agency and ran that, and continue to run it as a completely separate company.

Pop is not Kyle's forever job either. You really have to build things with the idea of selling.

The Reality: You Don't Get Paid Until You Sell

Kyle made a point that really hit me. One of the biggest things people who start their own companies will learn is that you don't really get paid until you sell.

For example, they have multiple servers in Page Optimizer Pro. About six months ago, Kyle figured out a way where they could save about $4,000 a month. That's great, that's lovely. But that $4,000 doesn't really go into your pocket.

The value of that $4,000 doesn't get realized until there's a merger or an acquisition. If you think about it, you can do about 5X on revenue. So that $4,000 is $48,000, just under $250,000. That's a quarter million dollars what that idea is worth.

But Kyle's not going to see that money until there's an actual event where the company's bought or sold. Whenever you have those great ideas or you have those things going on, it's only worth something at the end.

You really should be building all of your companies with the idea of some sort of acquisition or merger.

Advice for Agency Owners Looking to Sell

I asked Kyle what advice he'd give to someone like me who's maybe a more beginning agency owner looking to eventually get sold or potentially do a merger.

You have to have a predictable sales cycle. If you get up to clients that are above a couple thousand a month, you're into the four, five, six, even plus clients. The sales cycle takes a long time, probably four to six months.

You have to have a way where you get information out in front of them. They start to watch your stuff or however you're marketing yourself. They watch your podcast or your YouTube show. They get to know and like you because people still buy from people.

You have to have that face of the company that's getting out there and presenting who you are and what you do. You need a point of view.

"If you don't have a point of view then you're just another agency and then you're probably um just uh a price differential or maybe how quickly you deliver but people even know why they would come to you," Kyle explained.

This is the pest control podcast, the SEO podcast. That's excellent. Pest control is where I'm at. That makes sense to a lot of people. They know I have my expertise in that, so I have a brand and a point of view.

But a lot of people don't have that. It's not necessarily niching down into something, but just having why should somebody come to you? What is it that you're going to talk about that might be different from the crowd? If you don't have that, then you really don't have anything.

You need something proprietary that you've done, something that you're doing that is your own that could be sold as IP. Then your SOPs have to be remarkably tight so that if there's a key person within your company that leaves, the company's not going to fold because somebody else can step into that role and do it very well because there's an SOP that a well-trained cocker spaniel can follow and be rather successful with.

The last thing is you have to sell on the up. Everyone thinks about selling when the company goes flat or down a little bit. They give this pitch of with your vision, the company was doing well back here and you can bring it back up. Nobody's buying.

They only buy when you're on the up and you can show that the up will continue. Then their thought process is, oh, I can bring in my innovation and it'll go even higher. You can never time the market, but you can see when things are going really well. If you've tapped out or you've got to a certain level, that's probably a good time to sell when you're on the upswing.

Everything Can Be in an SOP

I asked Kyle what goes into a good SOP because I hear all the time that there's so much in SEO where you have to make a decision. How do you put that in an SOP?

Kyle's answer was blunt: that's absolute garbage that you can't. Every time he hears that, people say because they want to think it's mystical or magical or there's this art to it.

There are decision tree times for sure, but they're pretty binary. If you see this, then it's that. If you see this, then it's that. Your SOP can fork from there, and then you go down a certain thing.

But everything, literally everything, can be in an SOP. The SOP should be done in a way that it would take minimal training for somebody to look at that SOP and be able to follow it.

You want an SOP for everything. Even if it's something fairly routine for you, if you don't have an SOP, you are reinventing the wheel every time you do it. You have to rethink about the process. That takes mental energy, that takes time. You're wasting time and money by not having it written down in a very tight SOP.

It should be done so that the next person comes in. You should be taking responsibility off of your plate so you can grow your company, not figure out how to build local citations. Somebody should be able to follow your SOP on how you want those local citations done, done in such a way that when they check all the boxes, it's been done correctly.

Kyle runs things through a SaaS platform. There are going to be videos for things that need to have videos and then a Google doc as well, usually with extra information. That's all in the little description, and then you go through and tick the boxes.

If you have staff and you're training somebody, the best thing to do is have them send an email to you like they were sending an email to the client explaining what they did and why it's important, what was accomplished, and what it looks like.

You'll find out if they understand what they're doing or not. You'll find out where the holes are. You teach them, and then have them rewrite that email. They continue to rewrite the email until they get the words right, and then you know they understand what they're doing.

One other thing Kyle recommends: if you've got a staff right now, let's say you've got some VAs doing work for you, have them write the SOP that they're working on. Then you'll see the holes in their game, the things you thought you told them to do that they're not doing. That also saves you from doing the SOP, and then you're coming through and editing.

The last point on SOPs: they're not biblical texts. They are living documents and they should change. They're not written down once in stone. As things evolve, your SOPs should evolve. As you learn new techniques or things might tweak or things might change, that's the opportunity to change the SOP so you have current SOPs.

When you want to have an acquisition, the person stepping in who will be buying it from you knows they can now run this company without you being there.

How to Reduce Churn with Better Reporting

Kyle's been running his agency for over 10 years now. I asked what other advice he can give on reducing churn for an agency.

One of the biggest things they did that was really successful was in your reporting, benchmark how the page you're working on was doing before you started your work.

A lot of clients get to the idea of what have you done for me lately. You might have taken a client from zero to a million in whatever metric you're caring about, but if you have a flat month, they're going to be like, well, what's going on? It's like, well, hey, it was a flat month and flat months happen.

But if on the reporting you show where that page was performing before you started, those conversations usually go away. For example, this page is getting 10 clicks a month and you're getting one conversion and it was ranking for five keywords. Then now it's ranking for 200 keywords, you've got 500 people coming, and you're getting 20 conversions, whatever the numbers might be.

On all the reports and all the pages, they put where that page was performing before they started. When clients are looking at that report, they're getting reminded of how good this work is. You were all the way over there. So if you have a flat month or things are slightly down, they're not freaking out because they can remember because you presented it to them how that page was when you started.

That has been a really great thing.

The Power of Longer Contracts

Shifting to longer contracts is harder to land people obviously because it's an easy sell when you start off saying we don't lock you into contracts and if you're not happy you can leave at any time. Everyone starts with that.

What ends up happening in that situation is that you are reapplying for your job every month and you're going to make shortsighted decisions because you're going to have to try to show that you did something shiny and flashy and amazing.

When you have a longer contract, you can make more longer-term decisions. Okay, we're going to get this process started now, but this is a four-month process for this to be able to see any benefit. That's fine because you've got a longer contract.

Getting people into longer contracts is excellent. When they were on month-to-month contracts, their average person probably stayed with them for somewhere between 11 and 13 months.

Going to six-month contracts, that immediately went to like 19 to 20 months of an average client.

The other thing you get too are clients that are funded. Most humans live their life month-to-month in terms of the amount of money they're making. Most businesses live month-to-month. They honestly don't know where they're going to be in three months, and it's hard to make a commitment.

But companies that can make those commitments are funded. They already have the money. If there's a slight turn in the market or in the economy, they're not overly stressed about it because they're already funded for their activities for the year. You just get better-run companies, and that will reduce your churn as well.

The Birth of Page Optimizer Pro

I asked Kyle to tell me about Page Optimizer Pro. He started that about eight years ago. What made him start it and how's it been going?

They were solving their own problem. They were using a piece of software for on-page and were having really good success with it. Then they changed it. They changed the software and took out the feature they were using.

Kyle asked if he could roll back his version to the previous version that had the feature they were using. They said no. They were like, actually that feature is not really good anymore. Nobody uses it. It's not beneficial.

Kyle was like, can I buy it though? Can I buy that feature from you? They said no, we're not going to sell it. Kyle was like, okay, I'll just build my own then.

Initially, they were doing everything by hand. Kyle had written this algorithm for determining what you needed in different areas on the web page. They were doing the whole thing by hand. After they did two of them by hand, they realized they can't do this by hand.

His other co-founder Maria wrote a script. They were doing it within Google Docs. That was going fine until you run four or five and you break Google Sheets.

Maria goes, I think this should be a Python script and I think I can learn Python. She went out and learned Python in two weeks. In week three, she wrote the first script that became Page Optimizer Pro.

For a while, they ran that on the back end of their agency website. Then they started crashing the agency website. People were putting in a keyword and a location and their email, and they were emailing them a report.

That's when they realized they need to get a real Python dev in here. They built the first SaaS, and that was in right around May or April of 2018.

People really started using it. It was pretty crazy. They got to the point where they had to charge because the server expense was getting up there. Kyle was like, hey everybody, we need to charge a dollar a report if that's cool.

So they did. In that first month, it was June of 2018 when they started. In that first month, they made $2,600, which meant they did 2,600 reports. It blew Kyle's mind.

Within three months, Pop was paying for itself and all of its development. That just really blew his mind as well.

They now do more than 2,600 reports a day. A lot more a day. They're pushing close to two million reports run.

The whole thing was pretty wild, and it's definitely been the most fun project Kyle thinks he's ever worked on. Running a SaaS tool though is a completely different animal than running an agency. Churn is a whole different thing. You're dealing with more MRR and ARR numbers to see if your company's healthy or not, how much you're investing in development versus how much you're investing in marketing.

They've gotten lucky in that Kyle does a lot of shows like this podcast. He's on a lot of YouTube shows and podcasts. He does usually a healthy speaking circuit every year. That's been really good for them to move their marketing where they haven't had to spend as much on marketing and could put more into development.

The tool's completely bootstrapped. They've never taken a loan. They have no debt. The tool's been funding its own development plus paying salaries. It's been a really good project.

What Page Optimizer Pro Actually Does

For people who don't know, Page Optimizer Pro is an on-page SEO tool. The idea is you put in the page that you want to optimize, and then they tell you which words Google wants to see and how many times and in which places so that Google will like your page more than your competitors and you'll show up higher in the SERPs.

They're laser-focused on on-page. They have a lot of features, but they're all dedicated to on-page SEO. They're not going to tell you your backlinks or what your domain authority might be or your domain rating. They're not going to get into those things because that's not what they do.

They're not looking to be an all-in-one tool. They think they've gotten on-page down pretty well, and they think their technology is better than just about anybody else's technology when it comes to determining stuff for on-page. That's what they're really focused on. All the features they release are all dedicated to on-page SEO.

How Important Is On-Page SEO?

I asked Kyle in terms of all aspects of SEO, how important is on-page versus off-page versus branding? How important is it and how big of a role does it play?

Kyle's answer was perfect: the only page that you can't rank is a blank page.

On-page is extremely important in that you have to have words on there so Google knows what your page is about and that they know to decide if they like your page better than other pages and if it's the type of page they're expecting.

After that though, there is a point where on-page does end in terms of how Google evaluates pages. Then you do need external signals from there.

But Kyle can tell you that the better that your on-page is, the fewer external signals you need generally speaking. If it's an easier term, meaning not a lot of people are going after it or there's lower search volume for the term, often on-page is all that you need to get that done.

In SEO tests, Kyle's taken a blank page and thrown 20,000 links on it with a target keyword. That page will not rank for that keyword. You do have to get something on there. In a sense, on-page might be the most important because the words do have to be on the page in order to rank a page.

Google Ranks Pages, Not Websites

People very new to SEO, when Kyle talks to people that are quite new and maybe they want some consulting, they'll say I want to rank for this particular keyword. Kyle's like, okay, what page on your site are you optimizing for that term?

You'll often hear just crickets. They'll be like, I'm optimizing the website. It's like, well, that's not exactly right. Google doesn't rank websites. It ranks web pages.

If you have a concept or a term that somebody would search for in Google and it's really important to you and your business, you have to have a page that you've dedicated to that concept. That's where Pop comes in. They can help you write that page so you can get the right words on there so that Google knows you offer that product or that service and Google will understand that and will like the page you put out so it'll rank it higher than your competitors.

I told Kyle that's such a good nugget. Google ranks web pages and not websites. In terms of the home service local business sphere, this is the location pages. Those are the money keywords like pest control Portland or pest control Houston.

Most local businesses are trying to rank their homepage, and even some of their SEO agencies are trying to do that. When really, ranking their location pages is by far the most valuable.

Kyle agreed. You need that individual page. If you've got a particular type of pest control, maybe for termites might be different than for lizards. You might have those different services that you offer. Maybe you've got different spray schedules or maybe emergency services. You'd have all those things and you'd have your locations as well because those are all probably terms that you want to win. You're going to have to have an individual page for those.

A quirky thing in SEO with Google is that sometimes Google just loves a homepage. It'll rank the homepage and just latches onto that. You still should have that internal page for that particular service. You still should optimize that. You still should send backlinks to it and get those external signals.

What happens is Google just continues to rank the homepage. But you will have more success if you've got that internal page rather than the homepage.

The homepage should be a business card. Who you are, where you're located, about you. Then you should have what they call schema, which is words that search engines look at. You should have schema on the page identifying that you are a local business and you're here and you're founded by this person. You've been in business this long, all that kind of stuff that goes into schema.

That helps Google understand, oh, this is a pest control company in Dallas. This is what they do. These are their opening hours. That helps Google understand who you are and put you into service. That should be on your homepage. Then you should have services and products and locations on internal pages after that.

The SEO Testing Patent

Four years ago, Kyle got a patent for SEO testing. I haven't heard of any SEOs in the space get a patent, which is super impressive. I believe he's done over at least 350 tests now. I wanted to ask him what he's learned from all this SEO testing.

He's learned a lot. The biggest thing is that things don't change as much as people think they do.

"I think that statement like Google changes all the time just really comes from a lack of knowledge," Kyle explained.

The core part of Google doesn't change. Now Google does pull the lever and they turn the dials a bit. Most of that is on the periphery where they're going after people that are trying to game the system.

The other thing they do is they might decide they just don't like a particular type of site. Somebody that's hiding who they are and they're selling supplements to seniors. Google wants to know is this a real company. There are a lot of people that don't want to show that it's just some dude in his basement selling stuff off of Amazon.

Google will do something to get those sites out of the SERPs, and often it's not fair because sites that are not doing that will sometimes get wrapped up by Google to become part of the carnage of a particular update.

But by and large, what Kyle's learned through testing is things stay primarily the same when it comes to how things rank, how Google evaluates a web page, how it looks at external signals. They just kind of turn the dials on what they like a little bit more here or there.

When people don't have the ability to test or they don't have somebody they're talking to that is testing, they usually start to freak out because they just don't know what's happening.

As we know, in the last year there have been some massive updates in the industry that have really shaken things up for particular types of sites. But Kyle's run through all his original tests from back in 2015, looking at does Google look at the H1, the H2, is Google looking over here, what about this or that. All those things, all those foundational things have remained the same.

What Really Happened with the Recent Updates

I asked Kyle to talk more about the recent changes in the past few years. What's been going on in his analysis?

Late last year there was the Helpful Content Update which really shook up a lot of things. Then there was the March Core Update of this year which also shook up a lot of things.

If people are not familiar with the term affiliate site, an affiliate site is a site that ranks for a term like best vacuums 2024. Then somebody will go to the site and be like, okay, here are some vacuums. They'll look and say I like this vacuum, I want to buy it. When they click to buy, they get taken to another website to complete the purchase, for example Amazon. Then they'll make the purchase there.

The person who has the site gets a commission sale. Google hates those sites. Google's been hostile to those sites for five or six years. What it looks like in the last two big updates is that Google really decided to drop the hammer on them and get rid of them.

Google doesn't like it from a user perspective. If there's a problem with the vacuum, where can this person go to get help? An unsophisticated user will think they're going to go to that original website that sold them on the idea of the vacuum, and that guy's going to say I have nothing to do with this, you need to talk to Amazon. That's going to be very confusing.

What if they're harmed by the vacuum? The vacuum turned on them and now they're hurt. Who can they go for redress? The person that sold them on that vacuum is going to say they had nothing to do with the sale of that vacuum.

What Google's looking for are companies that are actual companies that are taking responsibility for the things they're selling, the words they're putting on the page. Two of the biggest things they're looking for: who's responsible for this website and who's responsible for this content? Are there real people? Is there a real entity behind this thing?

Sites by and large, a lot of those people don't want to show who they are and they don't want that responsibility, understandably so. But as a result, Google does not want them in the SERPs. Those last couple updates have done a good job of removing them.

Now in the industry, a big question is how did they do that? Google likes to say or likes you to believe that they did it algorithmically, meaning they have a bot that's gone to the page and that bot can see what this is and it's the type of thing they don't want and they removed it.

Kyle doesn't think that's what they did. He thinks what they did is more manual. There might be a bot that's thrown off red flags, but he thinks what they've really done in a lot of cases is they've manually done this. They've gone through and said, okay, I don't like these sites, and they put those sites on a naughty list. In that naughty list, they've either been knocked down in ranking or they've been removed entirely.

The reason is that a lot of the things that they hate are things that are very difficult for them to identify by a bot. He thinks they needed to make a big splash and put a lot of fear into the industry that you shouldn't do these types of sites.

It's not like you're breaking any laws. There aren't Google police knocking on your door to say this is evil or wrong because it's not. It's just that Google doesn't prefer these sites in their search results.

What Kyle thinks they've done to try to scare people away from building more sites or doing it again is to make this very big, loud splash in late last year and then the first quarter of this year in order to get rid of these sites. It's been effective.

The last eight months has been some of the saddest Kyle's seen in the industry with a lot of people losing their sites and getting upset.

Now people that are in pest control, real things, they've got who they are out and their certifications. You contact them and they're actual people. Kyle's sure if somebody is in the pest control space listening to this, they don't even know what we're talking about because their sites weren't affected in the slightest.

Google is happy to see that you can show where your address is and you've got a phone number and you've got an email and reviews that are real reviews of your service. That shows you're an actual thing. This stuff has only really affected these affiliate sites and maybe some content sites as well just trying to tell you where to travel, that kind of thing.

E-E-A-T: The Bottom Line Is Trust

I asked Kyle to explain E-E-A-T and how that affects local businesses.

The bottom line on both of those is are you a real thing? Are you taking ownership and responsibility? You need to show a bot that you're real.

The bot is going to come through and look for some things. That's going to be an address, that's going to be an owner, that's going to be a team. The about us page. The meet the team page. Different email addresses if necessary. Some companies need email addresses for returns and refunds and PR and stuff like that. Those would be all different departments. Do they have those kind of things? Do they have privacy policies? Do they have disclosure in terms of services?

It's never one thing to tick the box with E-E-A-T. It's doing enough to show that for your particular niche or whatever you're selling or doing, you've met the industry standard according to Google to establish trust.

The biggest thing is just trust. Can Google trust this site? Should the site be in the search results in the first place? That's what that is.

Initially, it started off with what they call your money or your life sites. Those are sites that deal with finances or health. Then it spread to pretty much every other site. It's probably triggered by some level of traffic. Once your site gets up to a certain level of traffic, it probably triggers an E-A-T check to see, okay, you're getting a lot of traffic now, are you a legitimate thing?

The more that you can show Google that you're a thing that exists, a real thing that exists in time and space, the better off you are. Again, it's not one thing, not one aspect, but it's doing as much as you can to show that you're real.

For a pest control company, this would be showing your address, showing who your founder is, having a local phone number, those email addresses. It's not just a weird contact form on one page that probably goes nowhere. You've got multiple modes of contact.

Having your Google Business Profile, formally known as GMB, having that completely filled out and done correctly. The address you're putting on your website, you're also putting into your schema, you're also having in your Google Business Profile, and all of that matches. You should care and you've got local citations. Maybe there's a pest control board or certification that you have, and you've got that going.

All that information is consistent across the web and it's consistent on your website. Those are the kind of things that show that you're trustworthy. If you do enough of that, then you should pass E-E-A-T.

E-E-A-T is one of the things also that if you do it, your ranking is not going to go up. A lot of people said, hey, I did all the E-E-A-T signals you talked about and my rankings didn't go up. Well, they're not ranking factors at all. But they're the kind of things that help you keep your ranking once Google does a check.

If somebody's like, I don't believe in any of that, that's fine with Kyle. He doesn't worry about anybody else's website or anybody else's SEO. But all those things are also trust signals. If somebody's coming to your site and you want them to contact you, they're looking for all those things anyway.

At a minimum, these are good things to get the sale, to get somebody to call your service, to hire you. Kyle thinks it's things you should probably have. Even if you don't believe him, which there are some people, you should do this in the first place.

You should show the people that you want to hire you that you're real. Whether or not you believe Google's checking or not. But Kyle can tell you that Google is checking. It usually takes about a half a day to a day to get all this done anyway. It's usually not terribly tricky if you're a legitimate business and you're registered somewhere as you should be. You should be fine. Just get it done and get on your website.

Schema: The Most Important Thing

I asked Kyle how important schema is. I think that's kind of controversial.

The most important thing is organization schema. That says who you are. Are you a nonprofit? Are you a church? Are you a pest control company?

Google doesn't look at websites. It doesn't have eyeballs. It can't just glance and be like, oh, this looks good or I understand what this is about. It has to try to decipher all that information.

The easier you can make it for Google and any other search engine, the better. All search engines have agreed that they can understand schema. Schema basically says within code, so it's underneath the text, it's something you wouldn't see as a human, but it identifies this is the name of our company, this is when we were founded, this is who founded us, this is when we're open, this is our address, these are the locations we service, these are the people that we work with, etc. You can list a lot in schema.

You definitely want that as a minimum. For pest control, you'd have to go as a service business. Then do that. That's what you would use there.

For the humans that work in the company, especially the most important ones like the founders, the CEOs, that level, and then anybody who's writing content on your site, Kyle would have author bios for them. He'd have person bios for them.

After that, the only other thing he would really worry about would be if you're actually selling a product because there is product schema. But if you're doing pest control, that's probably just more service-based, and that's not anything you need to worry about. He would just do the organization and then schema about your people, and then you're good to go.

Why AI Won't Kill SEO

I had to ask Kyle about AI and ChatGPT coming into search. Do you think that's going to take over Google or what do you think that's going to look like?

In 2022, Kyle thinks AI was supposed to kill SEO. Then in 2023, it was also supposed to kill SEO. Then eight months ago, it was also supposed to kill it. It just really hasn't happened.

That's because his entire career, SEO has died every six months. This is just the one thing.

AI is great at helping you get content out fast for sure and come up with content ideas. It's excellent for that. If you consider a lot of the stuff as like a good first draft, that's a great way to approach it.

The people that have gotten burned by AI are the people that were like the three-cent-a-word kind of copywriters out of the Philippines. The content farms over there. AI killed them. But otherwise, AI really hasn't done that much.

The reason is that AI can't do SEO. All that it can do is it can help you produce things faster, which is still phenomenal. But if you're bad at SEO, all it'll do is help you do bad SEO faster. It's not going to magically fix your SEO problems. You can't push a button and now all your stuff is ranking perfectly.

If Kyle were a gambling man, which he is, the language models that we have now in this version of AI will be gone in two years. It's going to be replaced with something else. That might be more interesting, but he still doesn't think we'll have anything where you're pushing a button and all of your stuff is ranking perfectly.

We're also never going to be in a situation where there isn't an algorithm doing the ranking. As long as there's an algorithm, that means there's going to be optimization.

While the landscape might change a little bit, if you're not locked into a particular tool or a technique necessarily for SEO, but you're looking more at the framework of it and why we're doing what we're doing, whatever tool comes along, whatever new thing comes along, it'll fit within that framework and you'll be very successful.

A lot of people right now are getting out of SEO because they're nervous. That's great because in the times throughout micro history where Kyle's seen this happen, where people freak out and they run away, that's where money is made.

Right now is a time for opportunity. All his businesses are doing just fine, even despite a lot of people complaining and a lot of services going down. His are doing just fine. If you're getting through this maybe slight downturn in the economy of SEO, things will bounce back in three, four, five months, and you'll be in a great position to make a lot more money.

For Kyle, he's not worried about AI. He's not worried about whatever the next AI is that's coming out. They'll have things they can adapt. There are things they need to use, but it will be just things they're using. It won't completely take over the industry.

My Main Takeaway

The biggest thing I learned from Kyle is that SEO testing beats guesswork every single time. Kyle has run over 350 tests and gotten a patent on his SEO testing method. What he's learned is that the core of Google doesn't change as much as people think. The foundational things from 2015, like does Google look at the H1, the H2, all those things have remained the same. Google just turns the dials a bit. When you test instead of guess, you can make decisions based on data rather than fear or speculation. That's the difference between agencies that grow and agencies that churn clients every 11 months.

The second takeaway is that Google ranks pages, not websites. This seems obvious, but most local businesses are trying to rank their homepage when they should be creating individual pages for each service and each location. If you want to rank for pest control Portland, you need a dedicated page for that. If you want to rank for termite control versus general pest control, you need separate pages. A quirky thing in SEO is that sometimes Google just loves a homepage and will rank it anyway, but you'll have more success if you've got that internal page optimized and sending backlinks to it.

The third insight is that you don't really get paid until you sell. Kyle figured out a way to save $4,000 a month on servers for Page Optimizer Pro. That's great, but that $4,000 doesn't go into his pocket. At 5X revenue multiples, that's worth a quarter million dollars, but he won't see that money until there's an actual merger or acquisition. This completely changes how you should think about building a company. Every company should be built with the idea of selling. You need a predictable sales cycle, a point of view, proprietary IP, tight SOPs, and you need to sell on the up when things are going well.

The fourth thing that struck me is that everything can be in an SOP. Kyle said it's absolute garbage that you can't put things in an SOP because they require decisions. Every decision tree in SEO is pretty binary: if you see this, then it's that. Your SOP can fork from there. Even if it's something routine for you, if you don't have an SOP, you're reinventing the wheel every time, wasting mental energy and time. A well-trained cocker spaniel should be able to follow your SOP and be successful. That level of systematization is what allows you to scale and eventually sell.

The fifth lesson is about what really happened with the Helpful Content Update and March Core Update. Kyle doesn't think Google did this algorithmically with bots. He thinks they manually put affiliate sites and content sites on a naughty list because it's very difficult for a bot to identify these things. They made a big, loud splash to scare people away from building more of these sites. But if you're a real business with a real address, real phone number, real team, real reviews, you weren't affected at all. The bottom line on E-E-A-T is trust. Can Google trust this site? Show that you're a real thing that exists in time and space, and you'll be fine.

If you want to learn more from Kyle, check out PageOptimizerPro.com for the software, HighVoltageSEO.com for the agency, and IMG.courses for his courses and community where you can ask him questions directly for $97 a month. You can also find him at KyleRoof.com and on LinkedIn. Kyle's journey from trial attorney to getting his brother out of jail in India to building multiple million-dollar companies and getting a patent for SEO testing is proof that when you test instead of guess, you win.