Room 301: What’s Inside Google’s Black Box? with Ryan Jones

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Resources

Some of the resources mentioned in the podcast, as well as some of our own.

• Follow Ryan on LinkedIn
• SEOTesting – Tests SEO changes and tracks their impact on traffic and conversions.
• Ahrefs – SEO tool suite for keyword research, competitor analysis, and site audits.
• SEMrush – Online visibility management and content marketing platform, SEO tools included.
• Keyword Insights – Helps find and prioritise keywords for content creation to maximise impact.
• Google Search Console (GSC) – Monitors website's presence in Google Search results and helps identify issues.
• GA4 (Google Analytics 4) – Tracks and analyses website traffic and user engagement metrics.

Disclaimer: These resources shared are based solely on the experiences of the podcast guest. This is not a sponsored segment or an endorsement.

A Podcast for Business Owners & Marketing Leaders

Room 301 is a monthly marketing podcast brought to you by The Digital Maze, a specialist full service digital marketing agency based in Derby. We discuss ongoing marketing themes, topics and news in the digital marketing industry to help marketing managers (and business leaders) stay ahead of the curve.

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Podcast Transcription

Rob Twells (00:04)

Hey guys, Rob here from Room 301. Today I'm joined by Ryan Jones from seotesting.com. We discuss the critical role of testing and experimentation in SEO, emphasizing how it helps demystify Google's algorithms and allows for data-driven decision-making. And as usual, a lot more than that too. Let's get into it.

Rob Twells (00:27)

Ryan, is testing and experimentation so important within SEO?

Ryan Jones (00:33)

So I think testing and experimentation are important. There's a few reasons to it. I think the first reason is it allows you to open up Google's black box a little bit. We know that, I mean, I'm not gonna go into sort of how many ranking factors there are, because I don't know if anyone actually truly knows the true number of ranking factors, but it allows you to experiment on different things for different business types, different site types, that kind of thing. what...

what works for an e-commerce site might work really well. So like schema markup, kind of just pulling an example out of thin air really, but that might work really well for an e-commerce site, but it might not work so well for a SaaS brand or a content publication site, that kind of thing that brings a lot of traffic in through sort of new outbound content and vice versa. What works for one of those site types might not necessarily work as well for e-commerce. So ongoing.

testing allows you to build a bit of a database. And especially if you've got sort of multiple site types that you work on, allows you to build a bit of a database that you can then fall back on and say, okay, well, we've tested this before. We know that this like over this many tests that we've done, it sees an average increase of this. So we can be pretty confident that this will happen if we make this sort of change. And then thinking about it more agency side or more sort of.

SEO consultant side, think it allows you to get, posted about this on LinkedIn actually yesterday. kind of allows you to move past client fears a little bit. I'm sure you've probably had it a couple of times trying to get something implemented, but a client might not necessarily want to risk the traffic that they do have and say, oh, wow, this is quite, it's actually quite a big page for us. So we don't necessarily want to do this, but.

Rob Twells (02:09)

Yes.

Ryan Jones (02:22)

with testing, you can either lean back on that database and say, well, we've run X number of tests before, we know that on average it does improve traffic rather than decline it, or it allows you to test on a smaller subset of pages first that might be of less risk to them, see what happens. And then obviously if traffic improves from that, then you can say, okay, we can be a lot more confident now in rolling this out to the wider site.

Rob Twells (02:47)

Yeah, I can absolutely see how that would be useful, particularly for us guys running an agency. Do you think it helps prioritise as well? So I think often with SEO, it's very difficult to know where is best to spend your time? What's going to give you the greatest impact? And I guess having a bank of these experiments knocking about gives you really good indication of where to spend your time, right?

Ryan Jones (03:08)

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean, one of our, using SEO testing as an example, one of our sort of marketing strategies is really sort of dumbed down and quite simple, but it's to find what works and double down on that until it basically doesn't work anymore. what we found just for us is we've had quite exponential growth in terms of publishing new content, making sure it's all internally linked correctly, and then updating older content as well.

It sounds like SEO 101 essentially, but it's what's worked for us. And we just continue to do that until it doesn't work for us so much anymore. But yeah, it absolutely can give you that prioritization because you know that certain changes will have bigger impacts. Certain changes will have less of an impact. And I say, if you've got that database sorted from a sort of background of testing, coming from an experimentation background, you're able to draw on that experience and say, well, we know that

these changes generally tend to have a bigger impact. So let's do this first and then we can worry about some of the stuff later.

Rob Twells (04:14)

That's awesome. And you may not be able to answer this Ryan, so let me know. Have you or anybody using the platform conducted any experiments that just have some wildly unique results or anything that really shocked you or surprised you at all?

Ryan Jones (04:30)

Not for, it's probably not something I can answer just because I haven't spent a lot of time looking at like client results or anything like that. But I mean, one of the things that worked for us, I don't know whether we were shocked about it or not, but it like just going back to internal linking, like almost we've got a background of like, I think over 20 internal link tests that we've done just on our site on existing content. think all but one of those tests were overwhelmingly positive.

So it just shows you like, keep doing the basics right, essentially. I know there's a lot of talk now about how like traditional SEO methods don't work anymore, but I've got test history that at least for our site type that it does.

Rob Twells (05:14)

No, And that's something that's really within your control as well, isn't it? That's a key thing that I think a lot of people miss. Well, look, I think that all sounds great and I think experimentation is super important in marketing in general, but actually I think people miss it in SEO because there isn't often that data to back it up. It either has to be manual or you obviously have to consult a tool like seotesting.com, which is obviously where you come from, Ryan, so.

Ryan Jones (05:18)

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, 100%.

Rob Twells (05:39)

that's really

important. Well, looks, anyone that has listened to this podcast before will know that we tend to ask our guests three key questions. And the first question is what's in your toolbox? Now, it doesn't necessarily have to be a tool, although it could be a tool. It absolutely can be a tool or a piece of software. It could be a way of thinking. It could be a framework you use in order to get your job done.

We're all very busy, marketers are notoriously very busy and I think it is good to have a framework or a way of working, also a suite of tools you use in order to get through your work efficiently. So what do you pull on at busy times? How do you get through your workload?

Ryan Jones (06:14)

Yeah, so I do have some

tools lined up. I think the standard one, everyone either has one of the two main ones, which is either Ahrefs or SEMrush. We use Ahrefs personally. I think it's just one of the key SEO suites that you need to have. Content still works pretty well for us. So we do a lot of work with keyword insights as well, just to make sure that we're really focusing on the right pieces of content that's gonna deliver the maximum impact and not necessarily.

publishing pieces of content that sits on the site and does nothing essentially. And then in terms of content research as well, there's also Ask, which is a great tool just to save a bit of time when it comes to creating briefs and that kind of thing. And then moving away from sort of actual tools, I like to come at things with essentially an open mind and not assume that I know everything because I absolutely don't. And I probably know maybe 2 % of what I need to.

But I think it's one of those things that you've got to have in SEO because everything changes essentially on a week to week basis. And I've been involved in things before like a few years ago where what worked for the past six months, a sudden day happens and then all of a sudden that doesn't work anymore. And then you've got to pivot and change your whole strategy essentially because of that. having an open mind is a really positive things about that. And I know there's a lot of talk about like...

Rob Twells (07:30)

course.

Ryan Jones (07:42)

AIOs and that kind of thing. just keeping open mind and learning about all that is going to give you the best outcomes in the long run, I think.

Rob Twells (07:49)

And you mentioned you mentioned content a lot is that quite a key pillar in in the strategy for SEO testing.com

Ryan Jones (07:57)

Yeah,

for us, yeah. it's been, I don't know, can't pull the exact numbers off out of my head, but I know, so when I joined SEO testing, the site was sitting at, I think just over 2000 organic visits a month from Google. And we're at a stage now where we're well over 10,000 visits a month. So nice, nice positive, and obviously we've seen the rev.

Rob Twells (08:20)

You've done your job

well then Ryan. You mentioned some Russian AHRFs and you're using that to back up the pieces of content that you do write. What sort of decision making criteria do you have when deciding what to write and when?

Ryan Jones (08:24)

I like to think so, it could be better but yeah, I like to think so.

So the decision making process, for us it's quite simple because we're a really small team and we can be quite agile with things. But one of our core values is to essentially teach everything we know. So if it falls under that category, so if we can put a piece of content out there, explains how to do something with Google search console or how to do something with GA4, those are two sort of big examples that we're really going deep on at the minute. Or obviously something to do with like how to test in different ways.

and stuff like that, then we're probably going to publish a piece of content on that purely because we don't believe in like gatekeeping information and that kind of thing. don't want anything behind paywalls. We believe in making SEO's jobs easier. So if it's something that we can publish that someone can read, learn something from, and then take something actionable from that, then that's what we'll do. And then, yeah, then we just analyze content as it goes on.

we might see a piece that we thought was gonna do really well and maybe hasn't, and then it'll go into a decision-making process as to what do we do with that? Do we delete it? Do we redirect it? Do we update it and that kind of thing? But a lot of the content that we do publish, especially within sort of testing, GSC, GA4, those kind of topics, they seem to do really well. So we just keep doing that.

Rob Twells (10:02)

Awesome. I love the fact that you referenced a core value as a decision-making criteria there as well. Sounds like the content you write is quite lengthy, quite in-depth, quite informative then, so I imagine it takes a lot of time.

Ryan Jones (10:07)

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah,

can do, can do. We have pieces that can be turned around quite quickly, but yeah, a lot of them are often, it's an ongoing process. we'll start, like a lot of good content projects, I think should start with, we'll start with a sort of brief that gets approved and then it will go into a draft, which I fully openly admit that. So I write almost all of the content that goes on the SEO testing blog, but I'll openly admit that I'm.

I'm not the best writer in terms of, so I don't know how to, I know how things should work in my head. And then I'll put that down on a Google doc and send that to an editor who's much, much better than I am in terms of making things sound sexier almost. And especially when we're dealing with topics like GSC and GA4 and testing and that kind of thing is they're not necessarily the most fun topics to write about, would guess. But yeah, that all goes off to an editor who makes

sometimes hundreds of changes. I'm sure she likes deleting my work and writing her own stuff. Absolutely, absolutely. And then, yeah, that gets published and then distributed. So we'll obviously make sure it's all going on social media. Oftentimes we'll do a video that ties along with that, that then goes to YouTube and that kind of thing. And just making sure we're getting in front of as many eyes as possible.

Rob Twells (11:15)

It depends how well you've done, doesn't it?

Cool. Well, you've had various roles over the last sort of, best part of 10 years, in-house, agency side, and obviously now at stotesting.com. And I'm guessing, I might be wrong, but I'm gonna guess that you've failed quite a lot in that time. I like to ask this question because I'm a big believer in, know, to be honest.

experimentation, experimentation, you can't experiment without failing every now and can you really and at end of the day so I presume it's something you're very used to anyway. But are there any times you've failed that stick out to you and there is bonus points here if it's funny and what did you learn from that and how has it helped you sort of grow in your career?

Ryan Jones (12:16)

Yeah, so I think I've got a lot of the same stories that people will have in the sense that I had this, like, not to give any specific examples, but I had like this great idea and we should 100 % do this. So let's a lot of money into this. I say I'm not gonna go into the actual number because it's quite embarrassing, but I've certainly had my fair share of we definitely need to do this. It will definitely be a good thing. Let's do this. Especially when I was agency side as well. And then it not bringing in the results that were.

anticipated or even expected and then being sort of reamed in a meeting room for the next hour or so by an angry client. But I think probably my biggest failure. So it's a career fail, I would say, but in terms of learning from that, it was a good experience. So I would definitely say my foray into sales as well. kind of left, I didn't 100 % leave marketing, but I kind of divided my roles up. So I was spending some time agency side and

I was spending some time client side working a sort of technical sales role, selling an incredibly, in my opinion anyway, incredibly boring product, which was sort of industrial steel petitioning and steel racking and that kind of thing. And it's certainly safe to say that I wasn't a great salesman at all. So I think...

Rob Twells (13:35)

What made you do that out of interest?

Ryan Jones (13:40)

There's a little bit of it that was burnout from a previous role and kind of wanting something a little bit different and kind of, I was still young enough at that point to try something completely new and hey, if it failed, then it wasn't gonna be the worst thing in the world, which is essentially exactly what happened, but it was all well and good. But yeah, I think in terms of the learning that came from that, obviously,

I do make a big point that I think a lot of marketers should sit in on sales call. A lot of people give that advice as well. It's because at the end of the day, traffic isn't the goal. It's revenue, it's sales, it's that kind of thing. And sitting in with the salespeople is going to give you the best experiences to what customer pain points are and that kind of thing. So learning about the process more in depth definitely helped me, I think, become a better marketer in the end, even though I actually hated the role of doing it.

Rob Twells (14:37)

That's interesting. mean, clearly you've learned not to do it again. I think you're right. I think that's a really interesting point and something that we really push internally here is that commercially minded mindset. know, we click visibility, etc. It is great and it is great. It has its benefits. But actually, if that's not turning into a commercial metric, nine clients out of 10 are still going to be disappointed. So I think it's really important to

Ryan Jones (14:40)

Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

Rob Twells (15:05)

It's all well and good me as a managing director saying that as well, but actually bringing somebody into a meeting and letting them listen to the client and talk about their pain points. they're not talking about, we need more traffic. They're talking, leads are really down this quarter. We need some help getting those up. So when I go back to the team and to speak about taboo things like forecasts and can we estimate the sort of results, it does get a bit tricky, but it's not.

It's not just for the crack. It's because it's, you there's going to be real commercial, sometimes very black and white people who look at this. There's how much we're to pay for this and what are we going to get out. And you have to stick your neck on the line sometimes with a prediction.

Ryan Jones (15:42)

Exactly.

Yeah, 100%. It's all about return of investment at the end of the day. And that's always going to be the biggest thing. Just in terms of like where we come in from when we listen to our customer pain points as well. Obviously it's a bit different for us because we're a subscription-based tool. So we don't do any contract periods or anything like that. So people can use us for as long as we're useful to them. But I mean, I think I initially came at it on the sort of pretext that

or people come to us if they want testing and that kind of thing. And a lot of people do, but a lot of pain points as well that our customers have is time saving. It's like we spend so much time doing these reports and I'm not necessarily sure that like clients understand the reports that we send out or that kind of thing. And I just don't know if we're like wasting time doing this or like how do we find the right thing to do? Cause we all know like marketing is like a really, it's a busy profession.

not many of us have a lot of free time during the day to like experiment and test on new things. So one of, again, our key things is to save people time. And that's where a lot of like the reports come from in the tool as well. It's all come from like some, a customer saying to us, it'd be really cool if I could do this because it'd save me three hours a week or whatever. And we'll go, okay, yeah, we can do that for you.

Rob Twells (17:09)

And I can really see stakeholder management being a challenge for your customers as well. So for instance, me a stakeholder would be a customer, but maybe someone internally, it could be a board level person who's always scrutinizing where are you spending your time? Why are we spending this much on SEO? But actually if you had a bank of experiments and you could justify and back up with data why you're opting to do this rather than this, that's going to be really useful. So I imagine that's a good use case for you guys to talk about as well.

Ryan Jones (17:38)

Yeah, it just helps people feel, especially SEOs feel valued. I think it's one of those ones that can go under the radar, I think a lot with the work going on in the background and clients might just see the sort of traffic gains, but at the end of the day, all they know is what they've spent and what the results have been. They don't necessarily know the work that's gone into it, but we've built a tool that allows you to log things and just say, here's what we've done on a monthly basis. You can see all this work has gone in.

And that's the results that's come out of it. And I think it just gives clients and stakeholders a much broader overview. So it kind of changes that narrative of, okay, we've spent X and we've got X. They now know exactly what's gone into it and how much time it's taken and how much care has gone into it essentially. So it helps SEO just feel much more valued as well, I think.

Rob Twells (18:29)

100 % yeah, absolutely and and last but not not least again You've been in the game a fair while Ryan so I'm guessing there's a lot of things about marketing or even SEO in particular that winds you up so we have built an Imaginary room, but we might build it one day who knows called room 301 301 redirects ha ha you understand Basically, we put things in there that our guests don't like about marketing never want to see it again

What's yours Ryan, what don't you like?

Ryan Jones (19:03)

Yeah, it's a very recent one because it's just started to really sort of gain traction a lot more recently, especially on social media, but I've seen it in blogs as well. But what I would like to put into Room 301 is the term GEO or Generative Engine Optimization. Just because I think from the set, it complicates things way too much. At the end of the day, it's still SEO. SEO will always be there as long as people are searching on things.

And the methods of searching might change. It might become less Google one day. mean, I'm just sort of not necessarily predicting the future and that kind of thing, but it might become less traditional search engine and more chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, that kind of thing. But at the end of the day, if the user is still using something to search for something, then we can still call it SEO. don't think we need to overcomplicate things by saying,

SEO is dead, but GEO is the new thing. It's all just SEO at the end of the day.

Rob Twells (20:02)

I agree. I've also seen a EO, Ampster Engine Optimization. think I agree. Search for me is a broad enough term for it to still be called SEO. I think it's just a bit of a tactic for certain marketers to carve themselves a point of difference, be a little bit polarized.

Ryan Jones (20:05)

Yeah.

It's to get

eyes on the, I call it new things syndrome. It's one of those things that it's brand new, it's exciting. So everyone wants to talk about it, but at the end of the day, it's the same things that we've been doing all this time. It's still publishing new content. It's still getting it distributed. It's still doing PR and that kind of thing. It's still getting brand search traffic up. It's still marketing at the end of the day. It's all marketing. It can all fall under the same umbrella. We don't need to call it any new thing.

Rob Twells (20:50)

It sounds like you're a big believer of the fundamentals and I do think we're shifting, it feels like last, you know, maybe 10 years or so we've gone down this route of marketing where it's funnels and it's very intentional and I think we're moving back towards this leaning into brand, the fundamentals, the content, that kind of thing. Are you of the same view there? Is that something that you're a fan of as well?

Ryan Jones (21:12)

Yeah, absolutely. I've always been, I suppose the best way to say it is I have been a fundamentalist my whole career essentially. And I think I still will continue to be. I'll come at it with an open mind like I do with all things. And I'm not naive enough to say that search won't change in the future. But I think the way people are talking about it now especially is like chat GPT is gonna overtake Google in the next six months or so, which just isn't gonna happen.

I don't know whether you saw the data that came out from Spark, Tara, and ran Fishkin and Datas and that kind of thing, which was essentially coming out that I think Google was still 273X times as big as ChatGPT. And that's factoring in the fact that I think 70 % of all the searches done on ChatGPT are for non-search related activities. So it's stuff that Google can't do basically. It's like.

like help summarize this for me or I need trouble with like I have this coding issue or something like that is 70 % of the search is done on ChatGPT and not search related. So when you actually drill the number down, Google is still number one.

Rob Twells (22:25)

Yeah, it's interesting, like, it's a really good point actually, because a lot of the, I use ChaiGBT all the time and the different models and whatnot, and come to think of it, most of my prompts are, I need you to do a function for me rather than a search, I need you to take something I've already done and make it slightly better. I'm not often looking for raw information, I'll still turn to Google for that.

Ryan Jones (22:46)

Yeah,

yeah, that's the thing. think even when it comes to like changing behaviors and stuff, like my behavior has changed and stuff, but when it comes to search in general, I generally use one of two things and that's, I don't know whether this comes down to my age or not, but it generally is either Google or I will occasionally search for things on TikTok. and I think that has become, especially for more sort of restaurants and that kind of thing and things to do in certain places.

Rob Twells (23:10)

Yeah, I'm a TikTok

searcher. More like, I suppose more tutorials and stuff like that. How to do...

Ryan Jones (23:15)

Yeah, yeah,

or yeah, how to do this and that kind of thing. But when it comes to my chat GPT use, I'm not searching for new information on chat GPT. I'm asking it to make my life easier. I'm not using it to search for new things just yet.

Rob Twells (23:30)

And SEOtesting.com, is that primarily search engine related stuff or do you think it will evolve into the broader scope, the TikToks of this world, et cetera?

Ryan Jones (23:42)

Yeah, at the minute it's still very search engine orientated purely because that's where the bulk of the market still is. I think it'd be a bit naive to say that it won't ever go that way. I think we're just gonna wait to see how the market shifts, how the industry shifts and we'll adapt in that way. But yeah, at the minute we're still very much a Google search console and GA4 tool. So you can use it to log SEO tests and.

One, see how that impacts traffic, but also you can use the GA4 integration and see how that impacts conversions as well, which is always the sort of number one thing that people will go for as well.

Rob Twells (24:21)

Excellent. Well, I could see how it's a super useful tool for agents and in-house people as well. on that note, Ryan, tell the people bit more about you, more about SEOtesting.com and where they can find out more and et cetera.

Ryan Jones (24:36)

Yeah, so if you want to know more about me, I am chatting constantly on almost all the social media platforms, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads, all the... 100%, I think that's the Gen X in me, I think. All the social medias. then, yeah, if you want to learn more about seotesting.com, it's www.seotesting.com. And yeah, if you want to save time and feel more valued, then check us out.

Rob Twells (24:45)

You're a threader and a bluescar.

Brilliant. Well look Ryan, thank you so much for coming on. I think you're great. think at seo-testing.com is really useful for the listeners and I hope anybody listening to this at least goes to the website and checks it out. And there is a free trial isn't there for 14 days. So jump in, start some testing and experimentation and yeah, I forward to hearing everyone's feedback. So thank you all for listening and thank you Ryan once again for jumping on. We'll see you all again soon.

Ryan Jones (25:19)

Yep, absolutely that,

Thanks for having me on.

Rob Twells (25:35)

Awesome.