Rob Timmermann, founder and CEO of Timmermann Group, was the next SEO I went to chat with in St. Louis. He started the company in 2003 as a web design agency before doing online marketing consulting. In 2006 he got into SEO by trying to drive leads to his own business, which is unlike most SEOs I talk to who got into SEO because clients asked him.
Rob then talks about sites that should not rank. Such as some people who come to him with poor web sites and/or poor content and they expect they should rank. But often their reputation offline is not the same as their online reputation. So Rob has to tell a lot of people that their web site sucks and give them a plan of action to make it better.
He said 80-90% of the time they spent time fixing the web site issues versus building the site up from an authority basis. A classic mistake he sees is that someone will come to his firm after the site is built and then “implement SEO.” But that is backwards, you need to start your site build with SEO in mind.
He said a lot of his clients are now coming to him because of these core updates. His firm runs an SEO audit and communicates those issues to the client. He explained often it is hard for clients to hear this news because it means a lot of work.
We then discussed some of the indexing bugs that plagued Google in the middle of 2019. He said he believes Google’s index is really full. So Google only really wants to index the best content and not the subpar content. I believe he was talking more about ranking versus indexing but you can watch that. So we go into indexing versus rankings.
He also believes Google uses Chrome and Google Analytics data simply because it makes sense and because he would use that data. He said there is no better judge on a web site than that data. He thinks Google says they do not use it because then people will hack it.
Here is the video:
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