Exploring Holistic SEO (Semantic SEO, Topical Authority, Technical SEO) with Koray Tuğberk

welcome back to another episode of the marketing quacks podcast I'm your host Ryan Dozer and if you're new to the show the mission here is to expose the quacks and gimmicks in the marketing industry while featuring some great marketers and entrepreneurs along the way on this episode I'm really excited to welcome my guest Karai tuber I apologize if I butchered that name I tried to say it here before the show um but K is a CEO and founder of holistic SEO communities he's a speaker and also a thought leader in the SEO space in general

so thank you so much for joining the show thank you for inviting me and it's very R actually I do podcast lately but when I see your name I say why not andless do it yeah I appreciate that man I've had some other pretty good seos on the show too so I'm glad you could join that list so let's do a quick intro on who you are and what you do for those who haven't heard of who you are so I actually started s industry from the casino Niche then I was a pbn manager then

on the first day of the August 2018 I lost entire pbn which was 3,000 man yeah then I started to learn actually the search engine optimization from a new angle and one day I was let's say in a bad mood a little bit then I started to read the Google patterns and especially my dear Mentor even if he's not around anymore the bill slowski and I have read probably like more than 3,000 articles from him and more than 4,000 Google patterns and I started actually bind different things to each other and I created a new

methodology called topical Authority that relies on the semantic principles mainly and understanding the search engine I started write some case studies then it became a kinds of Main Attraction and today I have an agency I have a community a course and soon there will be the conference section together with that and maybe in the future some SAS as well so we are just expanding yeah and before we dive into kind of the details of holistic and semantic SEO uh what are your highlevel thoughts right now on just the current state of SEO right what are

your thoughts on Ser quality we got Forbes and Reddit dominating the Ser just what do you think about what's going on right now I believe the main problem in our industry is that people don't read the past because what they complain about right now it was already a current state like 12 years ago people even were actually hiring their subdomains most of the news websites and most of the again these high let's High Authority sites and Brands and Publishers they were actually renting their subfolders they were renting their subdomains then actually Google created another penalty

for most of the subdomains on that timeline and being even announced organic side structure let's say you are you are New York Times and one of your subdomains are just about let's say Casino or let's say it is just about a certain type of thing and this was a current state like around 12 or maybe even more than 12 years ago like maybe 14 years ago so when I look at the current situation I believe people start to get a few reality that I was already talking about first Google doesn't have to be fair it's

just a company which tries to make money so I also call it like search engine on fairness basically it doesn't have to be fair it doesn't have to rank you even if you are the most quality one they are just trying to make money while decreasing their cost it's always the number one goal of Google and that's why I created the concept of cost of retrieval entire methodology that I have relies on decreasing the cost that you are creating for the search engine while increasing your quality so that you can be chosen instead of someone

else and about their deals yeah it's true that Reddit is actually dominating the Ser but according to the third party metrics they have just around uh 1 billion clicks amount but at the same time I believe the Wikipedia is around 30 billion clicks amount so I'm not trying to defend Google or something here but believe me I'm the last person to defend them because I call most of the most of the influencers as just Google parats because they are trying to just be friends with the googlers so that they can actually get some benefits from

that so I am very against most of the Google search orations teams and their propaganda I can tell it explicitly with confidence but at the same time I believe Google is teaching a lesson and one of the lessons is here that actually if you start to create bulk amount of autogenerated content eventually it will be also harming you or entire web and they will start to go with the forums and if you force too much as a community a search engine Engineers there they will be giving some certain decisions and they won't be caring about

let's say creating the best possible algorithm to filter everyone they will just get entire cluster down in this case it is eates and they will bring another cluster which is mostly F mostly e-commerce and the forums and sometimes these clusters actually compete with each other as individual sites and also from cluster to Cluster sometimes you will see news websites rank for everything sometimes you will see forum sites rank for everything and that's why as an SEO as a holistic SEO you need to optimize everything for every vertical so whenever they change things still you will

be prepared so this is my talk yeah no that's that's really detailed there I appreciate that so let's talk about holistic SEO right how would you define this on a very high level to someone who's never heard of this or someone who's kind of Dipping their toes in SEO Define holistic SEO I explain with just one simple example I was in Saigon 2023 I started my speech by just actually actually explaining coris SEO with this so let's say my business ranks higher during the rainy days then I will pray to the Rain Guard to rank

higher so when it comes to ranking if it helps you to rank just do it don't discriminate like black ATO whed SEO or legalo not legal I don't care I just want to turn clicks to money that's my goal that's my vision I don't care about all the I don't know all the the obsessions that people actually have lately with all these names they say parasite SEO is bad why because they use a website for another purpose and the readers don't know it so Google forces us to do that actually it's not my choice I

wouldn't like to have any pbn to be honest and this destroy all the pbns and I will learn all your patterns eventually I will change what I do according to the algorithm so holistic as is basically doing anything just for ranking and I can tell this right now since four years passed but in one of my first case studies published and it was hit.com once I went into the CEO room and I C that how about we do a major DDOS attack to the competive servers because I know from my pbn days we were able

to actually burn the diss of the servers if we send like 50 million like requests from trustworthy IPS they will try to respond and then they won't be able to respond and for two three weeks they will be just out of the game and luckily the CEO didn't accept didn't accept it but it was basically my transition from blackhe to the white head a little bit and I had the reflexes from my old times but basically if it helps you to rank learn semantics use links or do whatever you want but basally don't discriminate and

do everything and that's why it is holistic whole we do everything and we leave nothing to chance that's the holistic yeah and that makes complete sense right so where does like latent semantic indexing or LSI keywords come into play here because that's got to be a big part of what your strategy is Am I Wrong saying that slightly but I believe there's a misconception there so Susan D from Microsoft and Yahoo search actually he invented this he joined to the Microsoft later but he invented LSI actually in 1972 it's a a very old concept and

basically it is about binding certain type of terms to a kind of indexing structure so let's say there is a index documents and they are trying to assign a certain type of main term to represent entire index and under that main term there are other type of related terms that appear in all these documents so if you're able to actually exceed overall relevance threshold for group of the terms you will be placed in that index if you have terms from multiple other index for instance your rankings will drop since you are not consolidating it so

in a way it's helpful but technically and out of my respect to the bill slowski I must use the terms as they are so LSI is not something that directly the Google is actually using and that's why when we try to optimize things actually we use different type of methods that they call phrase based indexing from Anna Peterson for instance but overall when people say LS I they they don't mean actually what Susan D invented in 1972 they just mean using related terms or they just mean some engrams or some let's say phrases that appear

together based on semantic relations and of course we use that if they use it in that meaning yeah and that makes sense let's talk about entity oriented search another term that you've thrown around quite a bit in what you teach talk about the importance of this and also just how can businesses or website you know understand this concept to improve their rankings overall okay I'm I will give just one simple example so that everyone even from a beginner level can understand it so I will use actually one one person name I will use a predicate

and I will use a noun Tom Hanks is the person Tom Hanks acted in let's say Green Mile if you have this sentence directly in a document Tom Hanks is the entity and we have a predicate which is acted in which means the document context should be about cinemagraphy if I have Tom Hanks married to which means it is about the biography of the Tom Hanks so it means Tom Hanks is the entity we have two attributes one Cinema or cinemagraphy one is biography according to the predicates and nouns and their V the search engine

will try to understand whether this document is about Cinema whether it is about biography and according to the weight of the context you will be bind into the different type of keywords in terms of elements if someone searches for let's say The Green Mile cast your document can rank there if someone searches for actually Tom Han's first wife your document won't rank there because you are not having enough level of weight to be actually stay relevant to that context and sometimes you can't put every context into the every page you might need to actually have

two pages about Tom Hanks one is about Cinema carrier one is about biography for instance and then you will need to actually calculate a little bit distance which entities I was about to say triple but sometimes people get confused for that I will just say entity since finally after five years we most of us know what it means and sometimes you will need to adjust just these entities and how you can actually order them in the page and what type of predicates you should be using so simply you are actually just constructing a skeleton which

is certain uh let's say semantic connections and then you give it to the search engine so that they can actually calculate your relevance that makes sense yeah from a high level I like how you go into this stuff in detail I appreciate you doing that so let's talk about like micro semantics I think I've seen you throw this term around a decent amount too talk about how micro semantics can really it's like the small changes make a big difference overalls how I understand it provide example of how this works okay I created this concept actually

in again Saigon I announced it in saon at least 2023 SEO Master Summit and I have given one simple example there I will give you two sentences and in two sentences in both of them I will say the same thing but relevance will be different the first sentence is the financial advisers help families to Achieve Financial Independence now I will change the sentence a little bit the financial Independence can be achieved by families through financial advisers or by Consulting to financial advisers both sentences say the same thing actually so it means they are helpful on

the same level when you use it as a sentence it means the same thing it gives the same message and it is helpful as same but relevance is different in the first sentence financial advisor actually will be the most relevant term and it will be the heaviest term for context in the second one Financial Independence will be the most important term if the keyword that you are trying to rank for is financial advisers use the first one if you are trying to rank for financial Independence keyword or related keyword use the second sentence it explains

by just changing the order of the vers or order of sentences or order of paragraphs and web page components across 1,000 web P 1,000 web pages maybe you can create a macro difference after that point and macro semantics there it's about actually more General changes let's say you just change entire heer area for entire website it's a little bit more more macro change but Micro means small detailed changes which is harder to do or understand yeah yeah that makes sense so now I want to talk about yeah no that that makes sense completely so let's

talk about topical Authority now so I feel like there's a new definition of topical Authority every other week it seems so how do you define topical Authority and just like with AI now you know because AI people think that you can just create 200 articles with AI and you know have topical Authority so I want to hear your thoughts on Top Authority thank you thanks for asking that so first of all maybe it it won't be that much appropriate to say but it's funny because when I announced the topical map Concept in the famous interview

with my dear friend Matt digidi I saw that even the next week people started to sell it but actually I didn't show anyone how it is done or what it exactly is so it was really interesting then the term became so famous and it actually inter annoyed the link Builders because everyone focused on the sem no one buy the links then it also bothered me too that's why again in my every speech I always say that if you want to sell your links you can sell it to me just do me a favor and do

a discount please because people usually think that I am against that I am not and I am using everything to rank basically I always explicitly say that and then again some link Builders claim the opposite so when it comes to the topical Authority actually as I said cost of retrieval which means how costly your content to understand how costly your documents to retri so this is one metric the second metric is about actually overall relevance of your website to a topic and also the accuracy of that specific website's content or the functions so the purpose

there is giving a search engine a pattern of content for a pattern of query let's say Vicky how for instance they always focus on a certain type of template but not a topic that's an important difference because it's always about how to contents or how to format but it is not about a certain topic it might be about how to run faster or how to clean your skin or how to I don't know just go to space or anything can be there so it's a multi-topic website with a single format because when search engin actually

see that there is a website for a topic and for a pattern and it is able to satisfy users enough level then they start to rank it and they don't check even other websites because they are already happy with one of them so if I use it in a single sentence the topical Authority is about covering a topic according to the relevance configuration and relevance optimization but by providing lower cost and higher accuracy in the accuracy section it's not just about factuality of the content it is also about functionality of your document if I am

searching for credit card application and if you don't have any application form on the Page search engine will eliminate me it's not about your relevance only you should have the functionality on the page as well and it is not against link building or something but it just tries to explain that even if you have a low page rank a low drr website still you will be able to actually rank but it will take probably longer time since the search engine will need to understand your content test your content and through the time they will actually

need to trust you and we call this he historical data thanks to the Google API leak people started to focus on actually user behaviors on the Ser one more time not just click also selection copy paste or let's say query per second or there are lots of metrics that Google actually can follow on a search engine result page and whenever you click something they get it and they put it into the query log session and whenever your documents of role have positive signals for certain type of topics they start to actually increase your Authority and

you start to rank higher for Google News Google discover and Google surf overall the historical data is also one of the components there so even if you publish the most quality content directly today it won't rank directly the search engine will need to check and trust you through the time but when usually people say topical Lottery they just focus on this cover a topic by creating 5,000 Pages or 200 Pages whatever but the thing is right now we have ai anyone can create it important think here is creating difference is the most important part as

much as possible so I can't just use AI to just generate 200 articles on a topic and now I have topical Authority in Google's eyes that's that's what I think some of the advice it's actually given out there the thing is that there are too many SEO influencers and they try to I believe sell stuff all the time by hyping people like I hav did let's say I don't know $33,000 in just 10 seconds how I did I don't know how I rank a website in I don't know 20 seconds with AI so it sounds

perfect I know but if everyone wres the I got the clickbait thumbnail and the graph going up yeah oh yeah yeah definitely and if you if everyone does it so easily then it means there is no difference and the Google has to choose the difference which means you will need to cover it deeper which means you will need to add very much more detail about the specific thing or you want to cover it wider so I have a case earlier from sbart I also did an interview with the owner of that company and we outrank

Healthline medical news today WebMD with swar the e-commerce website and it we did it just 27 articles it's a case study it is written by explaining the quality thresholds in the ser and there we didn't publish that many document but we published it so deep the search engine actually realized the quality there and we published everything at the same time to get the to get the attention of the search engine in this case so it's about your conditions and right now I believe people again I believe SEO industry has too many treasure Seekers and they

always try to find the shortcut trick and they lose more time to be honest by doing that yeah that makes sense so one other question I have for you is talk about future proofing right so if you had to give one piece of advice whether it's like holistic or semantic SEO based if someone asked you hey how do I future prooof my website what would you say branding if you have brand source if people directly has uh queries for your name together with your products or together with your industry it will directly make Google think

that you are a brand you are a real world business and it will directly help you to be tolerated by Google and their algorithms if you don't have any brand search demand it's really harder for you to rank or stay safe from most of these updates yeah so building up that Knowledge Graph is another way to say that in Google of just your yeah for sure so how would you talk about so like all these Alternatives coming out in the AI powered search engine space right we have perplexity we have search GPT in the works

what are your thoughts on all of these I first of all I love it and I'm excited about that the secondly it will be definitely benefiting the semantic suos further because most of the large language model based search experience and search engines they will need to be favoring way much more detailed documents and documents that are able to also communicate with each other because basically when you have an llm based or AI search engine it is able to choose a page and it's most related section and then it is able to choose another document with

another section and they're able to combine these two paragraphs to each other as a single result so technically today the traditional search engines are not able to do that that much most of the time what they can do is they can represent entire term with a certain type of let's say keyword in this case to keep it simple then they can bind that Representative term to the query but when it comes to the llm it's not about that much relevance it's directly extracting the information from the page and also reforming it with other information from

other Pages creating it giving it to the user as the end output and usually I give this example for there to explain it from a practical example let's say you are a website about dep consolidation and someone searches for debt consolidation for teachers debt consolidation for Farmers that consolidation for other 3,000 occupations in this case most of the time the most websites don't have even any mention of these actually specific occupations or they don't have a relevance to these occupations but if you are creating a semantical optimized website with different pages you can actually find

the most Optimum place to mention these related occupations to create a kinds of anchor with the search when I search for de consolidation for the veteran I can get different pages because there directly there are already published documents for that there are already queries for that and search engine creates an index for group of queries but when it comes to the queries without that much of a search demand plus two long queries because in AI search people are writing keywords or questions that are longer than maybe 20 words since it is possible they Google can't

handle it that much but AI search or Beyond traditional search they are able to actually parse 20 ver keywords or 20 ver query into the pieces and they're able to retrieve documents from different contexts they're able to choose the document sections and create all of them together this is usually called retrieval augmentation basically or R A retrieval augmentation generation or retrival augmented generation sorry and basically it is a little bit harder but it will create an advantage for for you to be to publishing more document and to get more attention from most of these future

generation search engines just one rule always remember while you are optimizing for AI you might be de optimizing for traditional search and the real Mastery comes from finding the balance and protecting the side for both angles traditional search mostly will be about representing and ranking the document AI search will be mostly about being able to create a relevance for every type of combination of the phrase which might make you to write way longer or annotate these relevances way more granular detailed Pages it might be tiring but with UI ux design and page rength you will

be able to do that eventually yeah and same with cro and monetization right I think that loses track when people try to optimize for something like AI powered search cro or monetizing often gets thrown in the back burner because people are all more concerned about vanity metrics to be quite honest yeah yeah definitely um so I want to hear now do you mind sharing what you use for your AI and SEO tool stack if you could just list some of the tools use regularly of course but first I need to tell that and sometimes people

start to love for that but I always tell my trainees and 3 to 5,000 people in my communities I always say that first I use my brain it's the best tool ever you can have it has more than 100 billions of neurons and none of the AI tool can give it to you so secondly if I have to use something Technic I don't I use hm R of course but I use them for just getting the keywords nothing else even most of their features I don't use that much to be honest I use them for

reporting to the let's say and it's all third party data I think that's important for people to understand is they're just scraping sites and it's third party you can't you got to look at these with the grain of salt yeah and also another thing is that if you use any AI content auditor or AI content creator the biggest problem is that they just check what is already ranking on the ser and they just give you an analysis for that but Tech Tech when you use topical Authority you have to go beyond what already exist on

the Ser search engine doesn't need another website that tells the same exact thing they you just need to go beyond it to change the serve or to give the search engine a new Option and in this case I will suggest one tool and it will be I believe helpful for you especially if you're a beginner or medium level and it is infra nodus this tool is actually designed by ex googlers and also it is not funded by any one infr noes is actually a text graphic analysis technology and right now they created an also a

Chrome extension and you can analyze directly Google surf you can analyze the content on the web pages and you can connect different type of components of a document to each other and you can create a better knowledge representation thanks to that but still I must tell that do not depend on these tools but just use it for faster progress and another thing is I also created like 45 agents GP agents to help people in my community and you can find them from GPT store actually by searching my name you can also use use them as

well and usually some of these agents are very easy for instance one of them is just checking missing entities for your context and suggest you to insert them to document in the way of uh let's say protecting your sentence structures another one is mainly for showing you which verse you should be Bolding to create the relevance let's say another one is for uh again for turning your passive voice sentences to active voice sometimes another one is for analyzing your sentiments or or creating perspectives or experiences or there are different agents there I don't want to

use complicated things like uh let say metad discourse auditor Etc don't it for them for this podcast so this there are many simple uh very simple to use agents there you can also check them but besides that AI started to become a capitalization technology there are many influencers and their angle is this I got the money from the investor and I have to sell the company and to sell the company I need to bring the monthly revenue and annual revenue to here so that I can go to the next investor so as long as this

is the angle don't trust these tools that much unfortunately most of the AI Ventures not just SEO most of it is hype it's hype marketing unfortunately and but there are some good ones of course to for instance scaled AI it's not for SEO but it is valued like $4 billion all their only job is just labeling data for NVIDIA for Cisco they just get the data they can get data even from this podcast and they label it and they give it to the all these Global AI companies so there are really well functioning companies too

but most of the time it's just same tool and there is a tool inflation with different designs so I believe you will be able to differentiate them soon I actually made an entire YouTube video going on the rant about how AI is all white label 99% of the tools are white Lael open AI open you know white label quad white label llama whatever the llm is I also made another video about how AI can't create do you believe AI can create because I think that AI just remixes and repurposes what already exists versus actually creating

something original it's exactly true because mathematically when you have any output from a large language model it just gives you coordinates of the verse it just knows which coordinate can come after which coordinate and in this case they just actually scan all the document with a language model then actually they see that after the word Bridge we can have the word let say exit or after the word London we can also have the word bridge for London Bridge for instance once they give that they take these mathematical coordinates and mathematical patterns they just repeat it

according to your input it can create something new but it can help people to create Something New by giving them ideas or by helping them to process the existing information faster yeah for sure so I want to talk about marketing quacks now this is the marketing quacks podcast after all so let's stick on the topic of SEO what do you think is a quack in SEO or how would you define a quack or what makes your kind of blood boil when you see things on the internet with people talking about SEO for my Turkish Style

English could you define what quack means for me does it mean yeah so fraud right fraud gimmick um people like that I believe there are too many impostor unfortunately that's another good one because the thing is that SEO is not regulated and there are there is no University for it or license it's not like lawers so not everyone can do law lawyers ship right you can't be an attorney to just tomorrow you have to pass the exams but there is no such a thing in SEO or overall marketing and SEO also has this black box

of algorithms it also creates uh some conveniency for most of these myths I believe that you can use still a certain level you can use CTR manipulation but most of the services don't work most of them just try to charge you again I appreciate you and thank you to everyone for listening to this episode of the marketing quacks podcast be sure to tune in again next time [Music]