By Lydia Barley
The DMSS conference had a range of fantastic workshops presented by equally fantastic speakers. However there was one speaker that had everyone talking, that speaker was Kyle Roof. And with good reason, as his presentation involved showing everyone how he ranked #1 for a term with a website that was written in lorem ipsum, something that many SEO professionals (and maybe even Google themselves!) would deem impossible.
Who is Kyle Roof?
Before we jump into the workshop itself, we’d first like to tell you who Kyle Roof is. Firstly, Kyle Roof is a well-regarded speaker of SEO workshops at marketing conferences across the globe. In 2018 alone Kyle was an invited speaker at not only the DMSS conference, but at the inOrbit conference and the SEO Rockstar conference.
Aside from being an amazing speaker, Kyle is an SEO Analyst for High Voltage SEO, an SEO firm that has locations in Melbourne, Berlin and Phoenix. He is also the lead tester for the SEO Intelligence Agency, which consists of a group of SEO professionals who are dedicated to testing SEO methods in a controlled environment, either ‘busting’ or confirming each SEO tactic.
Kyle is also co-founder of the popular SEO tool, Page Optimizer Pro. The tool that tells you how well your page content is optimised and outlines the changes and the steps you need to make to optimise your page.
Now for the Workshop Details
The workshop itself was titled ‘SEO Tests and How Can you Set Them Up’. With the DMSS conference describing the workshop as ‘hands-on’, giving an answer to the question what are SEO tests and how can you set them up as well as providing actionable information (gathered from tests) that all audience members could implement into their SEO strategy.
The Competition
Kyle’s presentation was based around a competition he entered, and with good reason as his results in the competition left SEO professionals from around the world in awe. That competition was the Rank or Go Home Challenge by Steven Kang and the SEO Signals Lab Group. The competition involved a number of SEO practitioners from the Facebook Group being given a keyword that they had to try and rank for, in this case the keyword was ‘Rhinoplasty Plano’. Competitors had 30 days to try and rank for this keyword with a brand new site. The winner of the competition would be whoever’s site had the highest ranking position at the end of those 30 days. The only rule was to not spend more than $1000.
What was Kyle’s strategy?
Throughout the workshop Kyle took us through his analytical approach on how he handled the competition which consisted of the following:
- Kyle went and had a look at what was going on in the SERPS, taking note of anything he noticed from checking out the competition. In this part Kyle does not use any SEO tools he just has a look through the SERPs and the top ranking sites. Some of the things he noticed in this stage was that Google was rewarding: inner pages, good reviews and GMB profiles, therefore he made note of this to include these features in his strategy.
- Kyle then drafted the content for the page, writing up the content and implementing standard best practices such as putting the keywords for the page into the heading tags and paragraph text as well as adding LSI terms.
- Kyle then uses a tool called Page Optimizer Pro which compared his target page to top ranking competitors, outlining the errors with his page and how he can optimise the page based on the on-page signals that Page Optimizer outlined as being used by Google to rank top competitors.
What Were the Results?
Now after doing those changes Kyle didn’t immediately jump to page 1, as is the case with SEO, however his page creeped up the rankings and Kyle ended up placing 5th in the competition. But that’s not where this ends, two weeks later Kyle was number 1 in the maps and was 7th in the organic listings. Soon enough his website creeped it’s way to rank number 1 in the organic listings, a position that he held for a considerable amount of time until Google de-indexed his site and gave it a manual penalty.
The Twist
A presentation on how Kyle took a website from scratch and worked his way to rank 1 would have been impressive in itself however there was a twist that left the room in awe…. The entire website was written in lorem ipsum (which for those who don’t know is simply placeholder text that has no meaningful context). And this twist is what blew the minds of SEO professionals around the world (and the conference room!), as ranking a page written entirely in lorem ipsum goes against everything that google says about authority and quality content.
What Can we Take From this Presentation?
Once your jaw is off the ground and you’ve recovered from the shock of Kyle Roof ranking number 1 with a website that is written entirely in lorem ipsum, you’ll begin to notice the major takeaways of the presentation. The takeaways from the presentation are a plenty and will vary amongst different people. However, we have put together some of our major takeaways:
- Google is showing us exactly what it wants from a site for each keyword. It’s right there in plain sight. As SEO professionals we need to extract that data and action it, using it on our own (or our clients) websites. Use ranking competitors as a roadmap for your site.
- Google’s algorithm is an algorithm. Kyle touched on this point frequently throughout the presentation, and with good reason. Google’s algorithm is an algorithm, as much as SEO professionals can spend hours reading up on what can help them rank and stressing over pushing ranks through best practices, it’s an algorithm that we can see and can break down and investigate. That said, with it being an algorithm it can also have its weaknesses.
- SEO is a math and testing is key. Kyle achieved such impressive results as he recognised that SEO is a math and treated it as such, testing what Google liked for that keyword and implementing those factors.
