James Dooley: Hi, so today I am joined with Kasra Dash and the discussion we are talking about is marginal gains, specifically with SEO and how the little things start to add up and compound over time. It is the marginal gains that you get with SEO that give you long term rankings. So let us get started on the little wins that you can be doing. What are your initial thoughts when people attend masterminds around the world and think they are missing out on some push button SEO knowledge bomb.

Kasra Dash: It is definitely not the case. The best SEO advice is the most boring SEO advice, which is build quality content, build good links and you will rank. Not many people like hearing that. A lot of people think they need crazy calculations and crazy link building techniques, but it is not necessary. We have a lot of successful sites between us across many industries and the one commonality on every single website is that you need good content and good links.

James Dooley: For sure. The big part of marginal gains in SEO is to do all things right. So let us run through a few bits. Starting with technical SEO, make sure your site speed is good so it loads fast. You do not need to obsess over 0.01 percent speed changes, but you must make sure it loads fast enough that Google can crawl the site easily. I would start there with technical. What else would you say are marginal wins for technical SEO.

Kasra Dash: Good internal linking. Internally link to your most important pages, the ones that generate the most money. One thing to note, we are going to list a lot of things you should be doing on your website, but that does not mean you must do everything perfectly before launch. You can decide to work on technical this week, content next week and internal linking after that. People obsess that “Kasra and James told me 90 things so I must do all 90 before launch”, and that is wrong.

James Dooley: The main thing we tell the team, especially with content, is they procrastinate too much. Just get it live. There is an edit button, which means you can add more, optimise, remove fluff. Just get stuff done. People obsess over schema. Go and get basic schema set up and if you can improve it later, great. Whether it is organisation schema or local business schema, get those marginal gains in first then improve them. It is all about compounding improvements. Is there anything else within technical, maybe schema or other small wins.

Kasra Dash: A lot of people are scared after doing keyword research. They do not know where to start. Like you said, publish first. If you later realise you went past your topical borders you can delete some pages. Some of our biggest wins recently have come from content pruning, removing articles from websites. If you have a go ahead attitude, you cannot really mess up a site, you can always delete pages.

James Dooley: Doing a topical map and keyword research is an evolving system. You can always find new articles, new keywords, new products and new services that people search for and then expand to cover topical gaps. It is the same with link building. There are always new link building opportunities. Do not over obsess that a link must have traffic and be 100 percent relevant at domain level. You must keep moving forward and get referring domains built up. If you overcook it you have the disavow tool. Like you said with content pruning, many penalties are reversible. You can disavow toxic links and delete pages where you went too wide. Is there anything else you see as marginal gains in SEO.

Kasra Dash: If I had a checklist of marginal gains and we assume everyone has their basic technical SEO set correctly, so internal links are fine and there are no 404s or double 301s, then you can run a simple Sitebulb or Screaming Frog audit and that gives you guidance. Away from that, there are small things like people not naming image files properly, not using alt text. These are small but important because you can rank images, which brings more traffic to the page. People see four 404 errors in a crawl and ignore them. Just fix them. These marginal compounding effects are what add up and help you beat your competition. What else would you add away from that.

James Dooley: Adding to what you said, I call it 1 percent SEO. The only way to become a 1 percent SEO is to do everything across the board correctly.

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James Dooley: So the lighting has changed if you noticed, but that is a 1 percent gain on lighting. Back to 1 percent SEO. The 1 percent SEOs are the ones ranking in gambling, slots, CBD and other insane niches. If you audit their sites they do a lot of foundational things correctly. They have schema set up. Their files are optimised so images rank in Google Images. They have compressed images so they are not six megabytes. They use lazy load and proper CDNs. If you are doing all that you have a good start. After that it is keyword research. I would say keyword research is crucial. I did a video on the Reasonable Surfer patent. I tried to explain it simply. You need to think what queries someone searches before and after your product. If you are selling running shoes, do you cover the topic fully. Can that person come back and learn how to care for the shoes. Do you have content that helps them choose the right shoe type before they buy. That is another keyword strategy and another 1 percent gain. Most people jump to that too early and forget to build the base layer of content first.

James Dooley: Away from content, people talk about being holistic marketers and doing all things. What are your thoughts on off page, social media and things like GMB. Some businesses need a Google Business Profile, address and phone number, and they need to tick boxes for E-E-A-T. In some industries E-E-A-T matters more than others, but again these small changes improve trust. Forget Google for a minute. Having a phone number, email, accreditations, awards, reviews and review schema all on site are marginal wins that help convert visitors into clients. You could sit in a mastermind debating whether it is worth it or not, but if you do all things correctly you go a long way.

Kasra Dash: A lot of people get annoyed when we say build a brand because they think it is easy for us to say and hard to do. Go and check Surfer SEO. Their site was basically non-existent two or three years ago. They built a brand by doing everything you just mentioned. They have a YouTube channel. They run Facebook ads. They have a Facebook group. They have affiliates talking about them. They did everything we recommend to website owners in a very short time. If you are winning awards, go and do link building around those awards. If you have a GMB, get citations built. Get a press release service so your NAP is listed across the web. All of these are 1 percent tasks. It does not mean you do everything in ten days. It might be a six month or twelve month SEO strategy depending on budget. If you keep improving month by month or day by day you will get the result you want. The problem is people obsess over one vanity keyword. If someone wants to rank for “personal injury lawyer New York”, that is the only phrase they care about. They do not care how well the rest of the site performs. They will say that keyword is still in position eight and they are annoyed, but they are getting 4,000 more visitors from other terms. They ignore the bigger picture.

James Dooley: That reminded me of an interesting stat about marginal gains. If you improve 1 percent every day for a year you become seven times better. People think it should be 3.65 times because there are 365 days, but compounding 1 percent on top of 1 percent creates exponential growth, which makes it about seven times. That is insane. So these 1 percent gains are the key. If you go to a mastermind and expect one knowledge bomb to triple your business, you are deluded. You should look for a tiny thing that improves a VA’s task, saves time or saves money. All these micro wins compound and make you a better SEO overall. What are some compound gains you have had over the years that saved you time or money.

Kasra Dash: Mine are really small. If I rattle through them it is things like improving site speed, improving silo structure, adding alt text to images, making media richer by adding more images and videos, sharing those assets on social media, improving how I write social media posts so they get more retweets, likes, comments and clicks, improving YouTube thumbnails and tags, sharing videos properly once they are live. None of that sounds like a knowledge bomb. Then there is standard operating procedures for staff, adding images and videos to citations, writing unique descriptions in citations, doing a press release every time I win an award and stuffing it with NAP, images, video and links. Adding NAP to YouTube descriptions. It is endless. All those micro wins stack up. People ask how you have done well in SEO and my answer is I am more a businessman than an “SEO guru”. There are people with more advanced hacks and black hat tricks, but all these compounding wins over time are enough to beat competition on one site, then you move to another site and repeat.

Kasra Dash: Recently we also improved our view of what a good link is. We have disavowed some links. We have built a blacklist of guest post sites so we do not waste $200 or $300 on links with no trust and high toxicity. Every new link now has trust, power and low toxicity. We push semantic triples into content. I did not even know what a semantic triple was at first. I have done SEO for over 10 years and I still learn. People talk about SPOs, semantic triples, macro and micro content, contextual borders, heading hierarchy and so on. Small things like using the right structure for how to content, using numbered lists where needed, bullet lists for list posts, using HTML tables for comparisons, all of that improves HTML to text ratio and structure. These micro wins build up and make your content stronger.

James Dooley: It is not some secret code injection moving an element 300 pixels that jumps you to position one. It is not white text on a white background. It is quality content for the user. We also talked about removing fluff and contextless words. I used to be obsessed with correlation tools telling me to use words sixteen times or hit 3,400 words. If I can answer the topic, hit all entities and key terms and give examples in 1,900 words, that is better than 3,400 of waffle. The cost of information retrieval for Google matters. As long as I answer as well as possible with rich, dense content, shorter but better wins. Everyone is obsessed with content length and trying to beat competitors’ word counts. It should be about value and attributes.

James Dooley: I sound like I know everything but I do not. I just listen to my content team, my link building team and my testers. They tell me what is toxic, what is trusted, where links should sit in the content, how Reasonable Surfer impacts link weight, how to rank guest posts to send more power. We call them power posts. If their pages rank and get traffic the links are stronger. It is all marginal gains.

Kasra Dash: One thing people should remember is you started this chat very basic, like site speed, image optimisation and alt tags. I hope everyone watching is already doing that. Then you got very advanced very quickly. It has taken you years. It is not like you woke up one day and said “I will learn semantic triples, page weight and PageRank”. You first built strong foundations, 40 or 50 articles, then moved to improving content. You built 60 or 200 foundational links and then learned more about toxic backlinks and what moves the needle. That improvement happens over time, not overnight.

James Dooley: Exactly. I have been in this a long time. Every day is a school day. I want to learn every day and I want the team to innovate or they will evaporate. New AI prompts, new techniques, new tests. People say I make up terms like semantic triples. I do not. That is from linguistics. A semantic triple is subject, predicate and object in a sentence. Salience is another example. People moan when we talk about salience of an entity, but it matters. Salience is how prominent and important an entity is within the topic. If an entity is important I want it higher up the page, often in the introduction. That is another marginal gain.

James Dooley: If you do not understand these marginal gains you will struggle. If you do understand schema, technical SEO, topical authority, content quality, backlinks, social media, brand building, brand SERPs and sentiment, you make life easier. Off page is not just for rankings, it is for branding and user trust. Like you said with Surfer, could you get affiliates involved, shout about awards, get more reviews. The amount of companies that tell us they have traded 15 years and are the biggest in the UK, then we check and they have three Google reviews, is embarrassing. Go and get more reviews. Ask for Google, Yelp, Trustpilot reviews. Get video testimonials and share them. All these trust signals stack up and probably help your E-E-A-T whether you believe in it or not. Do all things properly and everything starts to rise together.

Kasra Dash: Definitely. So we hope you liked the video about marginal gains and those 1 percent improvements for your SEO efforts.