SEO Quick Wins

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SEO show. I am Michael Costin and Arthur Fabik is sitting opposite me. How are you going?

ARTHUR: I'm good. I'm sitting in your seat today. Yes. So I'm a bit thrown off. Everything's just a bit weirder today.

MICHAEL: You're like, actually, you know, when you move house and you take your pet and the pet walks into the house and it doesn't know what's going on, it moves around. It's a bit unsettled. Well, I'm not doing any of that, but I know what you mean. You're like you just before we went on air, you said, can we swap? I don't like this seat.

ARTHUR: But anyway, I don't, and then I'm going to, we're going to swap during in the next podcast.

MICHAEL: Okay. I don't like it here. Okay. I don't like it. Bad juju. Yes. Well, anyway, it's only going to be a short and sweet episode today, so it shouldn't really affect you that much to sit there. We're going to be talking about SEO quick wins because SEO is a long-term game. We always bang on about that, but People always do want to speed it up. You know, clients always ask if things can be accelerated. Generally, the answer is no. Particularly if your site is new, but there are quick things that can be done to make the most of any foundations that you might have with your site. So we're going to talk about what we normally do. We have a process that we run through for our clients and we're going to go through those steps now and give you a few ideas. Because the problem we found, you know, when the client started is that things like tech audits, keyword research, mapping, content creation, just takes ages. Takes time. Yeah. Clients are antsy. They want to see stuff happening when they come on board.

ARTHUR: 100%. And I think, you know, by doing this quick wins, I guess, checklist that we have, we can address, I guess, the main elements of SEO, like the 80-20 rule, maybe. Essentially, you know, targeting the things that we know will provide quick wins. So at the end of the day, we start getting, we start seeing results faster, the client's happier and, you know, we have more time to work on the more technical things later on.

MICHAEL: And like, because you'll find sometimes when clients come to us, they're not doing a lot of the basics. Exactly. Just by going in and doing some of these basics, you will have an immediate impact that you don't necessarily need to sit around and wait for client feedback or approval to add their target keyword to a title tag, you know? Yeah. So we've just basically got our little checklist open. We're going to move through it, have a chat about it. And wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. That is another episode of the SEO show. So let's chat technical.

ARTHUR: Cool. So yeah, the first thing that we will do from a, I guess, technical perspective would be verifying Google search console. So that's pretty easy. Um, or it can be easy. Essentially what we need to do is get a search console, plug in the domain. And then if we can't verify it automatically, We need to go into the client CMS WordPress and then add the verification code. And from there we can have a look and see if there's any errors, crawl errors with the site. We can look at Core Web Vital metrics and all the performance metrics, keywords, impressions and things like that. So very important. And that's the first cab out of the rank. And then the next thing would be verifying Google analytics. So I guess same process. If the client doesn't have an analytics profile, which most do, if they don't, we'll create one for them. In which case we'll go in and just add the tag to the site and make sure that it's tracking properly.

MICHAEL: And I would say with that one at the moment, The pain in our world is GA4. Universal GA is being sunsetted. Google is hurting us. So part of that would be having a look like, are they only running universal analytics and do they need a GA4 analytics set up? Yeah. Or the pain that goes with that.

ARTHUR: So what we do is if we find that only running universal analytics, we, we do create a GA4 profile just because it starts collecting data earlier. Um, and then, you know, with universal analytics eventually being, like you said, um, removed, having that data or historic data is important because when you're looking at year on year comparisons and things like that, it's a lot easier to do it within, um, You know, GA4, rather than having to, you know, pull data from universal analytics, cause I'm pretty sure they're going to keep it around. It's just that they'll keep, they'll still have it. It just won't pull data into it. So they're not going to get rid of it straight away in July, but eventually it will go away. So you'll still be able to, I guess, retrieve data from it, but. Hmm. Ideally, when you're looking at year-on-year, it's a little easier just to do it within one dashboard rather than chopping and changing.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so you just gotta… GA4, personally, I don't like it. I find it less intuitive, harder to use, like the interface is not as nice, it's more painful to get data from, but that's the world Google's forcing on us, so it's best to just have that in place.

ARTHUR: I think it's just something that will take a little bit of time to get used to. And after a while you'll get used to it and you'll forget that UA existed. But at the moment it is, yeah. There's a lot of pain points. I don't think I've spoken to anyone that that's actually said they like GA4. We'll see how we go.

MICHAEL: I don't know if you remember Google Reader back in the day, but it was like an RSS feed reader where you could plug in feeds from blogs and it would sort of amalgamate all of your blog posts into the one reader and Google got rid of that. It's probably like 10 years ago now. And I was outraged at the time, outraged. And then I found something new and then see the AdWords interface updates. Yes. Outraged. And then you get used to it. GA4, I am currently outraged. I'm going to get used to it.

ARTHUR: Well, the thing with, and going off topic here, but I think with the Google ads updates, it was just over time, it was small tweaks. So it wasn't like a massive overhaul. I feel like with GA4, it is a massive overhaul. Yeah. It's not just the interface change. It's just the reporting and everything like things that you can pull from universal analytics easily reports and you know, data aren't in there out of the box in GA4. You have to set up reports and things like that. So it's a massive change. Yeah, it is. But we don't want to dwell on it too much. We're talking about SEO quick wins.

MICHAEL: So that's not a quick win. It's a long-term pain, but yeah, let's move on then.

ARTHUR: Next one. Running paid speed insights. And also other tools like GTmetrix, so just making sure that the site performs well from a, I guess, page speed perspective. I guess seeing if there are any issues that we can address quite quickly, so things like large image file sizes, plugins can address that, or you can do it manually if there's, you know, certain images which are massive, there's videos. that are massive resource hogs as well. You know, you can address that, but essentially seeing, you know, what the recommendations, the tools spit out and addressing the, I guess, quick wins or high priority items.

MICHAEL: Yep. And keeping it as like a benchmark, right? So you have all of that. And then as the work starts to be done, you can refer back to that and take further snapshots and just show that the work is having an impact.

ARTHUR: Yeah and that's exactly what we do in the checklist that we have. We'll take a screenshot of PageSpeed Insights and then throughout the campaign just report back and show the client what we've done to improve it.

MICHAEL: Cool. We also skipped over mobile friendly tests as part of the process. It's pretty straightforward.

ARTHUR: I guess it kind of falls within PageSpeed Insights as well. Cause it does give recommendations on mobile friendliness, but essentially we want to make sure that the page is mobile friendly, that Google sees that the page is mobile friendly. I mean, it's one thing to visually see that it is, but we have to make sure that Google agrees. Yes. And again, if there's any issues like, you know, text being out without, what is it called out of the frame or whatever, Yeah, viewport as well. Things like that. If there's any issues that we can address quickly, we'll do that to improve that score.

MICHAEL: Yep. What else? Robots text is one that is very straightforward. Yep. Literally visiting forward slash robots. Making sure it's there.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Um, if it's not adding it and then disallowing things that we feel that need to be disallowed. So things, for example, in WordPress, if they've got a blog removing things like tags and categories, so those pages aren't being indexed, um, images, media,

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Images, media, and then also making sure that crawlers aren't disallowed for some reason, because you might find a developer was working on it on a staging side or something and moved over the robots file and they've disallowed all crawlers and the page isn't being found by Google. So just since checking the robots.txt file and making sure that it's updated and including, and I guess, including the things you want to disallow and making sure it's not disallowing crawlers.

MICHAEL: Yep. The other thing on that front is I guess sort of ties into sitemaps.

ARTHUR: XML sitemap again. Yeah. So making sure the XML sitemap is referenced in the robots.txt file. If it exists, if it exists, if it doesn't exist, setting one up, it takes two seconds to do. Yeah. And then that would be in search console too. Yep. So adding it to search console, letting Google know that it exists so they can crawl it and it knows which pages it needs to crawl and how frequently.

MICHAEL: Yep. And keep in mind, these are quick wins. So like this process is only designed to be played out like over the first week of a campaign. So we're not going super in depth. It's just what goals can be kicked quickly. So one of those is the site bulb audit that we always run. It's, That thing is sort of broken down into, I guess, a couple of phases. Like we run the audit, SiteBulb is like a crawler for the site. It will crawl every page and then analyze it from a technical point of view and then provide a prioritized report of sort of max importance through to least importance in terms of like priority and impact that it's going to have on your SEO. When we run that, we might find that there's things in that audit that can be fixed pretty quickly. Maybe like, you know, a couple of pages have like no index tags in them or something and you can just go fix that. Yeah. So we will go ahead and fix whatever the quick and easy stuff is that can be done without involving devs, without needing to involve the client. Yes. But then the rest of that stuff goes into our ongoing technical SEO that will roll out over the course of the campaign. Exactly. Yeah. The other one is basically internal links to deeper pages.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So that's just since checking the site, having a look and making sure that you have internal links from the homepage to deeper pages. And then if you have a category page, making sure you're linking again to deeper pages. Yep. Pretty straightforward, making sure that you're using the right anchor text. So, you know, if you have a Flourish site and you've got a category page that's targeting birthday flowers, for example, making sure that you're internally linking from the homepage, using that anchor text to the deeper pages. And that gives Google, I guess, context and also helps Google crawl the pages and pass down link equity and improve visibility.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And I, every time a guest comes on the show at the end, I ask three questions. One of them being, what do you, what's the biggest myth in SEO and what's the most underrated thing in SEO? For me, internal linking is the most underrated thing in SEO. Oh, a hundred percent. I agree. Yep. So, definitely something that should be done. A lot of, it's a sort of quick win that isn't being used by a lot of people. No. All right, let's talk daily backups and staging because this is something that a lot of clients out of the box usually don't have in place, particularly staging. Well, both of them. Both of them. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So the first on their daily backups. So making sure that the site's backed up doesn't have to be daily, but frequently. So at the bare minimum, once a month. Um, so there's many tools that you can use for that. Uh, one that we use internally is called managed WP. It's just the, um, it's just a tool essentially that you can add, add the domain, you add the login credentials. And what it does is it creates backups weekly, daily, however, however frequent you want. And the benefit of that is if anything does go wrong with the website. So if, if you as an SEO break something, uh, you can go in there and roll back to whatever version was last, backed up. One click. One click fixed. Yep. It works amazing. It takes two seconds to set up and it gives you that peace of mind. And it also gives the client peace of mind that if anything does go wrong, you can revert back to a state that was working properly.

MICHAEL: Yeah, and the alternative to that is you break something and your site's down for a week while you try and find a developer to fix it. And there's all stress and money lost and SEO results impacted. Yeah, you don't want to be in that position. Another tool as well, just not to promote totally managed WP, another tool is Blog Vault, if you want to check that out. Pick your poison. They all are much the same.

ARTHUR: And the next on there was staging. So making sure that wherever the client side is hosted has staging built into it. So you can, you know, test things and work on a staging environment rather than working on a live environment. And the idea is, you know, you can make changes and make sure that they look the way you want them to look and make sure it hasn't broken anything. And then push it live. So we often talk about Kinstra on the show, but there's heaps of hosts out there that offer, you know, one click staging blog vault that I just mentioned as well.

MICHAEL: If you want to do it independently, you want commission for blogger or I should be, I might go back and insert like a call out for our affiliate link, but, but yeah, backups and staging, very important, quite easy to set up these days.

ARTHUR: And it gives, gives yourself and the client peace of mind.

MICHAEL: Yep. That's definitely a quick win in terms of massive amounts of time saved for you as an SEO, if something goes wrong.

ARTHUR: Absolutely.

MICHAEL: All right. Let's move on to the next thing in our list, which is the onsite part of SEO, the pillar. Let's use the naming convention that we like to work with. The first one, very obvious, very easy, very much a quick win.

ARTHUR: I think the first three are quite obvious and easy. So let's just bang them off from one go.

MICHAEL: Okay. Add your target keyword to your page title, your H1 and then in your body copy on each page. Pretty straightforward. But like often if someone comes to us, their homepage, for example, isn't properly optimized at all. We don't need approval. We don't need back and forth on like documents and meetings and stuff to go in and change that stuff. A lot of the time the client might not even notice that it's happened, but rankings are improving straight away because you've done it.

ARTHUR: Absolutely. That's, you know, if it's not done massive quick win and you'll often see that you'll, you'll see organic visibility and keywords start to shoot up almost instantly.

MICHAEL: Yep. All right, let's move on. Ahrefs keyword cannibalization audit. Try saying that 10 times fast.

ARTHUR: No, um, I struggle speaking at the best of times.

MICHAEL: So, well, you know, you host a podcast. Yeah. It should be a bit better by now. What are we 48 episodes deep? Yeah. We're coming up on episode 50.

ARTHUR: There was a word I couldn't pronounce before we started recording.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I can't remember. Anyway. Let's chat keyword cannibalization audit. Cool.

ARTHUR: So essentially this is, as you mentioned, Ahrefs. So we look at, obviously Ahrefs is like our SEO Bible. We are always in there, you know, auditing our clients and looking at competitors and things like that. But one feature that Ahrefs has is a keyword cannibalization, I guess, Toggle? Toggle. Yeah. So what would happen is when you're like auditing a site or URL or domain, you can go and have a look at the keywords that the site's ranking for. And there's a toggle there, which says multiple URLs only.

MICHAEL: That's it. So if you turn it on, it's going to show you when a keyword is ranking on multiple different pages on your one website.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So at a glance you can see, yeah, if there's any cannibalization occurring, essentially what cannibalization is, is, you know, having multiple pages competing for the same keyword. And that's not ideal because it can, yeah, maybe that was a word you can't say. There we go. Confuse Google. And then, you know, it can prevent one page outranking the other. And essentially it's just, yeah.

MICHAEL: So let's put it into context. Maybe if you're a plumber, Sydney plumber and your homepage is talking about it and then you build a Sydney plumber page and they're both competing with each other. Yeah. You can go in there and fix. You're smirking at me. What's my plumber.

ARTHUR: We talked about me not being able to talk. I knew that I was going to screw something up like soon. It happened pretty quickly. And I got inside my own head and then yeah, here we are crumbled under the pressure. Yeah. It's going to push on like it never happened.

MICHAEL: That's it. Talking about it for 30 seconds probably doesn't help. Let's move on to the next topic. Authority your favorite. Yes. Well, it's everyone in the SEO world. I've caught your bug. I still believe that link building is everyone's favorite topic in the SEO world.

ARTHUR: So I guess one of the first things we do is a backlink audit. So we'll go into, again, Ahrefs or pick your poison, whatever tool you want to use, Search Console. We use all of them. We use all of them.

MICHAEL: But Search Console, Majestic, Ahrefs usually for this part.

ARTHUR: Yep. And then go in there and see if there's anything that is extremely obviously a bad link and then just compile a disavow file and upload it into the disavow tool. So we, we will do a more comprehensive backlink audit as part of SEO service, but this is just going in there and you know, we have a list of sites that we've blacklisted in the past so we can cross reference that and just remove any, anything that we think might be harming the domain.

MICHAEL: Yep. And then outside of that blacklist things, super obvious, bad stuff. Like, um, we always talk about Cialis, Viagra type things, Nike, Air Max, Jordan, long anchor text, spam, anything like that. With generally with disavows, less is more like, don't just go in there disavowing everything and like every little link that you think is bad. But, um, the really obvious stuff we go for. And then on the link building side, like this is the part of SEO that is long term, takes time. You've got to build it up. Google's got to find it, all that stuff. So you can't really speed this part up. But what we do is immediately start foundation link building or pillow link building. whatever you want to call it, but it's basically going out and making sure that the client has links on all of the obvious business directories in Australia for our purposes, but then maybe niche specific directory links, and then maybe the key social profiles and like web 2.0, that sort of stuff, anything that most businesses have. We want to make sure that our client site has, because it's really good brand building and like signals that it's a real business and it's building the foundations to then go out and do authority link building, which we're rolling out in the months to come. Beautiful. It is beautiful. It's a good quick wins process. That is how we go about it here at Local Digital. In your world, hopefully that has made some, well, hopefully that is useful to you. That's all from us for this week, so. Short and sweet. Short and sweet, except for all of the stuff up when we were talking.

ARTHUR: Yeah, don't remind me.

MICHAEL: But until next week, happy SEOing. See ya.

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