SEO Quick Wins

TRANSCRIPT:

Michael 0:00
Hi guys, Michael here before we get into the show, if you’re a Twitter user head to at service scaling, I’m tweeting a bunch of stuff. I’ve learned scaling our digital marketing agency, and I think you’ll find it pretty interesting. All right, let’s get into the show.

Unknown Speaker 0:15
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 0:37
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the SEO show. I am Michael Causton. And Arthur fabric is sitting opposite me. How are you going?

Arthur 0:45
I’m good. I’m sitting in your seat today. Yes. So I’m a bit thrown off. Everything’s just a bit weird. And today,

Michael 0:51
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,

Arthur 0:58
I’m not doing any of that. But I know. I know what you mean.

Michael 1:00
You’re like you just before we went on air you can we swap it out like this. But anyway,

Arthur 1:05
I don’t. I’m gonna we’re gonna swap during in the next podcast. Okay. I don’t like it. Yeah. Okay.

Michael 1:11
I don’t like it bad or 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 that things like tech audits, keyword research, content creation just takes ages, it takes time. Yeah, clients are antsy, they want to see stuff happening when they come in, but 100%.

Arthur 2:04
And I think, you know, by doing this quick wins, I guess, checklists that we have, we can address, I guess the main elements of ser like the 8020 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 clients happier. And you know, we have more time to work on the more technical things later on.

Michael 2:27
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. Exactly. 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, man. That is another episode of the SEO show. So let’s chat technical.

Arthur 2:59
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. 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’s 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 cool with vital metrics, and you know, 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, we will, 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 3:55
And I would say with that one at the moment, the pain in our world is GA for universal, GA is being sunsetted. Google is hurting us. So part of that would be having a look back, are they only running Universal Analytics? And do they need a j for analytics setup? Yeah, all the pain that goes with that.

Arthur 4:14
So what we do is, if we find the early running Universal Analytics, we do create a GA for profile, just because it starts collecting data earlier. And then, you know, with Universal Analytics, eventually being like you said, removed, having that data, or historic data is important. Because when you’re looking at your and your comparisons and things like that, it’s a lot easier to do it within GA for rather than having to, you know, pull data from Universal Analytics, because I’m pretty sure they’re going to keep it around. Are they keeping the key? They’ll still have it, it just won’t pull data until it said they’re not going to get rid of it straightaway July, but eventually it will go away. Yeah. So you’ll still be able to, I guess, retrieve data from it. But ideally, when you want Looking at urine here, it’s a lot easier just to do it within one dashboard rather than chopping and changing.

Michael 5:05
Yeah. So you just got to cheer for. Personally, I don’t like it, I find it less intuitive, harder to use. Yeah. 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 implant think it’s

Arthur 5:20
just something it 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. Yep. But at the moment, it is. Yeah, there’s a lot of pain points. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve spoken to anyone that’s actually said they liked GA for so we’ll see how we go.

Michael 5:36
I remember, 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 your one person to the one reader and Google got rid of that. It’s probably like 10 years ago now. And I was outraged at the outrage and then I found something new. And then finally, AdWords interface updates. Yes. Outraged and then you get used to it gi for I am currently outraged. I’m gonna get used.

Arthur 6:03
Well, the thing was, I’m 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 GA four, 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 data aren’t in that out of the box in GFR, you have to set up reports and things like that. So it’s a massive change. Yep. It is. We don’t want to dwell on it too much. We’re talking about SEO quick wins.

Michael 6:36
That’s not a quick win. It’s a long term pain. But yeah, let’s move on. Then. Next one,

Arthur 6:41
running PageSpeed Insights. And also other tools like GT metrics, just making sure that the site performs well, from a, I guess, PageSpeed 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. Well, you can do it manually. If there’s, you know, certain images, which are massive, there’s videos that have massive resource hogs as well, you can address that. But essentially seeing what the recommendations, the tools spit out and addressing the I guess, quick wins or high priority items.

Michael 7:15
Yep. And keeping it as like a benchmark, right. So yeah, absolutely. 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 7:27
Yeah. And that’s exactly what we’re doing the checklists 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 7:40
Cool. We also skipped over mobile friendly tests, I wouldn’t have to as part of the process. It’s pretty straightforward. I guess

Arthur 7:45
it kind of falls within PageSpeed Insights as well, because it does give recommendations. Yeah, mobile friendliness, but essentially 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 does it call it out of the frame or whatever, viewport, things like that, if there’s any issues that we can address quickly. We’ll do that. Yeah, to improve that school.

Michael 8:13
Yep. What else? Robots. txt is one that is very straightforward. Yep. Literally visiting Ford slash robots like insurance.

Arthur 8:22
Yeah. 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 this page is not being indexed. In images, media, yeah, 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 site 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 disallowed, and crows, yep.

Michael 9:08
The other thing on that front of, I guess, sort of ties into the sitemap

Arthur 9:12
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.

Michael 9:25
And then that would be in Search Console to

Arthur 9:28
Yep, so adding it to search console letting Google know that it exists. So it can crawl it, and it knows which pages it needs to crawl on how frequently

Michael 9:36
Yep, and keep in mind the the 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 audits That ball was like a crawler for the site, it will crawl every page and then analyse it from a technical point of view. And then provide a prioritised report of sort of Max importance through to less 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 are 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 up. 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. The other one is basically internal links to deeper pages.

Arthur 10:50
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 using the right anchor texts, or if you have a florist site, and you’re 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 11:25
Yeah. And I, every time a guest comes on the show at the end, I asked three questions, one of them being what do you what’s the biggest myth in SEO? And what’s the most underrated thing interfere? For me? internal linking is the most underrated thing in SEO? Oh, 100%.

No, I agree. Yep. So definitely something that should be done a lot of it’s sort of quick when that isn’t being used by a lot of people. No. All right, let’s talk daily backups in the staging, because this is something that a lot of clients out of the box usually don’t have in place, particularly staging, or both of them, both of them. Yeah,

Arthur 12:00
yep. So the first one there 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. So there’s many tools that you can use for that. One that we use internally is called Managed WP. It’s just a 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, we’ll have 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, 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 12:52
Yeah. And the alternative to that is you break something and your site’s down for a week while you try and find a development and fix it. And there’s all stress and money lost and its results impacted. So you don’t want to be in opposition. 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 match the same, cool, and

Arthur 13:14
the next time they have a staging. So making sure that wherever the client site is hosted, has staging are 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 Kinser on the show, but there’s heaps of hosts out there that offer you know, one click staging

Michael 13:42
blog vault that I just mentioned as well if you want to do it, or you want to delay the one commission for blog should be I might get back in and set like a call out for our affiliate link. But

Arthur 13:52
But yeah, backups and staging, very important, quite easy to set up these days. And it gives gives yourself in the client peace of mind.

Michael 14:00
Yep, that’s definitely a quick win in terms of massive amounts of time saved for you as an SEO if something goes wrong. Absolutely. Alright, let’s move on to the next thing in our lives, which is the on site part of SEO and pillar. That’s usually the naming convention that we like to work with. The first one very obvious, very easy, very much a quick win.

Arthur 14:22
I think the first three are quite obvious. And yeah, so let’s just bang them off for Mongo.

Michael 14:27
Okay. Add your target keyword to your page title, your h1 and then in your body copy that search page. Pretty straightforward, but like often if someone comes to us their homepage for example isn’t properly optimised 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 straightaway because you’ve done it.

Arthur 14:52
Absolutely. That’s a 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 15:00
Yep. All right. Let’s move on. Ahrefs keyword cannibalization audit, try saying that 10 times fast.

Arthur 15:10
No. I struggle speaking at the best of time. So,

Michael 15:14
you know, your host a podcast should be a bit better by now. What are we 48 episodes deep? Yeah, we’re coming up on episode 50.

Arthur 15:22
Those a word I couldn’t pronounce before we started recording. Yeah.

Michael 15:26
I can’t remember anyway. Let’s let’s chat keyword cannibalization audit.

Arthur 15:30
Cool. So essentially, this is, as you mentioned, H refs, we’d look at, obviously, H refs is like a SEO Bible. We are always in the, 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 one like auditing a site, or URL or domain, you can go and have a look at the keywords that the pay or the site’s ranking for. And there’s a toggle there,

Michael 16:01
which says it says multiple URLs only. That’s it. So if you turn it on, it’s gonna show you when a keyword is ranking on multiple different pages on your one website.

Arthur 16:11
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 come back that we can maybe there we go, and you can’t fit here we go confuse Google. And then you can prevent one page out ranking the other and essentially, it’s just yeah,

Michael 16:34
let’s put it into context. Maybe if your 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 smirking at me once, you know, my plumber.

Arthur 16:50
We talked about me not being able to talk. I knew that I was going to screw something up. Why, sir? It happened pretty quickly. And I got inside my own head and then yeah, here we are crumbled under the pressure is going to push on that title I can never happen.

Michael 17:03
That’s it. Talking about it for 30 seconds probably doesn’t help. Let’s move on to the

Arthur 17:09
majority your favourite?

Michael 17:11
Yes. Well, it’s everyone in the SEO world. I’ve caught your bug. I still believe that Link building is everyone’s favourite topic in the SEO world.

Arthur 17:23
So I guess one of the first things you do is a backlink audit. So we’ll go into again, H refs, or pick your poison. whatever tool you want to use such console, we use all of them, we use all of them, but

Michael 17:34
Search Console majestic address, usually for this, this pop.

Arthur 17:38
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 just remove any anything that we think might be harming the domain. Yep.

Michael 18:05
And then outside of that blacklist things super obvious bad stuff, like we always talk about Cialis Viagra type things Nike Air, Max Jordan, long anchor texts, 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 the really obvious stuff we go for. And then on the link building side like that, this is the part of SEO, that is long term takes time, you got to build it up, Google’s got to find out 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 a 30 link building, which we’re rolling up 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 this stuff up when we’re doing. Yeah, don’t remind me. But until next week, Happy Sewing.

Unknown Speaker 19:46
Bye. Thanks for listening to the SEO show. If you like what you heard, don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We’ll see you In the next episode

Transcribed by https://otter.ai