In this members only weekly webinar, Clint goes over Q&A, does a Case Study for a member when his site dropped but no penalties appeared. He also did a site review and broke down how to fix the site so it would rank better and what he does in a site audit. He also debuted the new SIA link for members to share with others. It's SearchIntel.org - easier to remember and share.
Tests this week
Test 388: Are Keywords in LI Tags in Navigation a Stronger Factor than Keywords in LI tags in the Body?
Test 389: Can a Bio Linked to a Valid LinkedIn Account Increase Rank?
Test 390: Does Having an Embedded Google Map on a Page Help Rank?
January 10, 2020 Weekly Dossier
Transcription Below:
Hey, how is everyone doing today? This is the first weekly webinar of 2020, which is awesome. A little bit of a different format change; kind of cleaned things up as you see. Created slides! Check it out. I fancied it up in here. I just kind of keep the flow going so you guys know what to expect for these in the future.
Plus, this allows the team to cut and paste different sections of the webinar and we can turn that into content marketing pieces for the SIA to grow our membership. And it's just a great way or a great example to show you all how to multi-purpose your pieces of work.
If you're writing high quality content and ranked number one in Google, you can turn that into other things and rank some more high quality content and rank number one in Google. Or build silos with it. Whatever you want. Hopefully this works out. It should create a decent system for everybody to leverage and get the ideas off of things.
So here's the agenda for today. We got three tests. We got some new test requests, questions and answers, and then we'll close it out with a site review. Total should be about a good hour. Hopefully you get some good information and if not write Meredith some hate letters and email about how your information sucks. She appreciates that kind of stuff.
So here’s the tests 388 89 and 90.
Test 388: The first one is Are your keywords LI tags in navigation a stronger factor than keywords in LI tags in the body?
Test 389: Can a bio linked to a valid Linkedin account increase rank?
Test 390: Does having an embedded Google map on a page help rank?Pretty good questions I think. So without further ado, let me switch browser views and get over to the test results.
Test 388: This one is the LI tags in the navigation. Basically if you're using the list tags, and depending on how your theme is designed and stuff, you'll have an unnumbered list and then you throw in your different homepage versus services versus whatever. And the question that was being asked is if you get more benefit from having them in your navigation versus if you did an ordered list inside of your body like a paragraph or something.
I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but the last year or the last 2019 webinar we did, we looked at the body part and we saw the results from that. In this case, we're gonna look at the navigation.
You see how it's built up here? It's pretty simple. It's not a complex concept to implement. Again though if your theme doesn't have lists in there you might have to tinker with code or get a dev to do the code but that's basically how it was built up. And this is what it would look like inside of the body, if you used to unordered list in the body. Not really that complex. So you see that here it is. It started out at number 3.
This is typical as always on the single variable test. Put it in number three and then see what happens to it. In this case, it just went up one so I think it's safe to say there's really no benefit of putting it there. If I remember correctly, it's the same with the body. It really didn’t do any good on its own just by having lists there. Just by having the LI come in there.
However there are some indications when you're using tools like Surfer, POP or Cora that it might come into play if you're putting in your keywords and your match terms. So we'll have to play around with that. And this was probably one of those tests where you want to actually kick it into the real world test environments and get it out of the single variable environments just to see if we can see what's going on. Hopefully that's pretty cut-and-dry. I think it is a pretty simple test.
Test 389: Can a bio linked to a valid Linkedin account increase rank? This is James. He is doing a bunch of things or he's testing does it really matter where you're linking out to? This is the second or third test he's done in that series and here he's checking if it matters if you link out to your LinkedIn page. One of the things that I noted that he was trying to do is to see if that would pass a trust signal and EAT and that's what he put in his background information.
However, I think in this environment, in the single variable environment, it's really hard to test that EAT thing because you're putting it on essentially brand new sites, right? Brand new sites and brand new pages. There's no authority, no trust and certainly no expertise unless you're testing Latin. And you're looking for expertise in Latin. And if we're using Lorem Ipsum, he knows what we're saying all right.
I think the EAT thing is a bit of a stretch but this is really one of those tests that probably actually can serve well in a real world environment as well. Where you take your about me page or your bio page, if you have a separate one on your website, and test whether using the LinkedIn or using your Facebook page, using your YouTube or whatever is going to improve the EAT signal.
So a little bit harder the test in a real world environment than it is in a single variable but you get a little bit better results, in my opinion, just based off of the application of what the heck you're trying to go after.
So here you see he added the LinkedIn bio. He did it right here with the link profile link. And then his control pages, he had the bio and just didn't have... if you see here he's missing the the link to LinkedIn.
And as you see from the images he added and it went down. It went down some more, went back up and then ultimately went back down again. Like he's saying in his applications and in analysis and implications section right here, in may not be a factor or it could be just how he placed it. Like his bio placement; does that cause issues?
He literally put the bio in there, did that change the way the rest of the page worked? He did okay by adding the word count so he kept the keyword ratio the same. But maybe because he did the lorem ipsum and then his bio was in English, could that have caused this little thinker thing too? So there's a lot of questions in here. If this was Mythbusters, I would say inconclusive. And that's pretty much the assumption that James came up with too is inconclusive on this one.
Again I think these are probably better off tested in a real-world but we'll have to find some keyword sets that we can actually start going after that are easier to rank in a real world that way we're not spinning wheels try to emulate this with the single variable model.
Test 390: Does having an embedded Google map on a page help? A lot of talk I think of Maps Liftoff by Brian Willie, Jordan Pierce's map course and a bunch of other ones that they recommend or they don't recommend the embedding of a Google map, and particularly Google my business map, on your web page in order to rank. And not only does it help increase relevance in a real-world environment to that location but in theory is that it also ties your GMB to help increase your ranking of your map.
I don't disagree with that. I actually use that model quite a bit and it does help but we wanted to confirm it. So James ran this test where he put a GMB map onto a page and said just having it there does that help? Does that help increase rankings? I think the set up is pretty much the same you just put the map down there. He threw it on there and then it popped in the number one, went back down and kind of stayed there and then jump right back up again. So it bounced around.
Now I guess the argument could be made is you messed with the relevancy and that's why you're increasing it up? Because you can play with that iframe code and actually do some stuff to it to increase relevancy and hide some stuff in there. Keywords, for example, or you put schema inside the iframe. In this case, because it's a single variable and he used a fake keyword, it took a little bit longer and that's why I think that bounce came in.
The act of putting that map on there in and of itself actually did improve the ranking of that page. You can't claim it's keyword density. I guess you could because you added a little bit of extra code but really at the end of the day, I think it's safe to say that the keyword density is ruled out unless the fake keyword was inside of there. I don't see why he would add the fake keyword into the iframe code so I'm gonna go with it's a good idea to do the map.
Caveat is, if you're a page speed nut like I am, then be careful with the amount of maps you're putting on your pages location page. It's fine, just don't put it in the footer site wide because Google loads for that one map to load in an iframe you're looking at 15-20 different scripts that are added to the load of your page coming from Google. It’s very inefficient really, but if Google wants you to embrace this system but they don't make it nice so it loads faster but then they cry at you that your page is loading slow. It seems kind of counterintuitive to me but whatever.
If you're gonna use this map, just make sure that you're using it smartly and you put it on your supporting pages where you don't expect a lot of traffic. Put it on your location pages where you expect traffic but you're gonna get relevancy and you're getting relevancy from that map and there's a user perspective there too. But don’t make it like you see a lot these days in the site wide footer map. Don't do that.
Q&A
So that's the three tests. I can close that now and go over back to here. I'm gonna hit up the questions real quick, just so we can get in there. One from Meredith. Meredith says she appreciates all the emails you send her so make sure you're sending as many as you can. On that note, not only bitches, gripes, complaints.. we don't wanna hear that stuff all the time.
Obviously it helps us do better but you know... send Meredith some nice stuff too. Or if you have questions and you don't want to ask in the slack just because you want to keep your site private or something like that, send those to Meredith. Her, the team and myself will do our best to help you out and troubleshoot that stuff.
Obviously, don't abuse it. We're not gonna do a full site audit for you and send you ten hours of work or anything like that, but we will certainly point you in the right direction of where to go. And if it's an easy fix or something that we could test… for example, we had one member send in a site and we recommended more backlinks with a diverse anchor text profile. And now we can turn that into a tests to see if it's going to work.
Because at the end of the day, you really have to test everything before you do anything. Especially the client sites. You want to be sure that method is going to be good. So the one that was recommended to them, I know for a fact, that works. They weren't sure. They wanted to test it out themselves, so that's cool. But when you approach us with those kind of questions and ideas etc, we can turn it into a better experience for everybody.
Let's see... Meredith... are there any other types of non Google Maps that could be an embed? There are a couple of other services that have maps. I actually used to like the idea of using Fusion Tables to take the maps and then embed the Fusion Tables.
But Google shut down that program. You can do a little bit more now with Data Studio, but I haven't figured out the integrations of those yet. I'm not so sure if Apple Maps and Bing Maps can be embedded in it. I honestly just never really looked. That's a good thing to keep an eye on that and actually try and check that out to see if we get the same effect.
Let's see... Suzy commented that Jo said embedded google maps affected page speed. Yeah, so like I said before, it does have an effect on page speed. If you're... however comma...if your site is loading three seconds or faster, you've met the Google standard and that's for mobile. The site’s gotta be in the start render, first useful phase, at three seconds. That's the rule and that's what Google's looking for. That's kind of their guideline.
Now if your site is loading at 1.2 and you put a map on there and it goes to 2.0, you're fine. It's not gonna kill anything. You can do it. Just remember you're balancing the usability, the relevance of having that map there, and is it going to be effective to leverage things. So in this case, do we put the map on because we know we can get a slight boost for rankings or do we put the link and forego that slight boost in rankings? And just tie the site into the Google map? Or is just having that link there, is that an advantage? I'd be another great test I think.
Turning that out and just having the link to the map, does that boost rankings? So yeah, like Gary said, you can lazy load map iframes. You can lazy the video iframes as well. Or you can turn on...if you have WP Rocket plugin, for example. That switch is there. It's in the code. But if it's a picture and it's set up as a lightbox. So there's plenty of things you can do but you know coming from a page speed junkie, I tell you don't get wrapped up around the axle .
If all your competition’s websites are loading at two seconds and slower and your’s page loads at 1.30 you've won that game. You've won the page speed game. Get out of it now and go do something else. And if you get that 1.30 with the maps on there and YouTube videos, go for it. Knock it out because you're enhancing the functionality of your website. So that's my rant on page speed stuff. Hopefully there's no more questions on that.
Test Requests
As you guys all know or if you don't now you do... there is a form you can get inside of the SIA slack > under events. I remind everyone inside of the general text as well. Typically you'll for sure find it in events. It's a test request form and these are some of the tests that have been requested. We just want to make sure that you guys all know that you have been heard.
So the first one is Sending spam domains through domain shorteners that are relevant and seeing if they get cleaned up versus sending through non-relevant shorteners.
So I think the person who sent this might need to clarify this if I'm wrong. But I think what you can do is you can buy a nice clean domain and set up a URL shortener service to it. They're not really that complex to do. You need a little bit of coding but I think there's plenty of scripts out there to knock this out for you. But you'd buy a relevant domain. So let's stick with an example of printing. So you're a printer.
You buy a domain brand-new with printer in it and probably partial match would be best, in my opinion. If you get the exact match, that's fine but whatever but you want to have that the keyword inside of your primary keywords. So if you're a printer, you want to have printer in city. That would be good to get some relevant version of that. And then take that and actually use that and send spam domains to it. And in the way your question is written is you’ll 301 the spam domains to the domain shortener now and then use that domain shortener to build links to the website or your target page.
Will that clean it up? That's technically what you're doing. There's a double 301 and that method has worked fairly well for quite some time. The double 301. So you have a spam domain and you 301 that spam domain to a good domain and then 301 that good domain to another good domain. And then send that to your website. So double 301.
How do you test that in a single variable environment? That's a good question. Something that we'll have to bang around. I’ll hit up Hunter and see if we can pull that off. But I want to research the domain short stuff too. So if anything, we can leverage that to create a shortener for SIA, which would be pretty neat.
And then we also have to look at does link juice pass through double shorteners. I think Kyle and the team did a domain shorteners test with a small batch. But I have a couple tools that we can use that can submit to a bunch of them so why not try a bunch of them out. And we get the new testing tool that allow us to do multiple pages so we’ll try that out and see if we can knock it out.
The next request was When you have internal links does it make a difference to open the page in a new tab or keep it on the same page? I would think by SEO standards it probably doesn't matter but that sounds like a really interesting test. Usability is like a pet peeve for me. When you have internal links and you have 2 money pages and one links to the other one and you want to keep both of them open right so I always do a new tab.
Nothing irritates me more than being on a website I want to read part of the page but there's a link there that relevant to that information. I click it and takes me off and then I'm playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon trying to get back to that original page. It's kind of a pain so we'll see how that one works out. That would be a really easy test to set up.
We'll see how we could pull that one off though. Instinct says it doesn't really matter but we'll see if we could play with usability. But in a single variable, we don't test usability. So yeah, that's interesting.
A third is If a page is sending links to three different places does it pass more juice to those three verses if it’s sending them to six different places? So the end question is does it matter how many links are going out of a page? If it has less links does the link equity get spread more evenly to three than it does to six? Or turn in more power? And I think the obvious question was if the assumption is that if link juice goes out equally to all the pages that are linked then if you have three, it's going to go out more of that link juice than if you have six.
That's another tough one I think that one would probably have to be a real-world thing. But I'm getting ready to set up... Hunter's got a whole bunch of page tests set up for me so I'm getting ready to test SEO Autopilot and the different types of links. So we're gonna actually get two different questions answered. One is this section in SEO autopilot work ie bookmark links etc... does that work? And two, we start putting those together and see if there's one that beat the other... that kind of stuff.
That'll help us with the question of which links is Google filtering. If you believe the John Mueller propaganda that they can filter backlinks out. We're gonna do a whole bunch of tests with backlinks and then once Dori is all calmed down, she's setting up all the new marketing and stuff. And once she's got that done, we'll probably start thinking about testing the PBN stuff and setting those up and doing those all right and getting some good results with that stuff to you. But we're gonna start testing tools because it's easy.
Let's see... Auto Poster Scheduler - WP Plugin Effects. So this is a plug-in can be used to update the publish date. There's another one by Jerry West. He created one too. Fresh update I think is what he was selling. And basically what he says this plug-in does is you can just change it so like every 30 days just reset the date of your posts and that's what link Fresh update did too.
And the question is does that actually help? We had another freshness test request too in the slack. The problem is not all terms beg for freshness. There's some terms that Google looks for the most fresh update then there are the terms that it doesn't. So in order to test the freshness and see if it's actually something that you can manipulate, you have to have real-world keywords that Google is already showing fresh published stuff in. Rank the page. Wait it out.
Hope you get a drop because it's doing freshness so other people are publishing for it and then change the dates and see if you get a rank improvement. And if that doesn't work, wait the 30 days out, change the content, and the date and then see if you get an improvement. So those are the two variations of that test.
So that's probably a good call out to you users. We need a low competition keyword from the members that is leveraging freshness. And if we can get a low competition that is leveraging freshness, we'll find a domain that'll allow us to pop in there and at least get into the top 50. And we can see plus or minus improvements based off of that top 50 rankings, which puts us right in the middle of the top 100.
Now the practical experience of us says that will work so John Meuller just did a post saying that changing your content and updating to 2020 doesn't work. But you know the algorithm didn't get that memo from John Mueller because that's exactly what's been happening and has been happening for years. Why he would... to me that's like if you don't know the answer to the question don't talk out of your ass because people are gonna pull the call up for ya. So that's what you get.
Q&A
Okay so let's get on to the Q&A and we're right on schedule at 30 minutes. So Question on switching from JPEG to WebP images. However when you convert png to jpg to webP images, then is there a chance of losing links pointed to the jpg versions of the image? And therefore the page? What might happen when a jpg file is converted to WebP. Do we lose the link equity in that case? So there's really only three types of images: PNG, JPEG and WebP.
The problem with WebP is that it's kind of new technology so not all browsers are adapting to it and when you convert... or using the plugins to convert ...and you lose the link equity for the JPEG? So what typically happens with all of these plugins right now unless you're uploading webP exclusively, you're always gonna have a jpg file there. Especially if you're using a converter. The JPEG file will stay there. It's the original file and depending on how your site set up a redirect to the attachment page which is where that's shown.
And then what the plugins now are getting is if the browser recognizes and allows for webP, it'll show that image instead versus the JPG. So you're technically not losing the link echo if you're embedding the JPEG everywhere and doing some image link building. You're just leveraging another file. Set this for webP. So I think you're safe by implementing webP. It’s actually a standard practice. We're doing it now in our services just to leverage that new technology.
I haven't noticed the ranking improvement with webP versus JPEG. It's like negligible when you're using something like Smush Pro, which we use to optimize images. Our JPEGs and our webPs are probably negligibly the same size. So it's just another to hit down that one or two milliseconds really at the day but it's a new format. It's not widely embraced right now but if the browsers are using it and you get a little bit more out of it than why not leverage it if it doesn't cost you anything. In this case, it's not costing you anything when talking about link equity.
Next question… A beginners question to GMB. Google my business builds your website for you on its own URL. Alternately, you can also build a self hosted WordPress site of your own and link it to the GMB. That's putting your website in the GMB block.
Which version works better? Do I use GMB’s built website or my own? And is there a lower chance of suspension when you're using Google's own built website for GMB? I’ll answer the last part of that question first. No, there is no chance having over the top SEO, we do a lot of that building for our clients for lead gen and using the Google site versus using your regular one is not going to save you if your map is not right, it's not good. So there is no benefit in the suspension part of that.
There is also no better benefit isn't choosing one over the other i.e. using the GMB site in that website link versus your own website because technically you can link the GMB sub site to your website and there's your tie-in. But if you have your own website already you want to put that on your GMB that said you should also have your site your GMB site turned on and optimized. And you can actually do these pretty quickly. Use the title as the h1 tag.
Think of it that way. Fill in the description. You can put a link to your website in the description. And as you do the Google post, you're creating posts on that site automatically. If you're doing backlinks inside a Google post, it builds another backlink from the website so it kind of stacks it up in power. So really you want to be using both of those sites if you have the time and you can set that up.
Here's one caveat. Let's say you optimize your GMB, then you turn on your GMB site. Go back to your GMB and make sure they did not automatically switch that over to that Google site. You don't want that. In the beginning that's what was happening automatically. Not too sure if that goes on anymore. We're very specific and how we set up our GMBs so I don't have to worry about it. But make sure you check that to see that it's not activating that GMB site and overriding your own website. You don't want that. That’s not a good thing necessarily so check that. Hopefully that would help.
Case Study
Anyone have a site like mine getting crushed since Dec 31st? It’s an affiliate site and had 100+ featured snippets now some have dropped to the tenth page. Even more weird some pages have jumped up to featured snippets on the first page. Overall though everything is nose diving and hasn’t slowed down. No manual notification. Just trying to compare notes if someone else has a similar situation.
Okay, let's see...questions and answers... last one... Anyone have a site like mine getting crushed since Dec 31st? This is an interesting one. I was thinking about sharing the screen share with this one cuz this comes out of the Slack. Basically on the 31st, his website took a dive off a cliff. Like it was doing awesome and then the most horrible thing you can see.
Typically when I see something like that, instantly I say a penalty. But he also said there's no manual penalty notification. So there's an algorithm penalty. Most likely it's not a penalty more than a change. The problem with these kind of questions is you have to really do a before and after site audit picture.
The easiest way to do that is if you're always maintaining Cora reports and every time an update happens, you see what changes in the Cora reports. That could be a little bit tiresome. And even I get lackadaisical in that concept.
And then the next most obvious place, and the place that I am first recommended him to go check this out is looking at your backlink profile. Look at your anchor text. Do a compare and contrast with what's there now versus what was there before, etcetera. And because he's got pages that are still ranking and then some that jumped up, you want to do a compare and contrast to the backlink profiles of the ones that jumped up versus the ones that dropped.
Is there a difference in there? The pages that all dropped have backlinks and the ones that didn't that shot up do they not have backlinks? That’d be an interesting development. If the pages that dropped had a set of backlinks, a particular set, then the featured snippet ones, the ones that were successful and jumped up, do they have a different set? Maybe you need to go from which backlinks are working for your website, in your particularly worst case, that you can test that out and see how it goes.
So surprisingly enough most people think I'd automatically think on page but when you're looking at a scale like this and you're hundreds down, the first place, really smart place to go is backlinks and anchor text.
Alright so that's the end of the questions and the answers for this week. Again if you go to the slack and use the Q&A forum inside of the events channel, you can drop your questions in there. Otherwise I’ll seek out and find my own on the Internet.
Site Review
The last segment this is typically the longest and we're right on schedule 11:35. We're gonna do a site review. This was randomly selected. Obviously, if you want your site reviewed on the episode, you can ask inside of the slack and I will add it. Otherwise I'm just gonna randomly find one just because I'm willy nilly like that. We'll go through it and look at things from my perspective. This is how I do it. Maybe it'll give you some ideas for what you do. Maybe we'll run into a situation where you are also having the same thing.
Again if you want your site reviewed on the show, just drop it in the Q&A forum. We will look at on page and off page and it will be in this format inside of the weekly webinars for members only. This won't be recut out and put on a public YouTube channel. It's Members Only so you have that there for safety.
All right so here's a keyword we're looking at his printing company Chicago. Again I just kind of scroll through here and pick the random one right there. It's number 11. And the reason I picked this one, printing, is because one of the members has a printing site in Australia and he was having some issues so I figured why not look in Chicago and see if some of these issues kind of carrying on the same.
Looking at backlink profiles and etc, it's kind of similar. So I don't think it'd be that far off testing this. You see, it's number 11. In my tool, it's actually not 11, but my tool counts some of these other placements in here too so it kind of dinks with the count because there's links in here. So it just jumps in numbers but its third from the bottom so that would that seven.
I always start off from a user perspective in any audit I do. What is it? What's it about? What's in it for me? I heard that from one of the Gurus a long time ago and I've been using that model ever since because it makes sense.
When I get to the website, what is it? It’s a website for West Chicago Printing.
What's it about? if I got here, I don’t know. I’m not really sure. It’s about this company, I guess.
And then what's in it for me? Obviously it’s just this one coupon but this page doesn't say what I do. Like do they print post cards? If you look at this, it's like books or something. Maybe I don't need that and I've now automatically disqualified myself with the lack of content on the page. It’s more to the point of lack of conversion point content.
This is your business card. Your home page is your business card. The first thing to say is: Welcome to West Chicago printing. This is what we do. This is how you get it. Call us right now. Or whatever that CTA is. So if these guys looking for Forbes or visits the store or email submits, that shouldn't be addressed on the home page. They're not.
As a matter of fact, when I first opened this, I didn't even know there was a slider here. That wasn't even working right the first time, which is kind of indicative to the problems they have. I would lock it right in on that. There's the offer.
There's a phone number and that's how you get a hold of us. And then I would go down to what we do. It is right here. It's all about them. I don't care I really don't care about West Chicago company printing. What I care about is what they can do for me. Self-serving and etcetera but that's how the web searcher looks at things.
You need to do that as well when you're looking at answering those questions. They do have the services pages here. Not too bad set up. Some standard optimization and stuff, business cards ,etc. So as I was saying we get those services and stuff yeah... branding graphic design, printing, etc and then they are talking about their different product lines.
What I would do is probably try to find the top five money makers and traffic drivers and those service would be here: We do flyers, business cards, and newsletters, for example. Plus, a link to the service page. That's kind of how I would have addressed that.
And when we get into testimonials this is pretty much a standard page. I don't like...it's like just one. You know what I mean? It's just there's too much here. I don't care. I want to see the stars. Show me some of the stars… your Google reviews. And finally if you're offering graphic design services make a nice website.
This one... the 90s called. They want their website back. It's time. So you guys that are web developers, reach out to these people and maybe it's time for them to get a new website. It’d be awesome. Maybe a new position for it.
Next thing I always look at is PageSpeed. You can see here this thing is running really slow. These days because I'm testing it from Chicago so we don't get to see it. That's a shame. Maybe if we were in another city we can get it to go faster.
But typically you want to use this and you want to find the city that's closest to you Dallas is nowhere near Chicago. I think they're beat up right now. Oh geez. All right so I'll skip that but basically you get the idea. You want to do a page speed test. I can use GTmetrix but I like the numbers. The numbers are wrong so we'll see something else about that.
Next progression. We go into onpage. There's a couple different versions. The way you look at this, I'm gonna use surfer SEO for this one. If you don't know how to use their system, we’ll probably do a class on that soon. Just to get you thinking about the different tools and stuff that are out there and how to leverage those.
One of the things that jumped at me right off the bat. This is where I started looking at the site in the first place was the common backlinks. Not a page factor but it's right there at the top of the important area. It just kind of to me just solidified my initial impression of the printing industry and what they needed to do is rank.
But you look at the keywords you see the phrases that typically most of these tools say start adding keywords, adding more content. Clearly looking at the homepage you need to add more content just to get the conversion better and clean that up. So the tool is not that far off. Would I be going into the 2500 words phase? Nah, not even close.
I'd probably go and add the 569, which would bring me up to roughly looking at… making a rough guesstimate about the 1300 range. 1000-1300 range. And it should be good.
Then looking at some of these codes, adding the headers H2s and the strong. Strong versus bold. Typically, if you don't know, strong is preferred over bold by Google. We actually tested it a long time ago. And again emphasis versus bold versus strong and strong again one last time.
I'm expecting yet to run again. And then talk about the keywords and adding that stuff in here. These are not in there right now. Now, there are seven without that in there. I imagine it would probably be easy top three ranking with just some of the onpage stuff. and then you go into some more elements that will cover that.
I'm going to close this and I'm gonna jump over to a Cora report. I ran this for giggles. Took a long time but typically I like to go over here to the basic terms and just look at some things. I just did verify that one tool was not crazy over the other one. Number of sentences. Number of words.
Obviously we want to add some more terms words in there and then looking at Meta Description length and keywords in meta descriptions. So you typically want to throw. headers...and we would address that or we would also address all of these. H1, h2, h3, and h4. I don't often get into the h5 and h6 because the way those are designed sometimes it just looks smaller. If you want it to look right inside your page, you have to edit it.
But I know h1, h2, h3, h4 are important. So I at least knock those out. And then you want to have two terms in the lead. Navigation - this will throw off if you have like a Yelp or something in there. So I typically don't follow that. Same with external links. I don't address that either. But you can look at this and see that there's plenty of on-page tuning to do.
Again, if it's ranking at seven, which is where it's at right now, and you do some on-page tuning, you're probably gonna get into the top three. And then you can get into you some of the intermediate stuff and this is mainly keywords, etc. Sometimes I go over here and tinker around with stuff in here in intermediate but depends on the competition.
And that's like if I've gotten all of this done, and got me up in the four or maybe one of these things will give me up in a three. But we'll look at my experience and then let my experience tell me that stuff.
Then the last part is the off page. This is a good carry over because my instincts on this niche was we needed more backlinks. And looking at this report, in particular the Ahrefs stuff, it agrees. So here's the DomDetailer where we get majestic trust flow and citation for DomDetailer. And then Moz.
That's all the tools. They all agree I need more backlinks. I think that with this one here you can see if I want easy wins quickly, start building backlinks right now . And then implement your on-page SEO. And that's pretty much what this report is telling us is we need to start building some more backlinks. There's some other things in here: entities and all that stuff. I don’t think if we have time to get into that and if we did I would not do the topic it's just service so maybe we'll schedule something else out for that one.
I also wanted to point out something here. Not a lot of people know this. But look at the backlink counts 21 backlinks and 9 referring domains (in ahrefs) and then you look over here at Majestic and there's 1 referring domain. And then you look over here (at semrush) and there's 30 referring domains. S when you're doing a backlink analysis, you need as many tools as you get access to.
Typically if I'm doing a penalty recovery, I also have open Moz and then Google search console and that pull from all those tools to make one collective list. And then I throw it in the link research tools and it will typically find some more because research tools has 22 sources or so they claim. But when you're doing backlink analysis you got to make sure that you're pulling from many sources as possible to get the entire picture.
But you can see it here on ahrefs, they get the jump in referring domains and they all died again. I don't know what would cause that except maybe some, hey let's try this kind of thing. And then it dropped. It was only for a couple months where that stayed in there and then they were done over a period of three months.
So my guess is: Hey, we're ranking on the bottom of page two, let's build the backlinks. I didn't get what I wanted so I quit my services and then I’m back here again, right? Which is the typical response with clients in SEO these days. Especially if you're charged $299 all you can really afford to do is some quick backlinks and hope that works.
So you see that process and you will look at their anchor text. Remember printing Chicago company, printing companies Chicago is the term and there's no exact match anchors in here. There is printing Chicago and that's inside too so that's okay and then you a lot of url but they don't have any exact match brand. That comma in there makes it a not exact match. And it's not even capitalized.
So for them, I would do some exact match brand and then I’d do a little bit more of the URL stuff. They’re okay but I would do some more. And when that's done and I've pillowed or I've created a collection of links, I’d drop some exact match for this particular target term. Or you could just go crazy and do it all at once. So that's how I would address that. We look at the same data look over here at the anchor text in Majestic.
Obviously, it's only got that one so it's the URL, no big deal. Then we kind of come over here and we see the referring ip's. You look at SEMrush data. It's okay. They're building up a lot better now. Their database is getting more and more. It used to be tied specifically to Majestic and now they're doing a better job of tying it to themselves. So we look at anchors and that kind of tells us the same story. There's some branding in there. There's a partial match but there's no exact match.
If I want to rank for printing company Chicago, I need at least a couple that say printing company Chicago. I can't just go nada and not do it. Well, typically technically if you have a lot better backlinks you can go nada but it's a little bit faster if you do some exact much stuff. Then you can kind of bounce that off and see what the results are. Again they're not doing horrible.
Let's go back to the domain overview and you see the traffic spike… remember those backlinks we saw ahrefs, that's when this traffic went up. They started dropping again and now they’re going back up again. So my suspicion is the backlinks helped, they dropped out but they were ranking okay, the pages do okay, so Google's like get some credit from the usability stuff and we'll keep it going. They rank plenty of terms.
There's a lot of traffic opportunities here: Chicago printing, printer in Chicago, printing companies in Chicago, printing services in Chicago. That was decent search volume so I think they're missing out by not building a better backlinks campaign.
Finally I want to close out the audit here with this report. This is an add-on report that comes out of Cora. These are the sections that I really like. These are okay but I really like this section here. The titles. Because I can look at where the term is being used, if I have to use it, can I focus solely on CTR? As you can see everyone's using printing and company, printing in companies there. So I have to use it inside of that variance.
Then there's some ideas here too. Now if you were a black hat guy like me, you take this report copy all of these titles down and spin that when you're building your links. And use everyone else's titles for your titles for your link pages.
You can also do the same with the H1s here. But more importantly, I want to look at am I using the exact match in the h1? Should I use the exact match? The top four here don't have it. Yelp doesn't count. They suck anyway. But a printing company, printer, printing company those are in there. I probably want to leverage that term. I want to leverage that as exact match in my h1.
H2 not so much. Not really a lot of people are focusing so there might be some easy wins. In particular, you can probably kick in your variations in the h2 h3 and then in h4. Again this is right back to you print and printing company, which kind of goes along with my theory.
This is my own personal theory: your exact match should in turn be in your h1. You should have exact match in h2. Then h3 and h4 should be related terms and your variations. So that's how I set that up.
I look at meta descriptions. Should my keyword be in there? Is Google looking for that? In this case, it is so a lot of people say, Hey that doesn't count. But if it doesn't count, why is it so consistent here? Obviously not all these websites are SEOed so if it doesn't count why is Google looking for it? I think it counts. Then you view the meta keywords. You see who's playing around with it and who's not. Obviously, this is an example. A nice prime example of how not to do it. They're at 13 so clearly it's not working for them.
Two tools that I use: Screaming frog just to get a 1000 meter view. I just want to scroll through here. I'm gonna look through the page titles and make sure that they're all filled out, make sure they're not too long and then I look at the duplicate title of things here. Those are things you want to fix really quick.
Same with the meta description. You can see it's blank, which is odd, right? There are people teaching to leave the Meta Description blank. Imagine just filling in one and seeing what happens. I would fill in a meta description here on this homepage. I am going to bet Dori a beer that it would actually go up.
Actually I bet Dori rum or tequila. I bet Dori tequila if we ever got access to this and we add in a meta description, it would probably shoot up from seven to five or four just from that one thing.
Meta keywords I really don't tink around with and we look at h1s. I just typically use this program to see if they're filled in. Same with Canonical's. The best one you're gonna get out of this is response codes. Just go here and flip it around. You want to make sure you don't have any 500s in there.
You're gonna get some of these randoms: the 307s and 301s. That's okay. There are something to look at. But 500s will kill you. You want to make sure that you look at those as part of your audit. And then I just look at structured data. Is it there or not? It's really what this tool gives you. You see all these straight zeros? They're not leveraging structured data at all.
And then finally I look at the technical stuff. This is the overview from Site Bulb. But this is hands-down my most favorite tool ever. We've got a couple clients that they have separate devs and the devs tell us, Oh no, we don't have to do that or we don't want to do that or whatever.
We just run this report and hand it right back to them once a month… Here you go, you still haven't fixed it. Here, you still haven't fixed it. That takes the ownership off of you. You've advised the devs who are responsible for the coding of their website. Fix the damn website.
I like this because it comes out and gives you the hints and stuff and then it's all broken down into different categories like the overall audit, the SEO, and low, medium, high, which you should fix. And your experience will help you determine what you worry about what you don’t. But if you're setting up a month-by-month campaign thing like your client wants three months, what are you going to do? Run this thing and divide it into three sections and there you go. That works out.
Then the visualization, I just kind of want to point something out here. I'm gonna click on one of these just to get it to zoom in a little bit better so you can see it but you can see that the overall site structure is not too bad. Now this is site structure. I'm not saying that they actually did pages and stuff that helped each other but this is a decent example of a site structure that would kind of lead you to worry about different things, especially if these were all correctly into a silo.
Like this one's not too bad. But this one over here, it's got some crazy weird page. I don't even know what they were thinking with this URL and then some other stuff linking to it. It’s just kind of a waste. It's never gonna rank for suspending failure. Well, it might but not when the target term is Wheaton Wesleyan door hanger.
If I'm trying to rank for that, we show in their portfolio they failed miserably in the URL creation stuff. But that's the stuff I wouldn't have noticed if I wasn't clicking around inside of the visualization. So that's really another good part. And I also just print out the PDF report. You can just hand that off to your tech people and knock it out. I think that is it.
I’m gonna go over the chat. No questions. So if you have any questions, this is your last chance. I hope you guys like the new leader slide here. Dori made that. Because she's awesome. And if you want to help promote the SIA, you can send people to this new domain she bought: searchintel.org. It’s really easy to remember. Easy to hand out and tell your friends, your family..
Start with your friends and family and build a business. [laughing] Even if they don't like SEO, they can pay us. I’m just kidding but again that is easy. Instead of SEOIntelligenceAgency.com - it’s SearchIntel.org. It's really easy to remember. Rolls off the tongue so make sure you keep track of that. Dori's gonna redesign the whole website.
Looking forward to that. So with that, I think that's it. I'm gonna close it out. We'll see you next week with some new tests, new questions, and a whole brand new site review. Thank you all for showing up. See you later.