Personal SEO Consultation with Nik Ranger

all right howdy marketers and welcome to another incredible personal seo consultation session um although not at our usual us time because we are having we are joined with some friends from australia today um we have today red good day we have an evening as we were talking about earlier because it is 7 p.m here in texas where i am still tuesday as well that's not wednesday yes like it is where you are we've got a really exciting hour lined up for everybody um as usual i am diana richardson the social media and community manager for the seo unit here at semrush and it's absolutely terrific to see you all here today whether today means tuesday or wednesday wherever you are if you haven't attended one of these before buckle up because i want you to get ready to take some notes these are super productive sessions i always end up walking away with like little nuggets myself i absolutely love these sessions we're going to walk through real life websites with our seo expert and figure out some really tough seo conundrums so like i said i always learned a lot myself so i cannot wait to get started and joining me in the webinar room today is someone i am just thrilled to be working with today i'm a long time fan myself she is the senior technical seo specialist at studio hawk has one of the coolest linkedin profile pictures i've ever seen she's a data driven marketer who also plays the electric violin so please give a big warm welcome to nick ranger hi everybody hello and um i guess from texas howdy y'all um my my jokes are pretty terrible my wednesday's pretty good um we actually um a bit of a humble brag um as of 5am this morning found out that we're actually being awarded um the best global agency um so uh we had a bit of a celebration out there before and yeah everyone a really really great spirits and yeah just excited to get a get started on a good cracking day oh it's great to be here to start a day right i'm not complaining that is so awesome nick congratulations and i mean you know what a reassuring thing to hear is you're about to like you know be the recipient uh recipient of seo advices to now that you know that you are multiple award-winning um i do have a super random question for you though because i was checking you out plus i i've known you from following you over the years um but i was curious to know like would you say that your experience as a musician has affected your experience as an seo or a marketer in any way i think um i think having like um experience with a lot of different things like has influence on us in ways that we don't expect right um here in seo we have so many amazing digital marketers who come from all walks of life um i also formerly did engineering as well i used to be super into robots and then got into music so it's just kind of all intertwined um i think it's no secret that um technical seo is the thing that's really kind of captured my imagination just kept me um really really passionate about um what we do and and um wanting to find out pretty much everything underturned every rock um but i think i think for everybody um your experience brings to a really really great um varied ex perspective when it comes to things and when we're unpacking search intent um really the main thing is like i use different analogies sometimes so yeah that's my answer to that beautiful answer and i totally agree and i love one of my favorite bits of my job is like hearing everyone's story their origin story and how what got them on their path and what got them excited about seo or digital marketing or you know web design or whatever and so i love hearing yeah those different walks of life because it's so true how random we find ourselves here sometimes like but it's so it's fascinating so and so perfect segway too because now we get to know three amazing other people who have had all walks of life you know as part of their journey too so let's get to know um our guest today so zoe why don't you kick us off tell us a little bit about yourself did you hear me though is that can you are you can hear me there you go design and marketing company based in sydney so the main thing we do is more on the website design and then we also provide some digital marketing strategies for the client as well great great and your friend and you did you say that you're from sydney as well yeah yeah we are based in sydney so very cool all right danielle europe why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself hi guys um i'm based in new york i am um the ceo of art in new york which is a women's clothing company and yeah we're really excited to hear everything that make us decide me too and kudos to being woman owned in nyc great job all right graham um why don't you let us know about a little bit about you too hi i'm also from sydney australia and lockdown sydney of course at the moment not much fun people are saying in the chat they're calling it lockdown sydney i hadn't heard this out to you guys right now well you know what we're talking about nick wouldn't you i do i do suffer through a lot of it already so yeah no we're an outdoor cooling company probably not high tech or anything like that but let's face it we're all all marketing companies ultimately and that's really where we're facing our challenge at the moment um we're probably the market leaders in some of the industry segments that we're involved in but we've got a new recent competitor who's giving us a bit of a hurry up but we've got to lift our game in all areas at the moment so while we're working on the google ads side of things and trying to improve that we've really got to improve our website as well to improve our seo rankings nothing like a new competitor to keep you on your toes very cool okay so before we get started just a couple of quick notes for everyone um each guest will have about 12 to 13 minutes with nick um i'll keep track of that time um but just keep an eye on me because i'll start to give you my fabulous hand signals um as the time ticks down but if you start to go way over then i'll jump in and cut you off but you know not to be rude but we want to make sure everyone gets their time in with nick today um we should be able to get to some of our questions from the live chat so don't hold back there i'll also be chiming into the live chat too um as nick takes over the questions here in the webinar room sound good so just watch for the hands and don't hold back on your questions and this should be a pretty pretty lively session today so i'm really excited all right well to kick us off we're going to start with danielle go ahead danielle start us off well first i want to say congrats to nick that's really great your accomplishment um so let's start off so um my sister and i founded this company at the beginning of the pandemic um as a way to help our parents because they had to close their businesses um so we really jumped into it and instead of thinking about the foundation and all that seo stuff from a professional standpoint we just kind of did what we could um and now we're a year into the business and we have had success through social media marketing um just viral videos on tick tock and whatnot um but we want to make everything just streamlined and we want to do things the right way now and not just haphazardly create all of our tags and h1s and all the things on behind the scenes on our shopify so we thought this would be a great way to kickstart our transformation into the proper way of doing things awesome well i love that you've that you've reached out and you just wanted to figure out like what's underneath the hood um and getting some some advice from um you know some external help so that's awesome it's a really really great place to start and good on you for stepping up and helping of your your your parents um took a look at what you've done um in that last year and to be honest it's like hats off to you guys like you've really been able to build out a site that um that is like it makes sense like it's got a good landing page experience um there is like a really nice wide array of um you know different dresses and pants and all kinds of wonderful little fashion pieces um that that are really really well laid out so um right off the bat really really great um this is just from semrush that i've been able to pull out so i can see at the moment that you know you've been able to grow your users per month to around about 266 now again i love semrush um it's not an accurate replication of your google analytics your google analytics is going to tell you absolutely everything about what's going on underneath the hood um but this is just kind of what i can see from an external point of view and you've had some good weight growth one point one point five percent growth um once a month from what i can see at the moment you're ranking for a 51 keywords which is which is pretty conservative considering like you know you've been um been there for about a year um and i think a lot of that comes from like branded search so like 96 of all of your traffic at the moment comes from branded search now that i think is going to be a really really great key um common denominator um for for going through this hey nick so while you're presenting this could you put it in presenter mode so we can see it full screen yeah totally i was gonna toggle in between of going in and out of this so we'll make it just bigger because just the details are really interesting and they were just a little hard to see no great um great so you had a really really great pr um question which is like wanted just to find out the basics of seo now um we're under a bit of a time constraint so i'm just going to be very top level but um i've basically done a full technical audit which i'll send you after this and that goes through things a lot more in detail um and it's also written out so it will be nice and easy for you to follow but seo really like when you think about it it's really three main things that you can that you can kind of think of start off with considering like your your technical um your technical seo because that's really the foundation it's kind of like making sure that um your your your baseline concrete is like reinforced and things like that before you start to really think about what you're building what your empire is going to look like um from that so that really technical seo is kind of like well bots go through bots crawl and bots um understand this your your site your pages that then influences where it gets indexed in in google search engine results pages um and this is really where that that goes so this if there's any inhibitors to that if there's anything that's sort of there's like some mixed signals or duplicate signals um that's really going to kind of confuse search engines so right off the bat technical seo is where most people um really want to start figuring out you know what the what the landscape looks like it's also the thing that i like the most now content is great because content really drives the growth of your website so really really focus on making sure that all of your pages are ones that you're wanting to present to not just search engines but to your customer base like is this a really really great hero page is it written kind of nicely and um consecutively it is doesn't make sense um is it kind of obvious that you're trying to just you know consider seo and shove as many keywords there as possible like you know make things that make sense to your customers makes things that make sense to just anyone wanting to find out i think um with anyone who has gone through covert and things like that a lot of people are absorbed off the streets and they they're online so they're going to want to know about like okay if i get this dress um i can't go into a store and try it on so you know is it like your asus of the world your your biggest sort of fashion retailers can i have some just some um flexibility in if it doesn't fit me or if it's damaged or anything like that like can i send it back what are the terms around that and secondly people wondering like okay what's the delivery time like you know can i sort of um when i'm like going out um can i get this dress within like one week two weeks four weeks you know those kinds of considerations um and as you can probably appreciate consider like what it means from going from um warehouse to consumer and if you make those those kinds of things really really easy to understand um and kind of like really help people make those kinds of purchasing considerations that's going to really help you in the long run furthermore if people have got like questions about their style um i don't know if you can sort of get this um this was bought for me i am not the most stylish person in the world and i need help so first people like me i'm even gonna ask my friends or i'm gonna like you know be scrolling on my phone at night just being like what are some like really good kind of like styles and things like that for people of my body shape or you know people my skin tone or you know ethnicity i don't know what like whatever really goes and and um drives that that purchasing decision for me it's kind of more of my body type right so what are some really really great pieces i can combine that's going to really cinch in so if you've got really really great content like that and have that internally linked to your pages that's really going to just provide a lot of great value to your customer base introduce who you are kind of say like yeah i'm the authority like i know my stuff i know what i'm talking about and i've got some really beautiful pieces that will suit you just um you know think about what it would be like for you to put on that stuff so that's going to be really really important for you as well now off-site i've kind of like grant shadows offside because it um really means backlinks and like you know things are external to just your website so um i don't think you've got a any stores at the moment it's just purely online is that correct yeah that's correct yeah awesome so in some instances i might talk about google my business but you don't have a a local store so it doesn't really make sense for local search so just really focus on backwards now it's really important when you're when you're considering backlinks a backlink is essentially just like an endorsement like it is a link on another website that points back to you and says like yeah i i know um out of new york they're awesome like they are really really great female lead um family-owned webs like business and they have some really really great pieces and things like that and i really think that they are a really great reputable business it's like your credibility boost um so having some really good um backlinks that are niche relevant that have some traffic and that have some keywords and things like that um are going to be really really good for you right now i wouldn't focus too much on on on that because there's a million people out there that's going to sell you some back ones that can actually be a little bit like actually hurt your business because if it's not niche relevant what's the point right so for you i would just focus on like you know your networks and things like that your suppliers your distributors um you know people that you buy from like um if you've got some really really good networks and things like that or some stores that you might start to put some pieces into um they've all got websites you know you can you can kind of like say to them like this is who i am let's sort of um get a bit of a profile about out of new york on your site similarly it works really really great for pr with like getting news items and things like that out there like out of new york is um and again you can you can use your anchors we're a family owned business and use your story like we started in the midst of covert and we really want to be able to support our family and be able to give back to our community and that's what we stand for as a business and that's really what the heart of what we do is focused around um that giving back in that appreciation of of the brand and what it stands for so again like that's a really really great kind of like pr piece that you can get out introduce people to what you are but also build the authority build the credibility back to your site that's seo it sounds like a lot but look to get started the basics semrush has a really really amazing beginner's guide to seo um i've linked that here which you can't see at the moment but uh like i said i've done a bit of a write-up so i'll send that to you and you can do that um yeah plus also like a little bit of a personal plug we've also got hulk academy which is like online video training so um you've got courses you've got videos you've got like um fundamentals you've got everything that you'll need to kind of like step by step go through and be like how do i write this how do i research this how do i apply this all those answers are um all those questions are answered all right now you talked to me about like you know the growth of your website and i said like well the branded non-brand is kind of a bit of a important common denominator there right now 96 of that is all branded content so this is what that means like you can see here with the keywords again i just pull this out of semrush out of new york 320 searches per month fantastic there are 320 people on average every month searching for just your brand so that is such a wonderful place to start with so that's awesome you have an audience now how you really grow that audience is with non-branded keywords and how you grow that is really starting starting to think about like okay what does my what does my metadata look like on my pages so this is kind of where we now can like start to look at your your pages and really hear every single one now when i say like metadata what is that so when you're going in shopify and you're going in to be able to like you know edit your page or edit your collection um you can be able to scroll down and they'll have like that little seo area that says like title and their description that's kind of what i mean so right now we've got something that looks really standard out of the box dresses are new york you know that's fine for now um but i think we can do a little bit more just to say like you know dr um you know dresses and maybe like you've got something really um specific to you to the way that you do that i think you've got um free delivery for 150 um and up right um so maybe you can include that in the meta description it's like an extra thing to pull people in or um you know you've got like you know free returns or i don't know some kind of other like you know thing to like separate you from every other you know fashion store out there that's just kind of like you know picking this up right now so that's a really really great bit of real estate you can be able to utilize okay we have to stop i'm sorry that's okay grace thank you so much because that was just absolutely amazing that's all good oh nick thank you so much nick no worries what i mean just like what a great place to start because i a lot of what nick went over was just so applicable to i think ecom across the board which are so many businesses are in danielle's sp like place right like they had to get online really quick during covid to help the family business to help their own business i think that's just such a that's just a common scenario that we it's an unfortunate common scenario because you had to do it so quick like you kind of wish you had more time to plan it out right but it is what it is and i think nick just proposed this amazing like launching pad for success for econ like that was just so powerful thank you both that was really really cool um we have we have a question i think i'm going to come back to it because i want to get to uh graham but we are having some questions coming in the live chat so i'm hoping we'll have a few minutes at the end to talk about those um but graham why don't you go ahead and kick us off with um your your site and what questions you have for nick okay we are quite different to uh danielle's business we are almost strictly a b2b business so we have you know a different type of thing we're usually going to fairly large businesses in most cases we really need to improve our seo and we're looking for the ideas of what the actual best things to concentrate are on at this stage we know we've got to increase our domain authority we know that you know our website's badly in need of a redesign because it's become a bit um let's call it unplanned it's been adjusted on the run many many times including i spent most of april doing updates to it but nothing was ever done cohesively they've always just been bits and pieces here and there with no overall plan so we're looking at that at the moment that's something we need to really focus on but you know things like i've read listicles are a good idea for seo in some areas should we have a blog how would we format case studies all those type of things you know where it's very much a do-it-yourself website where i get other people who do most of the technical work yeah absolutely um and you know kudos to you they're getting rolling up your sleeves and getting in there and you know trying to do some of this yourself i can see um you know your website at the moment this is just what i can see from your organic traffic and your growth of organic keywords um you know it's kind of just kind of just there it's petering along and especially when another competitor comes into the fray um it kind of really motivates and and kind of is like all right we gotta we gotta actually like look at this and um you know take this quite seriously at the moment like i'm seeing just a little bit of reduction in um in your traffic and you know with your pages it's at the moment they're like walls of text and like for any business owner particularly in b2b from my experience people want to be able to see some really really quick consolidated information and be able to be like yep mr fogg like yeah i've heard about it from a mate they use it but at the same time like it's really clear it's really well laid out i totally understand what they do and what what things that i'm interested in to be able to to be able to consider from what i need out of like getting like a um really good um cooling fan or something like that and strolled into my uh into into the patio section of my restaurant um you know these are really really important things to be able to consider so um at the moment you sort of rank for 94 keywords but the good thing is like 30 of your traffic comes from brands search and 70 of that is actually coming from non-branded which is awesome so well done for well done to you and all and um looking at these keywords like some of them you do um you have some really really great competitor layouts now i'm going to be talking about like how to link all of this together now we just went through um with art in new york before about you know the basics of foundations of seo now this is where we can basically look at this and consider a plan and i love that you said that um because it fits my narrative that there wasn't really a big plan when going through this so i found really indicative got 124 urls on your pages at the moment and at the moment like they're all kind of off um that that tld or they're kind of like not meaningful so with every single page that you have that you're wanting to have listed in your sitemap which is just a list of all the things you're saying to google like hey these are my pages consider these for competitive rank right um you want to have like the best user experience possible now with when it comes to like um now this is just a screenshot from screaming frog it's another tool that i really like to use it's free for up to 500 euros pretty sure that applies to everybody that um i have looked at today um it's just a really fun thing to be able to like you know put in there and just just see an overview of what's going on as well as the summer site audit tool which is fantastic um i use this a lot to be able to look at the english this is also in semrush but i find that sometimes like for this it's really really nice and clear to see what's going on for most of your pages you've got one two three um kind of like internal links that point around to each other when you're thinking about it if these are really important pages and some of them really to be honest from my perspective they are um you're wanting people to be able to find it you're wanting search engines to be able to go through and crawl your pages and be able to find it so i try and like keep it as a little bit of like a rule of a rule of four so this is actually from a presentation that i did last week for insane rush um about site architecture and in that i talked a lot about internal links and this one is like if you've got say like um a transactional page so um you're one of your service based pages that says like oh this is um this is like a like a a cooling um cooling solution for your business like we've got like you know missing fans and things like that um that's like a transactional page because you want someone to go to there and be like yeah i need that um i am in cairns and it is unbelievably toasty hot all the time i think about my friends in the north but um how do people be able to find that most of the time they're not looking like especially business owners like they'll be just kind of like dancing around like what they might want or you know what are things for that so there's a consolidation fine from from that so how search how google is wanting to really present information is really starting to consider like that whole purchase journey so that's why i've got information on intent here and commercial informational is just like what is it like or just like um like how do i how do i sort of like you know cool down my business or you know how do i create like a really nice kind of um light experience or you know something that that kind of speaks to what you do right um and then commercial intent is kind of like more of that consideration it's like you know should i just have like an upstanding fan that just blows across my customers um or should i have something that is a little bit more integrated within um the structure of my business something that you offer and saying like you know this is uh one of the best long-term solutions it's really really um like discrete um which is a really nice design that your your business offers um and it's a really nice way to um welcome people into your space and make them just feel like oh it's really it's like it's like 10 degrees cooler in here this is awesome i might stay here a little bit longer and enjoy that beer so um that's a really really great way to have supporting content around your pages internally linking them and basically showing um search engines um that these pages are really important to your website because you've got a flat structure you can sort of see there is a thing called crawl depth it's a bit of a flat structure so having this like plan sort of thing um is really really great and it starts to make you think what kind of questions do my um do people have around this stuff and again some um keyword magic tool is brilliant for that because they've got a button that says questions they've got all kinds of things you can do to be able to really start to map this out and i've done a technical audit for you as well so i've tried to keep all that i'm just going to go top level and we'll um in that it goes into a lot more detail so yeah now with your pages like what i'm was saying without new york like just aligning the keyword research to your pages like um there's all kinds of things you can do with this outdoor cooling page it is a big wall of of text right now right so putting things in the drop points would be really nice and easy way to go um but also to making sure that the metadata that you have matches the search intent so i have a look at outdoor cooling you know it's in your title tag somewhere with 119 characters a little bit too much mate um and it's in your description again um but it's actually not a not a bad description but yeah um and you're heading uh your heading one is outdoor cooling now outdoor cooling is fine like but i get more like informational and commercial intent so like um you know more like questions and what i just what i just mean by that is i'm just gonna go here can you guys see google outdoor calling right can you see google right now see that i'm searching that awesome so when i say informational content i mean like four ways to stay cool on your patio this summer like that's a great blog um like like supporting content for your commercial your transactional pages right um so that's like informational um and then you've got like a transactional and intent that's that's pretty good and there you guys are number five that's awesome um but for this one like you know there's 170 searches per month that's um that's from semrush this is sort of like another tool sorry but i like to use semrush because it's got the largest keyword database in the world um but when we're when we're considering it like outdoor misting fan like when i actually read um on your page like what it is and what it does like for this particular one like it's it's it's a big outdoor missing fan right am i am i correct in this yes awesome well that has 720 searches per month and when i had a look at that most of that intent was all transactional so people when they are looking for that um they're going to want to find your you and your services so again that might be a better um primary keyword to link him with this page is a bit of an example of um that and for every single page one primary keyword it's pretty good all right so well you guys are in sydney right now um it's pretty it's pretty tough but one thing that i think you can do with your contact us page um people are going to want to figure out like what they can do and there's all kinds of things i can get really into the weeds with this but i'm just going to keep it top level so with your contact us page like have your location your address your phone fax um if you if that's still relevant um and it's like you know an email thing and you've got your contact form that captures a lot of that stuff um but again like that would be really good i didn't test this out but i hope that that's kind of goes to a page that says thank you will be in contact with you like within like x amount of time again a really nice way to capture that having um having tracking on that just to be able to see like those interactions with really good opening hours so um you don't really have any opening hours here at the moment so you know can i call you now or are you 24 hours like you know what are the appropriate times that you're saying to people like this is um our standard operating hours of business like if i if you reach out on a saturday am i going to get contacted on saturday so just like little things like that um you guys have um an actual address now i'm going to assume that that's a that's a real address so just little things about like um getting there like if i'm actually to go to your location like what do i expect some real some um some businesses really go down to the granularity of like you know we're right next to the um the number eight train or something like that or you know this is like a a good sort of way we're like you know um two minutes out of the city for example i don't i don't know sydney all that well i do apologize i never could drive in sydney successfully uh scary set up and pack down information now of course um this is kind of like just general things for what to expect and i also really want to see those on your on your service level pages like if i if a business is calling them out potentially that's going to have some kind of halt to the business because you've got your technicians are going to be in there they're going to be installing things like how long does that take right um so having a good guideline as to um some expectations are really good for them just to kind of in their mind have a bit of an idea that yeah it's probably might differ um depending on the location the layout of the building and um look like how complicated the electricals are but like having a good idea this just helps them be able to plan out their days their businesses and their downtime a lot better and gives you guys like a lot more of a leeway to to have those conversations when they do eventually reach out to you so that's going to be really really good um i think like when we're going and looking at these pages look um like i was saying walls of text was a text and i love that you guys have got really really great information but some of this stuff when i was where i'm saying like about supporting um content like things like this like should i use miss fans or you know have to pull my area how does this system work they're really really good but they're kind of like faqs right um like maybe you can maybe you can like condense those and just have like little dot points to answer your questions and maybe put all this extrapolated like longer form content onto a blog that internally links back to this page um again um you know for this if there is like some faqs and i love faqs on service pages you can have what's called um faq steamer so that's just something that um really just helps um you to be able to see like in the service when i'm looking for this stuff like say for example uh where is mr mister mister there we are they're in the oh so you're on the first page and you've got an ad make your like organic listings you've already you've already worked hard to get that spot if you've got a paid ad over the top of it and they want to find you they're going to click on your ad and that's going to cost you money rather than finding you here so you might be doubling up there um but i'm not i'm not reacting to a problem we're having at the moment so that's why the ads are there and it just comes out we were a little over time now that's fine i'm sorry i'm i'm just expecting you just to be like nick stop talking no i was like i was so waiting for you to start talking about faq schema on that last page like i was waiting for it so i didn't want to cut you i wanted to talk about something that i find really interesting and not talked about a whole lot nick and that is the power and importance of those internal links were talking about at the beginning of the conversation with graham and like the site structure but i don't i don't think it's um a concept that is thought about necessarily all the way through because we talk about backlinks so much like the concept of these internal links are so powerful in everything that you said like it was you know it's sending not only the search engines to your site but it's sending your customer through this site it is passing people through this journey but it is giving a structure to google to being to duckduckgo to understand what is important to you and what's important to your business so the power of internal links should not be overshadowed by the power of backlinks i think yeah absolutely and i i kind of am of the opinion like if you don't have a process or if you don't have like a really good um partner to um outreach um for backlinks um then just focus on on just growing out your business and doing what you do really really well focus on on fixing the technical issues focus on writing some really really great content and laying it out um in a way that makes sense to users and again for search engines with that really nice heading structure um yeah don't because i've i've um i've gone through and like you know had to reverse enough manual um actions on some really dodgy um backlink practices and of course i've been in seo for a little while so i've seen it sing a lot which is actually a really great segue and let me let's try to answer this question quickly so we can get over to zoe but craig mullins asked in the live chat something very on topic for this he asks what are your thoughts about the coupon sites that were um that are common in these backlinks and backlink profiles now like any thoughts on the on these sites yeah so coupon sites are really there to be able to you know offer discounts and things like that to people um look if it has if it's a if it's a big rapid or a site that um is quite trustworthy and has some really really generally good deals look um i'm from i'm from the gold coast and like half my family are like you know coupon keepers um and you know they'll scour the line they're basically the um the honey chrome extension but in human form um so some of these some of these websites are actually really really great um they are pretty genuine and they do what they that they deliver but again if they're sort of like you know pop-up ones and and they're kind of just there um really for the sake of being able to have like these these linking networks and things like that um again like pop it into semrush pop it into like um maybe ahrefs or something like that and really have a considered opinion as to um you know whether or not this is um a really meaningful thing to be able to point back to your site um and again like i'm always like happy to you know take a dm or take um a twitter dm whatever whatever i'm just on studio.com.u just reach out and ask me some questions because um these are pretty important and just kind of making these considerations like you know that's what we're here for that's why like i'm i'm using my time right now to help because you're amazing and i love that answer i mean i think that philosophy applies to any sort of backlink you're thinking about outreaching to or whatever is do your homework don't just assume and please don't do it because your competitor is that's not a reason all right we are going to head over to zoe for the next uh 12 or 13 minutes or so to cover your questions awesome thank you i'm nick um so we are sparking right so we what we do is that we usually design website for clients and they might have like an existing website then they might have oh it's a brand new website and the website could be like this it's already ranking so so when we are doing the website we're gonna look is that it will be a full new website after we launch i'm just wondering like um what are the critical in considerations when we are building the new website for them now when we launch a new website yeah all right so you're building the website for someone else or you're you're relaunching your current website at the moment like what's the what's the story there yeah yeah so both ways because we have clients that need to design life and then we are building new websites as well yeah yeah yeah awesome um so i've done a lot of work with site migrations and i've seen it done well and i've seen it done um like you know unscrambling a cooked egg which is i think a nice way to put it um look this is kind of like where your side is at the moment it's got some good organic um growth it's got some good keywords that it ranks for um and they seem to be relevant which is always a good place to start um and 80 any comes from branded search so we want to be able to keep all of that hard work and and things like that so when it comes to like um designing a new site look it's there is a lot of different components of it so first things first like whenever you're doing anything with um you know changing new site like there's a lot of different ways that we can kind of look at um doing site migrations and things like that building out new sites it might be a new theme it might be um your merging sites into one or it might you know lots of different types of sign migrations right um different things will sometimes do different things to um just the structure of how the pages layout or you know the heading structures and things like that and they can have effects on um your site similarly when you're in the staging environment and you push it live then then your hosting provider actually starts to take the weight of all the users coming in and it's like oh um yeah noises so what first things first like conduct a crawl of your website have a nice snapshot in time of what all the pages are because that's going to be really really important should anything go awry you've got something static that you can always refer back to when it comes to like redirecting all pages um that are being deleted replace them with new pages i try and like i like to not change the url structure if i can help it if there's a really good reason for it i try not to change it um look planning is pretty important um so really scope what you're doing first right know who's a part of that team know what their concerns and really understand what their goals are um and explain the risks of what's involved and how to map out the tasks um because when it when it goes wrong it kind of really really goes wrong um in my in my little technical audit um i have like a whole list of considerations to be able to go so um it's it's hard to kind of like like like let's let's have an example so this is with your current website right so spark interactive yeah yeah yeah so at the moment it's like um like how many pages do you have uh no i haven't i haven't captured that but look do do a full crawl of this like you know get a good snapshot of what it looks like right now like you know what are your what are you wanting to do with these are you wanting to build them out you want to redesign them like that's going to be really really important um say for example with another site um you know they might be they might be changing because um with you know mr fogg and i'll use these guys as an example you know they know that like you know the the theme of this site is starting to look a little bit dated and they really wanted to maybe look at giving them a fresh feel and a fresh um a fresh look at that have a really really good plan as to what that's going to look like um i've done work with a lot of deaf agencies that like to really plan out what their what the architecture is going to look like so you know how is it going to what is this top level menu going to look like you know how does it sort of work how are things like sort of listed and things like that um sorry there's a lot of things to consider and i feel like i'm just kind of talking at you a little bit um but you know there are so many different considerations and i'm sorry a lot of things yeah yeah yeah but like at the same time the main thing is take a take a whole snapshot of what you're you're doing um you know a whole crawl of your website save it if you can avoid it don't change url structure too much because with a redirect um basically search engines have to go through passing and reconsider what this page is about from scratch right um i've gone into a lot more detail with this with a site migration um webinar um and and it really really goes through from the planning to the post um to the pre-launch sort of testing stage um to the launch stage and then post a launch stage um really making sure that you have a redirect plan if the urls are to change for whatever reason and to really make sure that the intent for this for the old page matches the intent for the new page and a lot of the time um that doesn't happen um i wouldn't be redirecting a lot of stuff back to the home page because that's not a great user experience right you're clicking through to something and go straight back to the home page and i've kind of got to start all over again right so so redirecting it to the most relevant page is super super important um yeah i think um so going through the seo strategy you know what are the things you need to plan and consider and things like that so you're a design agency right um the things that you're wanting to consider is like you know having having themes and things like that you're building out that make it really really nice and easy for people to be able to add stuff well some of the best things for an e-commerce website would be to have um have an area to have your heading one and a little bit of content so they can be able to add some um you know internal links in there or add some copy in there to further contextualize what that page is about having faceted navigation in there so that they can be able to with their tags and things like that um like say for example without new york one of the things that i thought that they could they could kind of do here is add some faceted navigation here on maybe the left hand pane they have a whole really really great range of different dresses and things like that strappy halter neck um short you can tell i'm not a very fashionable person but at the same time like when it comes to this stuff your keyword ratio is going to be able to inform this stuff and you and with faster navigation you can be able to have some of like those those modifiers that help you gradually find more um dresses that suit your search i only want to see black dresses so i might sort by color i might sort by price um i might stop by style you know as like some really really good top-level modifiers to do that and for your kind of like b2b service-based businesses um making sure that there's nice clear call to actions like this super large call to action but something that just really just makes sense for these guys um having like their if they've got multiple locations you know have those multiple locations and making sure that each of those pages are nice and new and unique um and that's nice and simple and it's just really bold and um and all that from a technical perspective make sure that these pages are um mobile friendly and um mobile first so a great way to do this mobile friendly test i'm sure you you probably would have done this quite a few times but um if it's not something that's in your day-to-day practice just make sure that it's mobile friendly this sort of stuff like make sure that um run tests that make that make sure that like from a mobile experience um you know there's nothing that's sort of like you know blocking um walking search engines like if you've got intrusive pop-ups um you know not to have those or to tow them in a way that it's going to be a little bit more meaningful um and make sure that the the pixel parameters and things like that um are suited towards um you know that mobile experience um similar to merkel has a really really great mobile first mobile first test so this is just looking again from a code perspective um making sure that from a mobile to desktop version um like let's have a look at what what that looks like you know making sure that the um different layers of um the actual html behind that isn't too dissimilar because if there's just similar um things sometimes it can kind of be like well you know we might um only consider the the mobile version of this and completely ignore the desktop version of this um so that's a really really great way to to go through and just be able to test you know how these pages are going to perform um from a from a page speed insight perspective you want to make sure that these are also really really nice and and fast um look from a coding perspective don't have things that are that are super long um the hard way is probably usually more than often um the right way to go about doing it so instead of like adding um code underneath things rewriting um and unifying is probably you know the best way of going about doing things um i like to change things in the code rather than sometimes just adding on plugins that's a personal preference um because i feel super comfortable but at the same time making sure that you're not using too many plugins to be able to do some pretty basic things um like adding i don't know um google analytics scripts or google tag manager scripts like just like embed them straight into the html um in the in the header or the body um and just kind of keeping it like that rather than having a plug-in that will add even more code to that so um yeah it's a good way of looking at it now from a seo strategy i'm gonna go all the way back to what i was saying it's about um technical it's about content it's about off-site um about the authority of your websites so when you when you think about how this is going to go how this is going to scale like keeping in mind like that really really nice like you know um for link um internal link structure is a really great way to say like you know how are my pages gonna how is my website going to scale how am i gonna be able to increase um my user base that's a really really great place to say like okay well i don't have a lot of internal links going here or i've got orphan pages i've got no internal links going to these pages so if no one can find them users aren't going to find them searchers aren't going to find them and all that hard work is kind of just you know they're doing nothing so yeah this is um google page speed insights um well with this one enabled text compression pre-work keyword requests rendered blocking resources um pretty pretty standard stuff um you can enable text compression in your web server configurations um look this is what this is wordpress yeah baby they be well wordpress is amazing i really really like wordpress because it's super customizable you can do a lot of stuff with it um and there are some really excellent um you know page builders and things like that like elementor pro that just kind of make things a lot easier um you know right out of the box plus it's open source so there's heaps of people with lots of different opinions about what you can do in that um from a from a image perspective it's really easy to go through and just optimize your images make things super fast put them on there and um happy days you can be able to compress things or be able to put them into different formats um also too you can go the advanced route and consider maybe like cloudflare cloudflare has some really really great options to look at um going between um the the server and the browser and you know being able to serve your your pages a lot more faster and we've like had some really really great results from doing that and that's just all from wordpress so it's super customizable with what you can do here so um makes sense yeah it's great so that's all of our time was so but nick i swear you are slightly psychic because we had we actually had a wordpress question in the live chat that i think would make a great side conversation right now so from it but from so you said how wordpress is so customizable and that's really great but from an seo perspective would you prefer wordpress over something like squarespace wix or something like that um look i used to have a bit of a negative opinion about squarespaces and wix um mostly because like one of my old businesses um that used word sorry squarespace and it was just really hard to do things within that cms it's a bit limited and it's kind of like indicative of anything out of the box wix as well which has come a lot a long way um and i actually tweeted out like a few months ago um of a site that we've been working a business that is on which and we've been able to do some things with all the changes that they've done um but i feel like you know that wordpress is is is kind of like it's the pc of um the web the web builder world if if you will whereas maybe like those are kind of like the mac version like it's a really easy user experience shopify is really easy user experience um it's nice and pretty and things like that but again it's super limited and they kind of like put you into these very set um modes as to what you can do um i feel like with some things like it's it's just a lot easier just to be able to go outside of the box and do things in wordpress that make it easier i mean for example um i mentioned um for red hot seconds elemental pro now um with elementor pro there you can be able to make you know category pages really really easily um that interlink with each other um in a way that i don't think i don't think like a lot of other place other things like um can do as as easily so super customizable and and does any of that customization or adding in like elementor pro does any of that affect page speed and like what is the impact on can you talk really quick about like page speed and its effect on seo because we have that question in the chat too yeah i mean page speed isn't a new thing i know called web vitals you know we're in the midst of a algorithm rollouts um and a lot of people are worried about it i think that there's no issues with being worried about it um because it's just basically there for a better user experience um so you know if if you've got like you know it's about the um layout shifts and things like that if your site um takes 15 seconds to load like it just or just a really really long time like clearly that's going to affect you right because after a while it will just basically time out and be like i'm not going to continually to render these pages and like maybe your customer is going to time out because no one's going to sit there and wait for 30 seconds for our website to load who got time for that yeah yeah precisely so if it's if it takes a really really long time that's where i really start to look at um yeah it's um chipping away at it but again there's some really easy common dynamic things that are in most of the sites that i see images are some of the heaviest loading things it's so easy with what you can do to be able to go through optimize those like you know compressor code um you know put them into a different format um lazy load them like all kinds of other really really great things you can do to be able to speed that up um which is why i kind of like broadly just glazed over it so you can do that with your images and like with your code you can have like like css sprites and all kinds of other wonderful things minification that will get in there and just kind of um clean up the code a little bit yeah then we've got things like cloudflare which in with wordpress [Laughter] that should be that should be their logo is just like your hands um okay so we have we're gonna i think this is a really great question to end on um because it was asked in in the live chat but what two-part question because i'm gonna i'm gonna make it a two-part question does seo have a future and if yes what do you see it as i think seo is always going to be around because people don't get such intent right like matching things that um you know we we can be able to we can be able to do making those kinds of assessments are really really important and i think that is always going to be around it's just going to evolve into a different way i mean what seo looked like five ten years ago 15 years ago 20 years ago a really good friend of mine peter mead shout out mate yeah yeah has been um has been a real dominant force in our industry you know since before google really started to take its um take its roots and become the um the monolith that is today um and a really really great um quote that i got from cindy crum so shout out cindy crum from mobile moxie was um the best way to understand what is next is to understand what happened in the past um with all these changes things like site speed like how much um should we kind of consider this to be um you know like a factor that's why i'm not as stressed as maybe some other people with this stuff because unless it loads like like exceptionally long um the impacts i i feel like are just going to be like you know that there is like a strong suggestion rather than like a go forth and just make it like you know under one second like low time which would be awesome and if you're really really in that type of competitive space then that's probably a really good thing for you to do but otherwise for everybody else like chill or to quote every seo in the industry it depends i really tried not to say that today if you haven't you have gone a full hour without saying it i was about to call you out on it and then i was like well we're just going to bring it out right now [Laughter] well very very cool this has been um an incredible session to say the least all made possible by everyone here in attendance the chat was on fire you guys had such incredible websites uh to to look over um thank you to everyone who attended and especially to our guests here in the webinar room thank you for being so open about your seo struggles we you know we've all been there so it's just wonderful to hear you know your experiences and learn from each other so and of course you know that that wouldn't be possible without the amazing nick so thank you so much nick for spending this time with us where can people find you you mentioned your dms are open so where can we dm you at absolutely well for everybody um here i've done full technical audits which i'll be sending to your email addresses after this um also if you want to get in touch with me um ceo um dot com dot eu staff watch that's nick ranger or if you just google nick rangers yeah um yeah twitter um my twitter handle is actually that there yeah there we go um at nick ranger seo or i'm on linkedin so um yeah i'll be checking those in the next few days but i'm always i'm always just like happy to help out like um i'm on the chair of seo collective and that really is just there as a volunteer based thing to be able to help business owners um be able to ask questions without the fear of having a paywall to good advice so it's really something i'm super passionate about so i'm always happy to help out and um just see see what i can do which is a lot because this was so jam-packed full of amazing tactical insights like it was it was just incredible um i also want to invite you guys to follow some rush on social media if you haven't already we are semrush on all of our uh on all social media platforms so it's super easy to find us um our dms are open too in case in case you might have a group chat we can help you it can be us and you guys um but that's where we also announce when we do like hit that notification bell yes awesome on youtube and um but that's social media is where we announce these really cool webinars and how you can apply to have your site be part of this too so we do lots of really interactive stuff because we also love to help just like nick does so we hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and we'll see you again really soon have a great rest of your days thank you

Channel: Semrush Live

Views: 317

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Id: O89R-uaDE7g

Length: 62min 32sec (3752 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 13 2021