SEO Essentials: Double Traffic with Google Search Console

what's up everybody we are live it's the 17th of november 2021 and it's a duda webinar um welcome everyone i'm um being joined here today by russ jeffrey from duda russ how you doing good well how are you tristan yeah very well very well thank you um and just for everyone tuning in right now and watching and thinking i was expecting to see paige's face uh hosting today paige has sadly uh had some difficulties uh traveling overseas work and internet connections power issues so sadly she won't be able to join us today but uh paige if you're watching this back i hope everything got sorted out your end but for everyone that is joining us today we are going to be talking about how to double your traffic through google search console but before we get into that i'm going to introduce myself and then let russ introduce himself and then we'll find a bit about the audience so i'm tristan jarman i'm co-founder of purple smudge digital marketing agency down here in the uk in sunny brighton um just a few fun facts i like surfing i've got a vw camper fan love being outdoors and i have a very erratic french bulldog which i would love to bring him in and show you guys right now but i don't think we'd get anything done after that so the end of the webinar man we just well i'll open up the door and i'll let him come crashing in and we'll see what happens russ how are you doing and please uh introduce yourself to the audience absolutely so my name is russ jeffrey i am the director of ecosystem and product strategy at duda um i'm really broadly responsible for a lot of our product implementation and also seo inside of the platform so i take care of everything on that front i've been in the digital marketing space for about 10 years now and so i have you know a good wealth of experience and history of all things seo marketing websites all the fun stuff so super excited to be here awesome some fun facts about me um i i have a new son i'm first time dad so i'm super proud of him he's he'll be four months old in two days so he's a little wiggle worm and rolling all over the place he's super adorable i'm super proud of him uh and i have a corgi my corgi is is like he just wants he just wants to be everyone's friend he goes up and flirts with everyone and wiggles his butt against their leg he has a really good time yeah nice nice um and just throw it back to the audience where is everybody watching us from uh i know these kind of webinars usually uh drawing quite a worldwide community into watching so feel free just pop it in the comments box uh where you're watching from today it'd be fascinating to know um and then for anyone who is watching this now um live all i'll say to you is this is being recorded so you can watch this back to your heart's content so don't worry about taking down notes anything like that just watch our faces hear what we've got to say and then you can watch it back to your heart's content and then if there are any questions or anything like that that we aren't able to cover but we will have a section four questions throughout this so please put your questions as they come up into the comments box um and they will find their way through to us but um if there was anything that came up afterwards i'm not going to throw you out there ross but i'd certainly be happy if you want to contact me ask me any questions uh and i'm sure you know russ and the guys that dude if you've got any um specific questions on that uh drop them a message as well so let's see where everybody is today as i say i'm in brighton in the uk we've got birmingham alabama we've got malta we've got montgomery alabama popular in alabama today aren't we uh we've got boulder calif uh colorado sorry and we've got newport south wales uh in the uk so hey everyone how are we all doing uh and then for anyone that's joined one of my previous webinars uh and seen me before hey nice to see you again um so as i say today we are going to be looking at how to double your traffic through using google search console so let me jump in um just let everyone know i'm not i haven't got a presentation um or i have got a presentation i haven't got any slides to share with you guys today um it's all going to be on the fly we're going to be jumping into um google search console maybe some other tools and look at how this looks in search etc so today in this webinar we're going to be covering a brief explanation of what google search console is uh have you set up your google search console uh a quick bit on validating google search console what's in google search console and maybe if i say google search console once more i will win a prize and then a quick word of warning how we can look at and flip the data in there and then what can we do with this data so uh i will proceed so as i say um here's a brief explanation on google search console for anyone going um i've heard about this not really sure or it might be set up don't really know what is or what it's there for so google search console is a free service offered by google that helps you monitor maintain and troubleshoot your site's presence in google search results you can confirm that google can find and crawl your website and you can fix um indexing problems and even request re-indexing of new or updated content and i hear a lot of people say this like google search console is kind of like your personal portal uh to google where they can communicate issues with your site so have you set up your google search console uh if you haven't i'm just going to quickly share my screen as we neatly transition over seamless perfect so um if you haven't uh set it up make sure you've got google account hope you have because you've set up google analytics but you'll most likely come across this page to start off with so you either want to set up your google search console as a domain or as url prefixes and i'll explain the difference between those so back in the day you could only set up google search console through url prefixes and that would be so say your website was example.com um and it was um we're going very far back if it was an http www.example.com you pop it in to the url prefix and you would set up your search console for that but as time went on we and most people should have progressed onto https version of your website so that would actually mean that you need to set up a second google search console um property so you can view both sets of data and then in fact that even goes even further because you've got actually i've got a nice little let me pull this up share the screen again i remember tristan back in the day when we were setting this up for a few customers of ours we set it up four different times yeah we had one is for http the other is https and the other is you have to do the www version and the non-www version of your domain so sorry like four different properties google will kind of choose one you know in actual search results and that'll be the primary but we weren't sure which one was going to be selected by google at the time yeah yeah yeah as uh once and if you just share my screen so you can see that this is just a quick example of the the different versions of a website that russ was just talking about so ignore the the bottom four but these top four so example.com and then the https and the www dots with the http and https so back in the day you would have had to set up all four for you to have visibility of all of that now times have changed and you can actually set it up for your entire domain which uh saves a lot of headaches um russ what's your thoughts on setting it up for the whole domain but also setting some url prefixes um if you wanted to interrogate certain sections of your website do you still feel that's relevant now or is it a case of kind of just chuck it all in the domain i think i think it can be handy right like being able to go and set up you know whether it's like you had the example shown there like blog.example.com or even if it's example.com blog you can go and create a specific profile for that you know part of your website and i don't think it's as relevant anymore google has done a good job in recent you know years of really exposing the filtering options in the data so you can kind of filter out and get the exact paths that you want to get to and the right pages and so i think it's a little less relevant than it used to be in the past you actually couldn't go and you know filter and organize the data as much as you wanted to so if you wanted to understand just your blog traffic you'd go and set that up but i think today i wouldn't recommend it unless you really have a really solid you know use case for it yeah yeah of course perfect uh yeah so go in and make sure you set up one or the other but as we've kind of recommended go in and set up the domain version that should encompass everything so you've gone to set that up uh and next you'll be taken to the validation stage uh there are i can't remember whether you said there was six the other day that we spoke about russ or maybe i made that up i've got five i think five is right right there's i mean you can go through and they're like meta tag there's putting a file on your site there's verifying it with like uh the dns records um what am i missing uh there's there's a few more there yeah so i've got you can html file upload you can html meta tag added to the home page you can use an existing google analytics account you can use gtm or you can use the dns record which you said about russ um but just for everyone on validating and why this is so important in many areas so search console gives you access to important data about your site as well as tools that can do significant damage to your visibility if you use them improperly so it's important to verify that you have the right authority and ownership to these views and properties or sorry properties we've got mixed up with google analytics been doing too much of that today and make decisions about content on the site otherwise you could theoretically register profiles for competing websites wreak havoc on them and of course the same could happen to you so it's kind of a very strict protocol so you can't screw over anyone else's site um i will give the word warning now i've got it further down in my notes but a word of warning with google search console is only ensure that anyone who needs access to your google search console has access to your google google search console the reason for this is um i've heard examples of this but you can access um like the disavow file for your website through registering through this process and if somebody maybe left your company was disgruntled and still had access they could theoretically go through and say disavow every link on your website which is not ideal and could tank your website along with a number of other things that someone could do please yeah like another example is you can request you know pages to be de-indexed right directly through search console and so try and do it for the home page and completely remove your site yeah yeah so it's really important yeah it's yeah it's a very powerful tool and yes can wreak havoc and make sure only people who need access have access um yeah so let's have a little walk through google search console this is for anyone who hasn't used it before uh just to give you some ideas of what's in there and i'll try and rattle through these quickly because i do love to talk and i already realized we're 12 to 15 minutes into this so i have to pull myself back so this is google search console where um this is the overview page which as it says gives you an overview of your account performance coverage um and then sort of page experience here um then we drill down into performance this is uh one of the areas we will be looking at in depth um it's quite fun uh says me the nerd what you can get in here is you can get um in these search boxes you can look for the data that's held in here by web by image video or news today we'll only be looking at web we've got dates so you can change your date range here which is fantastic now because previously and i can't remember when this changed it used to only collect 90 days worth of information and then that would be kind of lost and then you'd constantly be collecting only 90 days worth so um if you were sort of a bit more in the know i guess people would download this information and keep it on record but back in the day a lot of people didn't do that so you'd only ever have 90 days worth whereas now you can see we can have up to the last 16 months worth of data stored in here which is fantastic it's just it's such a wealth of information some of the other filters and tabs in here sorry uh you can click new and then you can actually start to search with this data by a search query a page you can even break that down to country specific searches what device they're searching on and even search appearance so we're not going to go that deep today but you can start to see when you're looking to increase your traffic from the data you already hold on your pages and search query and search traffic you can really start to break it down if you're a site that's international you know you can start to see is there a particular country or market that we really want to be starting to step up and understand how we're being visible et cetera in that country the same with devices you might start to be in a position to look into going actually you know our desktop's in a good position but our mobile's lacking what are we going to look at that or just to see if there's any disparities between those two there's also you can toggle these little tabs here so at the moment you can see these two graphs we've got total clicks by total impressions which is very cool and then you can even add average click-through rate and then average position and then this data all populates underneath so it starts to become very very helpful and i'll just rattle through a few more of these on the side we've got url inspection so i've already got one live for us just to have a quick look at he says whilst it loads this is a great little page because i've just looked at a specific url and this tells me that my url is on google and i can actually view the crawled page i can see that it's been submitted and indexed i can go through and look a bit of mobile usability and i can even see there's some um review snippets on this page as well exactly and what's great you know sometimes you might hear people saying oh what's the canonical for this page um and in here you can find this information out there are other ways of finding this information out but this is a great spot to come in and have a look and just one thing tristan on that url inspection page it's a powerful tool as well if you have some problem on a page and you go and fix it you can actually go in there and just request google to re-index that specific page of your site so if you fix problems you can just ask google to come in and say hey prioritize this page let's get it done quickly exactly it's a great test super powerful super powerful um and then under the index section we've got the coverage tab so you can see what errors valid warnings what pages you've excluded we've got site maps here so we can jump in and see what specific site maps we've got um how many urls have been discovered in there you know has it been successful or not really great ways to you know do some monitoring on your site maps then we've got the removals tab which is what we spoke about earlier about actually removing particular pages on your website uh do be careful with that if you're in a position where you think oh actually i don't want this page to be indexed anymore um because uh it might be a an event page as an example and you go that events pass so i'm going to say to google i don't want this page to exist anymore don't go in there and request it to be removed there should be other ways that you are putting in redirects um in place but that's for another day uh and then below that we've got um i missed one out so we've got page experience here which populates uh your core webview tools your mobile usability is your site https then the core web vitals jumps down even further in the next tab we've got mobile usability i'm not going to jump into the enhancements this time round this one's quite good security and manual actions here you can see whether there are google's picked up any security issues or you can see if you've received a manual action uh and then a couple of last ones links so if you're ever wondering um what links are coming to your site externally and then what you're linking to internally you can find this information out here you don't actually need to go out and pay for at all to find out what links are coming to your site google will give you some of this information then lastly settings as i said at the beginning be careful who has access to your site uh because you might want to come into settings and just have a little review of that if you've been working with any um you know any members of staff that are left old agencies whatever it is go in there just have a little double check to ensure that everything's okay um so well let me have a little scroll down lillian here has a has an interesting question for you i think might be interesting for us to jump on um she's asking how about a page that is shown as valid in the url inspection tool but google refuses to index it even after requesting time and time again to have them index it's an interest it's a tough question to answer i'll let you know i'll take a stab then you're next um i think the first thing i would look at is is just try and look at the the quality of the content on the page right a lot of times google will not index a page because it's maybe it has a limited number of content or a little amount of content or google for some reason is perceiving it as a low quality page and so that was that would be the first thing that i would check if you like you have a page google's giving you a green thumbs up but you can't find it in a search result try and try and optimize the content of the page and then the next step i would do this is the second thing is try and make sure that google is seeing the content on the page so you can actually dig into the url inspection tool and see the html see if you can find some of the text or some of the copy on the page within the html and if google is picking that up those are two paths to kind of go down and check to troubleshoot i don't know if you have any other ideas but it's a difficult one yeah yeah no i like those i like those and uh hopefully was it lillian hopefully that will help you um in the right direction there but yeah you know reach out if um you have further problems please um so the next part of uh what i want to show you guys is so how to look and flip the data or how to look at and flip the data so i'm just going to jump back into sharing my screen i need some sort of transition music to play over the top um and so as i say i'm just going to populate all of these this is probably going to be the page the um part of this webinar you you will take away and look at afterwards uh so let's take um a couple of scenarios here so your website has been live for x amount of time and you're thinking of optimizing your site's content so where can you start with that and where can you look for opportunities to create new content and why i say it like that is a lot of people i still see today is you know we're told google likes fresh content it likes updated content um and it likes relevant content so some people just go off and they you know quite rightly will build a content plan seo plan whatever you want to call it and go right so what are the pieces of content i'm creating and what's that looking like over the next six or 12 months so you kind of become a content churning machine just pumping out new fresh awesome pieces of content but you might also be sitting there going i don't know what new content to create and is my content on my site working as hard as it could be well this is where google search console comes in and is your friend so let's jump into the performance tab as we are here um what i like to do is uh change the date range so change it for whatever your makes you feel comfortable um and works with your sort of business model um yeah we've had a very turbulent well it's like 18 months almost two years pushing into next year of uh covid et cetera um so you know your data will not necessarily be as normal as it has been in previous years and seasons depending on what your website's about um so just you know keep that in mind whenever selecting any date ranges but i'm just for this i'm just going to select the last six months i feel that's a good pool of data for me to have a look at uh and then we can have a look at the search queries now one way you can instantly jump in is uh just to start flipping the data um by clicks and impressions so what i mean by that is here you can see with this site uh this particular query has had around 10 000 impressions and just under 800 clicks so that's about a 7.2 click-through rate so it's seemingly quite reasonable but you might want to try and close that gap so one initial way that works quite well is that you can actually take some of these keywords and start to see what pages they're related to and whether you can improve your title tags and meta descriptions just to improve the click-through rate from your from google's landing page to your website and so what you can do straight away is we can jump into pages and we can actually look at the same information we were with queries but with pages so if we have a look at impressions again so impressions are the amount of times it's been served to people when searching but no one clicked on that so that's where the clicks comes in and so what we can start to see is say this particular page here you know it's had almost 30 000 impressions but only 51 clicks um and not only and i will continue with the content optimization but this one's quite interesting because you might actually start to find some technical issues with your site uh because whilst i was looking through these previously before we went live i thought well i can have a look at this page and see what this page is about now you might not see this happening but when i loaded that page up there's actually a redirect from the original page to what's now a gallery page so i have a little scroll down and beautiful images but there's not a lot of content on there so i just took this one step further and have i got it here and i well i won't show you now but i put it into a tool called wayback machine so that's a little snapshot and record of your website over time that's stored on the wayback machine it's very useful to look at old content um of websites um of days weeks months years gone by and so what i found was that the original page here actually had quite a lot of content on st martin or sint martine and what's happened is this has actually been redirected to what looks like a gallery page through a bit of searching it looks like this might be the um redirect that should have been put in place to this page where we actually talk about um saint martin or synth martin so just i think it's oswin who uh kindly allowed us access to his google search console um what i would do for you is i would look at that redirect in place and maybe change that from the url that we clicked on to land on this page and not uh this page because this one is seemingly the updated version of the lost page and so google can put a to b and go oh okay and hopefully we'll start ranking you better um for these terms in this page uh once you've linked everything back up um do we have any questions coming through whilst uh i'm just chatting away i don't think we've got any at the moment so i i think i'll jump in though i think i think i think this is super interesting right because you you quickly identified there a technical problem with your website the page people clicking on search results are being redirected somewhere else probably google is being redirected and seeing this lower quality content that's not there so you're giving yourself a direct item to fix immediately on this site um and and improve that on an ongoing basis yeah so i mean that's because it's not like a content a straight-up content optimization technique but you have found an issue which hopefully once you've sorted out you should see uh better quality traffic coming through to the the correct page that you want google to see on this page and so then you should see some positive benefits from that and let me just see what we've got coming up next [Music] so let me just jump back into here so as an example if you have a phrase um if we were looking at sanctuaries oh actually what i will do is another cool thing you can do is we can copy this url or we'll copy this url and then we can put new and then click page and put in the url that we've just copied and on this time we're just going to look at the exact url so we don't want to look at anything that might be in a subfolder from from this page so we'll just click apply and so obviously we can see we've got our one page there but what the beauty here is is we've got all the search queries that google's picked up for this page uh so as an example um if a phrase is in position 21 or higher um and has if it's in position 21 um or has a high number of impressions but a low click-through rate uh you can have a look at taking these keywords uh and looking to increase the keyword density in your existing content so just remember don't just stuff keywords into your content as many times as possible look for opportunities to include it organically and i'll cover some of this a little bit further down but what you might find through some of the search queries coming up is that not only you want to optimize your title tag and meta description to increase click-throughs but you might also want to take some of these keywords look at the page you're working on and go do some of these fit in with this particular page it's saying it's being associated to uh is there anything in there that actually you might find i we seem to be coming up for this search query but we haven't really delved into it that much on this page have we delved into it in other parts of our website so this is where content can then start to grow so it's like actually we might be looking at putting paragraph sections into this already created piece of content uh just to bolster it out even more to make it more relevant for the user and google um in turn increasing relevancy hitting more search terms sort of you know the basic look at it you should be able to increase your position and and how easy it is for people to find you um as well as uh yeah so we've added content to our page but you might also find going ah this doesn't really sit on this page but this is great this is a great new piece of content i can write and actually this original piece of content where it didn't sit it's a great link through to this piece of content and this new piece of content might seemingly link back to the previous article just because of the connections that are involved with the content um so i seemingly have already jumped into the next section of what can we do with this data um but just uh for a little bit of information for everyone um firstly it should be noted that google analytics held keyword data back in the day many many moons ago uh this was removed by google due to privacy uh yet thankfully you can get a lot of this information in google search console so it's really prime if you haven't set this up make sure you you know you get that done this week next week because you just want even if you're not going to use it straight away for three six months you just want that data being collected collect collect collect because then you'll be in a position at some point to update your content and seo plans uh you know and then this will allow you through this tool as well to review the seo impact of your updates and you know don't forget to review your changes you've made to see what improvements there were or weren't hopefully there were and you know have metrics changed um you know has the average position changed did your total impressions or average click-through rate increase this is what we want to see so it's definitely worth um you know doing this but also looking at what results you got from this uh you know and you can start by doing this by listing all your top performing pages actually i'm just gonna so you can all see my face a little bit more um we can start this by listing our top performing pages and see how we can increase the click-through rate from serps what pages are indexed with related search queries that we can use to bolster pages traffic rankings and relevancy uh what search queries are coming up that may require a new page or additional content on specific page uh and as i said right at the beginning you can also break this down to looking at you know particular countries and devices adding this all into the mix you can hopefully already start to see that just from what we've looked at before jumping into any site examples we can start with our own data to find issues and find opportunities to move forward so you can really start to build out your own kind of content plan seo plan for the next few months with the data you already hold without really you know kind of going off and going right what new content can we create i'm going to start keyword researching all that malarkey competitor research start in here you've got so much in here definitely start and utilize that as much as possible and so tristan one of my favorite things i'll share to you here is you can actually exclude terms in the google search console so excluding the brand of the business or of the website itself and removing those you start to see just the places where you're showing up for organic terminology and those are things that you can either say cool i want to turn that into you know a keyword i'm going to build some content focusing on those things that i'm already getting some traction for and and leverage that type of information or even just say oh this is maybe not as interesting and i can see why i am showing up there i'm not going to prioritize that and work on that type of content too which is just as important yeah and the second example site i've got there are some of those things that you were just saying there where they seem to be coming up for certain search queries pages have come gone but it doesn't appear to be necessarily about the business in itself so you know it's it's looking at well okay maybe we need to increase the relevancy of what we're shouting about the service the business uh in terms of yeah pushing that out forward uh so let me just get my next screen seamlessly moving through this if i say it enough then we all just sort of believe it's seamless don't we uh anton if you could post up my page for us that would be brilliant lovely so the first site you've already seen um some of this it's caribbean paddling very jealous it's uh run by oswin who was kind enough to allow us access to the google search console for this site um i really want to go to the caribbean and do some paddle boarding and kayaking so um yeah so let me jump into here so we're going to have a look at what um a couple of examples of what we can do with this site so as i say you can sort by clicks and impressions and so my first example is going to be that one so we're gonna have a look at pages and let me just scroll down and make this a little larger and i'm just going to copy this particular page so this particular page has got just short 9000 impressions and just short of 90 clicks over the last six months with about one percent um click-through rate so what we're going to do is we're just going to pop in the page up here as i say try to make it exact if you just want to look at this specific page which we will do here and for this specific page we're going to have a look at the queries for the page now i've already gone through had a look at the page i will just populate it here for everyone to have a look so it's the top five essential paddle boarding tips for beginners so anyone who's been around seo for a while knows that a top five anything is sort of seemingly quite popular content and quite popular uh to be searched for um so you know this is great you're you're offering paddling or paddle boarding and kayaking services so why wouldn't you have the top five essential tips so some great tips stay hydrated stretch wear a life vest great so how can we do more with this so i've already gone through this data had to look through here and i'm just going to pick out some of the key phrases that i found so what do i need for paddle boarding so sorry i'm going faster than i need to be similar to how we've been flipping the data before we've been looking at clicks and impressions so if we have a look at the impressions here versus clicks oh some of these searches don't appear to be getting any clicks and so what we can see here is there's a couple of uh cool searches uh question-based searches so what do i need for paddle boarding and how to hold a paddle board paddle um and so these might be particular things that you can easily add in to your top five i don't know how essential some of those question based things are but what i'm showing you is you can see that a question's being asked google's saying this is related to your site you're coming up around these search terms but no one's clicking so a great one would be to come through here see what you feel could be added to your page uh in terms of making it more relevant so i've noted down the the two i said which was what do i need for paddleboarding how to hold a paddle board paddle and there was another one do you need to know how to swim to paddleboard which actually sounds like quite a serious um question and you know i'd say yes you do need to swim but from understanding where this um paddleboarding takes place i believe it might be quite shallow so you know it might be that you can say well if you you know you're not such a great swimmer um you've got a life jacket um you know there's lifeguards in the area blah blah that's a great question to answer or to go in on because it's clearly a need a concern and it you know it wouldn't take a lot to add in just those three question based questions into your article and that will hopefully bolster things out more um and then with this because obviously i wanted to try and um increase your click-through rate from uh search um hopefully i can get this to come up i'm just going to share a different screen window there we go so i'm just going to share this other screen so the title tag um for this page let's just move that up so i don't see a bit better was the top five essential paddle boarding tips for beginners uh and then the meta description was so you've taken up the sport of paddle boarding and you're wondering how to optimize your experience on the water with essential gear now with time not being on my side i didn't change too much of the title tag but what i did do was i just put in the brand name at the end so we can at least a we've got the phrase caribbean in the title tag but we've also got the brand name and the tag you might want to spend a little bit longer to see in the search queries that are coming up whether you find that there's something a little bit more prominent um to add to this page uh actually sorry i did change this i put top five beginners paddle boarding tips because this seemed like it was more for the beginners um so i felt that might be a bit more relevant than essential but again that might be something you want to test and then in the meta description i've changed it to check our list of paddle boarding tips for beginners avoid first time mistakes explore caribbean waters in your sup with advice from the experts so to me that's kind of like come to us we're the experts you know we'll give you all the advice you kind of get an idea of what you're really clicking through on and hopefully it gives it a bit more relevancy and then hopefully a few words changes that the idea is that we've increased the relevancy um you know to the person looking and that they want to click through even more than they did before and it stands out more to them um and another great one i'm just going to change my screen sharing [Music] let's actually share this screen uh and so where is the there we go so i just took the uh title for the page uh top five essential paddle boarding tips for beginners and popped it into google and what you can see straight away so this might give you some further ideas um is that you might want to start writing your content say like in some list forms or marking it up uh correctly um so that you can try and take this featured snippet on this page although i'm not sure yeah so green waters yeah greenwatersports.com isn't ranking in position one but because they've gained the featured snippet they're in that position zero so you know along with adding more question-based uh information on your page by changing your title and description and then by having a little search on google search you can start to see what other people are doing and start to craft a little plan for yourself in a staged approach you can see it's like right i know what i want to optimize my content for this is i'm going to do it i'm going to put some tracking in place to see how this is improved and what's what's other people doing and you can see there's a list here top 10 tips list so you know are you gonna then go back to yours and mark up your page differently um from your top five uh tips or just from a bit of research you might go actually top 10 tips is actually it's top 10 tips oh i disappeared there for a second am i back russ yes you're doing it you're you're well you pause for a sec but you're good uh perfect uh so yeah i'm just going to stop showing my screen for a second there um and so that kind of neatly because i realized time is uh dramatically getting away from us um some of the other suggestions for that site i've got is i was looking at a things to do page on pineal island i think it was which um was a very popular search term i believe that pineal island is around um where this company is and so obviously there's going to be a lot of searches around that um and i saw that that page was coming up for snorkeling in uh pineal um and then snorkeling pineal island saint martin where you actually have a page um on the best snorkeling spots in pineal island as a separate on the website so through my searching you wouldn't necessarily go well i'm going to add a whole section of snorkeling information on this page you might just want to add a tiny bit and say hey go over and check out our best snorkeling spots in pineal island so then that's not only a little bit time saving uh it helps the user out because they're like they didn't know that existed they might have just come to that page read a bit of information and gone but by you adding the link in there saying hey there's even more keep clicking through you can start to build up this web of internal linking keeping people on your site because you just have more and more useful information that you want to give them and then i won't go into it all now but google does look upon that quite fondly because it sees the relevancy the structure of your site and can really start to understand what you're trying to tell people and you know what they can get from you so that's that site let's just jump into the next one need some transitional lift music to happen yes well just sharing my screen everyone and so the next site that we're looking at is um this create my site so it's a web design digital marketing site so let's have a look in here so this was funny um earlier in this webinar russ you were saying about sometimes finding um information isn't necessarily relevant to your business but you're coming up for um and what i found was this site actually does some of that so there's you know you're coming up searches for uh just change that six months a little more data here we're looking at and obviously i don't fully know what was on the site previously to what's on the site now but um i had a search online it's you're coming up for privacy policy restaurant uh custom screen rooms i'm not gonna try and pronounce that um custom patios so i don't know if you've worked with particular clients that did these particular types of sites or something like that or something else has happened and you're coming up for particular search terms some of these you i guess you probably don't want to be and you want to be bolstering because the company is in louisiana does web design so you want to kind of be bolstering these uh search terms around your business uh when i jumped into the pages this and this goes back to sort of finding some more i guess technical seo issues with your site um so this here we have restaurant privacy policy so of course i have a click through let's have a look at what's going on this page has been moved okay so we've hit a 404 page there uh should that be redirected um i'm having a little scroll through further and then i think it was maybe this one premium web design again this page is hitting a 404 um and i won't go through too many more um but there was quite a few pages that were hitting 404s i think it was 22 out of 50 pages actually i found because i've shoved them through screaming frog um just to see what the status code it was came back with and so yeah 22 of those pages out of 50 were hitting a 404 page if you've got access to your google analytics and everything for this you might find some of these pages were actually uh quite traffic driving over there over you know previous time that you might be like actually i need to redirect these pages to the appropriate place rather than just letting them 404 or it might be that you want them to 404 for a particular reason um yeah i think there's even a page which is on page seo which hits a 404 page but delving through the site i actually found you had a specific seo page and so without me having a look at what was on the original on page seo page i if all going well i would probably take that page that's 404 ring and redirect it to your new seo page because if you're just taking pages down there 404 and you're creating a new page over here with similar ish content it's starting to confuse everything you're starting to gain a lot of yeah 404 pages that you don't want so just within this not only like optimizing your content as we said you can start to find some issues uh with the site so my my recommendations here would be to come back into the site in search console um because i see that it's a company that's um in louisiana but from what i could see there wasn't a huge amount of references to louisiana like website louisiana louisiana web design on the website and i also because i had to do a bit hunting i found it difficult to find the name address uh i could find the phone number but that's seen as in local um seo as your map nap name address and phone number and so it's advantageous to have that in your footer throughout your site because then that gets read picked up and that will help you with localized seo in your local area something else i noticed was and this might be a great place to start by mining some of this data um there was a blog for latest news which seemed to have no content on there so that's a great place just to start adding um some information that you're finding that you feel it won't fit on a service page but you want to kind of talk about you know it might be top 10 tips of seo or something like that you're starting to see come up in your search queries so if it's not can't be added to a service page in this example it might be um recommended that you can start adding that to your blog um i in this website's instance i probably have a look at running a technical audit but that's not what we're here to talk about today find out what pages are live which ones aren't uh and then figure out your redirects um and get everything redirected to their new homes and then look at your pages products and services you want to promote and work on optimizing content from there so what core pages can be bolstered what secondary pages can be created and linked to and then our final site is this awesome site dog alliance and i think it was debbie from dog alliance who was kind enough to allow us access to the google search console for this one um let me just jump into performance for this um and so i took a slightly different approach because hopefully i've given everybody three examples of kind of how to use this information and data and not only look to try and take this information and work hard at your content to try and you know seemingly double your traffic but also how to find other issues in there and this is kind of the final one of um some other tools that we can use to get ahead as well so let me jump into pages and extend that a little and it's a it's a lovely page on puppies learn more about puppies so it's this lovely page here uh learn more about puppies uh puppy training tips that's fantastic so we're just gonna take this page add it in that url the magic happens and then we'll look at the search queries so in here we've got puppy training tips puppy training there's a huge amount let's just flip those clicks that seems strange there are no clicks we won't get bogged down with that at the moment that might be something that we need to maybe converse with debbie afterwards to have a look at but what i did was i took the top top 30 impression giving search queries then what i did was you can use i think there's a number of tools you can use but semrush has got a seo content template and what you do is you jump into the seo recommendations i dumped 30 of the top um impression giving search queries this comes back it gives you loads of information here um of different keywords etc but this is the crux of what we want to look at so i dumped the content from the page in here and as you can see it's slightly working away here to give us our seo score um but in short what we found was um let me pull some of the [Music] so i think in here it's got about puppy videos and is there actually anything on puppy videos so there's um oh one thing that actually on this page is that a number of these links when i went through actually are all external links so what you might find from looking at your um search query data is because ideally you want to keep people on your site spending as much time with you as possible and so what you might find is that from some of the search query data you don't actually need to start sending these people to external sites you can start adding this content yourself and keeping people on the site itself through some of the search queries that i found you definitely don't cover or cover in depths around some of these search queries so a great way as i say to do this is dump the content in here you've got your target keywords and you can start to go through and so i know this website talks a bit about service dog training and so have a look through this content and see where you're talking about service dog training in austin and where you might be able to extend on that in this piece of content or you might be able to send someone to the service dog training page where they can then find out more um yeah help with puppy training socialization training with dogs or puppy training basics uh for the first week very little of this was kind of covered in depth um and so hopefully that you know will help you give you the mindset where it's like oh this is how i can look at this content slightly differently and start building out um your your current content and your future content and so that will give you the opportunity to sort of quite easily now after this hopefully start building an seo plan and strategy moving forward just based on the data you've got and the search query information you've got um so that brings me to the end of what i came to show everyone there was a little bit more but i do apologize to everyone watching i do like to talk um so if anyone has any questions after this do feel free to get in contact with me um i'd be happy to talk through a few of the other um things that i found um yeah russ did you did you have anything you wanted to jump in on that you felt i might have missed or no i thought this was great i i really i really thought it was awesome how you found keywords that can be targeted and focused for specific pages right you had some examples of pages that were not showing up well and you're saying cool here's 5 or 10 or 15 that really you can see there's a lot of impressions you can see there's a good amount coming and you can really go and optimize that content i think those are are really just solid ways to to leverage the data that search console gives you and this is totally free something that anyone running a site should should be doing and looking at at least on a you know monthly basis and trying to think about and say cool how can i improve my presence or answer that question that somebody's asking on search in a better way or try and bring in a bit more of these like targeted you know areas for us so i think it was really really actionable uh information here so thank you um and then if anyone's interested like this was kind of i guess like a glossary of you know just opening the door of what you can do um with google search console so you know feedback would be awesome from the audience if you were like this just didn't go deep enough i'd be happy to you know do do another episode in the future where we can specifically drill down into an area you know the idea was i really wanted to just kind of give anyone who's kind of like i do use search console or i don't or you know you're not using it enough uh that you can kind of leave this and go ah this has given me a great idea it looks like we've got a question here from ann uh did you mention an app that allows you to see if links in your site no longer go to anything so that i can remove them or find the new links i have a small business directory website so i think that was screaming frog that i mentioned so um screaming frog i can't remember how much is he about 120 150 quid pounds sorry a year um but you can get i was just gonna say they have a great free version yeah that's about to say yeah yeah but you can get a free version uh which you can crawl up to 500 urls so um yes if you wanted any more information on that and do drop me a message on social media or anything like that but it is fairly straightforward the process i went through was uh with create my site i just took a list of the urls uh on the pages um section of google search console i exported those so i just had 50 urls i uploaded that to a screaming frog i got screaming frog to crawl those pages and basically it came back and went you know like url one ah that's a 404 url too oh that's a 200 it's working okay and then it gives you back all that information so and that would probably be your best step forward to see uh what's happening with your pages etc and then you can be sat better going um these are all hitting 404 pages what do i want to happen with that do i want to redirect them i want to leave them you can you can start to make a little bit of a plan there because there isn't always one answer to these things so be careful um let's have a look to see if we've got any other questions coming through as we wrap up towards the end of what's seemingly been a very very fast hour um ah and also another question i'm a beginner at this do you have a pdf or anything you can recommend me to make sure i have included basic stuff that will help with seo uh that's certainly something um yeah i'd be happy to sort of craft together and um we can possibly pop that out on another webinar but uh yeah and get in contact with me i'm sure i've got something that i can i can help you with or i can certainly send you um some links and resources that will help you in good stead and on your way so oh this got questions flying in now christopher asks do you have any tips or special consideration to apply to multilingual websites big question that's a big question um so i don't know whether you've got anything to jump in for us i'll start i'll start yeah i think i think i think the first thing i would say is street multi language like almost like two different websites you know the search volume and search queries that you're going to get in specific languages are going to be drastically different you know if you have a french version and an english version the queries that are going to come in are going to be different and what people search for are going to be different just based on the language itself and so you probably need to think about an seo strategy and a keyword strategy specific for each language that you're setting up and so if you're going into search console you should be maybe finding a way to filter a search console just for you know that specific language page and then thinking about how you can optimize that content in that language uh and and move that forward um so i think i think that would be probably step one of you know trying to to think about multi-language is just really think about it and look at the data on a per language basis try and avoid you know grouping things together because i think you're gonna just run into too many problems in my opinion yeah that's great advice yeah and i hope you found that useful um so yeah we uh we we have more questions um michael is asking my webshop has a has a duplicate site because of parameters from changing the product layout on category pages google is indexing them all what would you do if parameter exclusion in console isn't working would you like that one too russ i've spoken the entire hour i totally haven't seen i think i think my first piece of advice would be try and implement a canonical tag on the page so when you're you know no matter what the variant is or the alternate version url parameter try and implement a static or single canonical for that entire page to tell google that okay there might be three or four you know urls for this page but here's the real source of truth in a canonical context so i think that would be step one uh of trying i think um also you might want to try try in a different way and try to ask google to to ignore those url parameters because you can go in it's one of the older tools that google provides is ignoring those url parameters you can try and add that in and double check that uh as well although google is trying to get away from that so they're trying to actually deprecate that tool so and i will actually because i've just got it here antoine if you could share my screen when i do it in a sec and i will just show everyone where that url parameters is whilst we're here and it's under the legacy tools um and it's just the third one down url parameters down there so if you're at all interested that's where russ was mentioning it was so uh we we've yeah we've run over the hour uh apologies if anyone's um waiting to get away to do something else this evening i just want to thank everyone for joining the webinar today i've had a blast hopefully you have i see some regular faces in the comments so hey to everyone who's kindly joined us today russ you've been fantastic thank you for being part of this absolutely um and yes until next time as we said this is the first of um a series of webinars so we will let everyone know when the next one is if you're watching this uh pre-rec pre-recorded thank you again uh please like uh hit the like button double tap the thumbs down if you don't like it and be sure to you know share this with anyone that you think will find this um webinar useful that would be awesome and if you want to find me out on the internet i have a very specific name tristan jarmond i don't think there's anyone else out there with my name so you'll find me pretty easily uh so yeah come with me with some questions etc um and uh yeah so thank you all for joining us russ thank you and thank you tristan this is great content and great information really appreciate you sharing and spending the time on it cheers and to everyone whether it's a good morning good afternoon good evening or good night i wish you well and until next time

Channel: Duda

Views: 2,455

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Id: XTheaU7tLxQ

Length: 65min 40sec (3940 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021