Host: Alex Valencia, WDW
Guest Host: Jason Hennessey, Hennessey Digital
Guest: Jordan Kasteler, SEO expert, speaker and author
In this webinar, Alex Valencia of We Do Web and Jason Hennessey of Hennessey Digital welcome Jordan Kasteler, SEO expert, speaker, and author, to share his insights on Google ranking factors for small businesses and law firms. Jordan gets to the heart of SEO and how to stay ahead of Google’s ever-changing algorithm:
- Google’s top ranking factors for law firms
- Important elements of an effective law firm SEO strategy
- The importance of a technical SEO site audit
- On-page Law Firm SEO Tips
- Keyword optimization inspired by user intent
- How AMPs can help with mobile responsiveness
- Reverse engineering your competitors
Transcript:
Narrator:
The webinar will begin shortly. Please remain on the line.
The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode.
Alex Valencia:
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of SEO Happy Hour. We are very fortunate to have Jason and Jordan Kasteler with us. Just a couple minutes, we’re going to wait on… Sorry, I’m getting a little feedback here from my phone. Shut that off. So we’re going to wait a couple of minutes to have another few people come on. Can everybody hear us? Jason, can you do a sound check?
Jason Hennessey:
Yes. Hello. And what are you holding there, Jordan?
Alex Valencia:
He’s got the happy hour beer.
Jordan Kasteler:
You said it was happy hour, so I’m being happy.
Jason Hennessey:
There you go. [inaudible 00:01:40]. I’ve got a fruit juice with water.
Alex Valencia:
Wow. I hope there’s vodka in there.
Okay, can anybody hear us? If anything, let us know if you can or cannot. Yes, I can hear David. All right, cool. Thanks, David. Jason Hennessy. Hello. All right, cool. So we’ll jump on it because we have tons of content to go over. First of all, I’d like to thank you all for taking the time on a Friday afternoon to be with us. SEO Happy Hour’s been a success for us, but we’ve been a little lazy and super busy with all our clients that we haven’t done one in several months. So we promise to be consistent with them going forward.
So with that said, I’d like to introduce our team. First of all, Jason Hennessey is a good friend of mine. I’ve known Jason for about seven years, owned his own digital marketing agency for a while and sold his part of it. About two years ago, I reached out to him over Facebook because I saw… I was stalking him. I got to be honest. I was stalking him on Facebook, and he posted something about SEO, and I immediately told my wife, I said, “Yvette, send Jason a message and see if he’s willing to work.” So very fortunate timing worked out for all of us, and we’ve been working together for a couple of years and doing some really awesome stuff for our clients, and new clients are coming on. Jason’s been studying Google since 2000 and he’s written a book, had an agency. He’s been working with some of the higher end clients in the country, not just legal, but in some other big branded industries, as well.
And then we also have Jordan Kasteler that joined us. We’re super stoked to have Jordan with us. Jordan joined the team early January. Jordan is a fluent writer on Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land. Has spoken at several different on the search marketing events across the country, and I think outside of the country as well. He’s published a book on social media marketing and he recently also became a writer on Inc, as well, which he posted the other day on social media. So make sure you check it out. But he’s a fluent author on that, so is Jason. So we’re fortunate to have him. He’s also was working with some big brands like overstock.com and PETA. Jordan’s very passionate about that project. So make sure you check them out and follow them.
So we’re very fortunate to have these two guys. So I’m going to jump right into it. This is a webinar that you’re going to learn tons of information. Jason and Jordan are really going to dive into to this 2017 ranking factors that you really should be considering.
But all of this came about because of the clients that we’ve working with. Jason and I started doing webinars about two years ago. And once we started getting clients in, one of the strategies that we do is we do an audit. We immediately start with an audit with the client. And this being new to me because I owned a content market gaining agency for so many years before we started including SEO, and looking from the outside in, it just baffled me. I was just so impressed at the detail and the amount of work that actually goes into an audit. But more so the results that you get because of it. An audit is so important because you’re really diving deep and… Can everybody see my screen first of all? Sorry, I just want to make sure we saw the agenda.
We’re going to start off with the importance of SEO audit and then dive into the ranking factors. So I go back. So Jason’s going to show you guys some examples of clients that we did an audit for and the ridiculous results that resulted from doing the audit and making the fixes. But what I urge you all, whoever’s watching on Facebook Live… So we’re on Facebook Live, we’re on Periscope, we’re on YouTube, and for those of you that joined us on the webinar, we’re directly on the webinar too, so please make sure you write this down and then get as much information as you can because we are giving you gold. “Gold, Jerry, gold!”
So with that said, I’m going to go ahead and turn it over, but really, do not go any further without having someone do an audit of your website. I think Jordan, you and I were talking about we should do it at least every six months, correct?
Jordan Kasteler:
Yeah, that’s ideally it. At a minimum, every year. But every six months is ideal because so many things creep up that you want to make sure that you’re keeping on top of them and keep ahead of issues that are occurring because if you just let them fester for a year, you’re losing a lot of potential SEO value in the interim.
Jason Hennessey:
And I’d also jump in and say that it’s not a matter of just what might be broken on your website. Google’s constantly rolling out new updates and features and there’s new snippets that you can add to your website. And so there’s all these different technology that if you’re not keeping abreast of, you could be missing out on some of the traffic that you could be getting by making sure that the code is probably installed. So it’s not always looking at what’s broken with the website, there’s also just opportunities you’re missing as well.
Alex Valencia:
Right.
Jordan Kasteler:
Absolutely.
Alex Valencia:
Perfect. Cool. So Jason, I’m going to go ahead and let and Jordan take over and let’s go from there. Let’s get started.
Jason Hennessey:
Perfect. Perfect. All right, so kick off into the next slide there, bud. All right, so what is an SEO audit? Why do you think you should have one? And so we talked about it just a few seconds ago. The biggest thing is that when you have a website, there’s probably a lot of technology that you don’t know about, you don’t know how to code, you don’t know what’s right, you don’t know what’s wrong. A lot of people just admit that. And so you might be working with a web developer that built your website and web development and SEO are two separate skill sets. And so you might have a developer that’s awesome at designing websites and building websites but not know the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect. And so it’s always good to have a specialist, whether it’s us or anybody else come in and just make sure that that the code is properly optimized for the search engines. Jordan.
Jordan Kasteler:
Yeah, it’s pretty important to keep that church and state separate too between development and SEO because so many times, and Jason and I have talked about this, you get developers that come in and say they know SEO. And then you might be thinking to yourself, “Well, I don’t need an SEO person to audit the site. I don’t need to have an SEO agency on my team because my developer knows SEO. So he can just do both of those things.” And very rarely is it the case that a developer is so good at SEO that you don’t need SEO consulting. It’s very rare. So it’s very important to keep those things separate because the things that the developer knows can be some technical things on the site, but there’s so much science and art and strategy involved with SEO that you really need a trained person that’s been doing it for quite a long time and knows the outs of SEO before you just let your developer do what they think they can do with SEO on your site.
So auditing is really important factor for an SEO to deep dive into your site, go through it with the fine toothed comb, not only find issues that are wrong with the site, but as Jason said, find the opportunities that are there as well. Because as Jason mentioned, the search engines are always changing. There’s always new enhancements. No, that’s not to say that you get a shiny coin, shiny object syndrome where everything new that comes out you immediately do to your site. I see that as a common error that a lot of sites make because Google released something or something new will come out and they’ll spend your time and resources doing it and they’ll end up killing it a month or two or even a year down the road. We saw this with Google authorship that Google was pushing so hard for people to do. So an SEO knows how to identify those opportunities that you should go forward with and are worth your time and resources, not just because they’re new and out there.
Jason Hennessey:
And in addition to the Google authorship, which they totally just took away, the other one was AMP too. AMP is like the new buzzword on the street and everybody’s talking about it. And so with a couple of our test websites because we have test websites that we use just to mess around before we implement changes on client’s websites. But a couple of our test websites, we said, “All right, let’s go full force with AMP.” And it turns out that there’s a lot of restrictions to AMP. Well, for those of you that don’t know what AMP is, it’s Accelerated Mobile Pages. And so it’s a technology that Google is using so that they can increase the speed in which sites load from a mobile perspective. And so we built AMP versions of some of our test websites, rolled it out and got the AMP versions index within Google.
And it turns out that those AMPs weren’t pages because they do have restrictions, you can’t put video, or at least you couldn’t when we first started it. And so those pagers weren’t converting as well as our regular pages. So now we have a fast site that loads super quick and it’s using Google’s latest technology, but it’s killing some of our conversion. And so we do tests like that. And so you should have somebody that A, that knows what AMP is on your team or on your corner, but B can do that as type of AB split test as well for you.
Jordan Kasteler:
Yeah. And some people are sitting on AMP saying, well, maybe Google will enhance it and make changes to it in the future. So you can be able to add video, make the page more sticky, make it more conversion oriented, but we can’t really sit around and wait for that because conversions happen every day on your site and you’re losing conversions if you’re doing something that’s afflicted towards that. So it’s a good point. I think this isn’t a discussion about AMP right now, but I think AMP’s good for publishers with news-based content and getting articles to load quickly, for sites that are lead gen, sales oriented. You might want to take a second and look at that. But that’s just an example of things that Google comes out with that you shouldn’t just necessarily jump on just because it’s a new thing.
Jason Hennessey:
There you go.
Jordan Kasteler:
Well, we take a look at this in the audit, present the opportunities, try to display what the ROI is and your projected outcome, and that’s in a projected SEO roadmap and strategy that comes along with the audit.
Jason Hennessey:
All right, let’s move to the next slide. All right, so what to expect in an audit. So there’s two types of audits. The first audit that we do as a preliminary audit, and those are free, it’s complimentary. Alex, give the email address for those that might want to jot this down now so that they can email us if they’d like us to conduct a free audit.
Alex Valencia:
Yeah. So we’ll be doing a free audit. So the email is info@WeDoWebContent.com. For those of you that attended, you’re going to get an email probably a half hour after this webinar inviting you to the audit as well. And for those of us watching from Facebook Live or Twitter, there should be a link on the description page of it as well. So make sure if you haven’t done so already, go ahead and register for a free audit.
Jason Hennessey:
And so the reason why I say that is because just take the opportunity to do that. There’s no cost to you, there’s no obligation at all. If anything, it’s more of a learning exercise. That’s like what we say is when we conduct these preliminary audits, we just educate you with things like, “Hey, did you know that you have a bunch of broken pages? Did you know that some of your content isn’t getting indexed correctly because it’s using JavaScript?” Right? We’ve got a couple of examples in a few slides ahead. Also looking at studying some of your competitors. Why are they ranking higher than you? So it’s not about just the technical elements of your website that we look at in an audit. We’ll look at the sites that are actually ranking higher than you for some of your targeted terms, and then get into some of the specifics on what strategies they’re using that you’re not and why their site is performing a little bit better than you. Jordan.
Jordan Kasteler:
Right. Yeah, really a big part of that and something we’ll talk about later in these slides is intent. The old days of SEO were finding keywords that we could stuff throughout your webpage to make you rank for those keywords. Now Google really is looking at not just the keywords that are mentioned on your page, but the intent of the user, what intent the user might have when they come to your site. What stage of the buying cycle is that user when they’re coming to your site? And is your site serving up content toward that stage in the buying cycle? What kind of device are they using? Is your content optimized for that device? What web history does that searcher have to display some intent, whether that person’s looking for information or being ready to buy. So we look at so many different things when it comes to how to optimize your page for intent and not just keywords like the old days of SEO were.
Jason Hennessey:
Mm-hmm. All right, let’s go to the next slide. So on this slide, we’re really just talking about just a list of the elements of just some of the things that we look at for like meta tags, some of the on page, looking at your internal linking structure. I had mentioned we look at your Backlink profile so we can share with you some of your strongest Backlinks. We can also let you know if you’re missing some foundational backlinks. Like a foundational backlink might be making sure that your YouTube channel is properly linking back to your website because that’s a very authoritative link. I think it has the most or the highest domain authority than any other website on the web.
Content efficiencies, language markup, that’s another important thing. There’s things that are called knowledge graph that we’ll get into a little bit later into the presentation, but you’ve got to make sure that you’re giving Google the specific language via code so that they know what this page is about and that this is a review and that this is your address. And so there’s all this different markup that you can do as well. So anything else to add on this slide?
Jordan Kasteler:
No, let’s hop into some of these items.
Jason Hennessey:
Okay, great. All right. So this is just a good example. This is a client that we work with. I took out their names so that we don’t disclose who they are. But this was a client that was working with a web development team. They had rebuilt their website. As you can see, they were pretty flat as far as their traffic goes. And so the development team had implemented a 302 redirect and they couldn’t figure out what was going on and why all of a sudden their traffic had just fallen off. This right here on the left, if you see 1,700 at the top. That’s how many keywords that they rank for on Google. [inaudible 00:18:13].
There you go. Can you hear me? So that’s how many keywords that they rank for on Google. So there’s 1700 keywords that they rank for that meet a certain qualifier. So this tool is called SEMRush. And so the qualifying variables are that there’s more than ten people per month searching for that keyword and that they’re in the top 100 position, so that they’re in the first ten pages of Google. So they’re ranking for 1700 keywords, but more importantly, the value of those keywords. So if they were to build a pay-per-click campaign and get the same traffic that they’re getting from an organic perspective, they’d have to pay Google $58,000 per month. Seems really well, it seems very good if they’re paying their SEO company maybe $3000 or $5,000 per month if they’ve got a value of $58,000. But because we went in and we did this comprehensive audit, we were able to determine that, wait a second, they’ve implemented the wrong redirect here.
And so if you go to the next slide after we caught that, it took Google about a month and a half to actually call it correctly. And so the keywords jumped from 1,700 up to 2,300. But more importantly, they had massive increase in value because some of their targeted keywords that are very expensive from a pay-per-click perspective, they moved from position maybe like eight to position one or position two. And so that brought the value up from 58,000 up to $365,000 per month in value. And that was just from a slight little mistake that they didn’t even know about. And it’s been like that for a long time. Jordan, anything to add there?
Jordan Kasteler:
Yeah, that’s why you need a technical SEO person to audit your site so they can see, we’ll talk about redirects and we’ll talk about HTB status codes later on this presentation, but you need to be able to spot things like that because there can be small technical things that you don’t even know about that you wouldn’t even come across on your own, that you have to have somebody with great insight and the right tools to be able to check things like this.
Jason Hennessey:
Mm-hmm. That’s exactly right. All right, we’ll go to the next slide. Jordan, I’ll let you talk a little bit more [inaudible 00:20:29].
Jordan Kasteler:
Let’s talk about mobile because mobile’s huge. I don’t know how many of you out there know this, but this year is the first year that Google is looking at your mobile site to determine how it’s going to rank your site in the index. That is completely different than how Google’s ever done it. Google’s always looked at the desktop site, mobile’s always been secondary. This is called the year mobile first. This is the year that Google is now ranking your mobile version of your site. So you need to check and make sure that you have a great mobile presence and your content’s in order on your mobile site to be able to rake in the index. We saw in 2015 was the first year that mobile search, if you looked at the graph, mobile search caught up to desktop search. And then in 2016, last year was the year vastly surpassed desktop search.
Most people are searching on their phone. And Google’s taken a hint at that and looked at, okay, since so many people are searching on their phone, we need to create the best mobile experience possible for mobile users because that’s where all the search is happening. Not all the search, but most of the search is happening these days.
So now Google’s saying, “Okay, your mobile site is the most important asset that you have, and you need to make that first priority in order to rank.” So taking a look at the next slide here, Google rolled out a penalty, if you will, called the “mobile interstitial penalty” for mobile sites that have obtrusive popups on their content that cover content that you have to “x out of” in order to see the content. So this is not the case on desktop sites right now, at least as of right now.
Google as of January 10th, said, if you have any mobile hovers that don’t have a qualifying factor, some of those qualifying factors are like, for example, a site that has alcohol or adult site or something like that, that has a popup to ask you if you’re 18 or not. That’s an okay pop-up to have. But a pop-up asking for an email address or is trying to get you to download a free eBook or something like that. Anything commercialized in that form that covers content, at least 20% of the content on the page is bad news. And Google doesn’t like that and Google’s penalizing sites for that. What Google wants you to do, as we can see from the icon on the left is they want you to have a banner at the top of your content. So if you want to have a signup banner, that’s fine. As long as it’s a banner, it’s not covering content, it’s not hovering over content and people can’t ax out of it’s okay.
But if you have some hovering banner that’s taken over 20% of your content, that’s bad news, and we’ve been going through auditing a lot of clients, a lot of their mobile sites and trying to get rid of any of those issues. One thing that we commonly see are-
Jason Hennessey:
Chats.
Jordan Kasteler:
Click-the-chats. “Click-the-chat” boxes are ones that we are going through and optimizing to make them less obtrusive. For example, you might see ones that cover the bottom 20% of the screen and want you to click the chat. And as you scroll down through the content, it always hovers over the content. But ideally, what we would have is just a little small icon off in the corner that’s not covering content where you can still click the call or click to chat without it being intrusive.
Jason Hennessey:
Yeah. No, that’s the big one. I was just going to mention chat because there’s some chat companies out there that are still using interstitials that are covering more than 20%. And so I would recommend that you go and look at your website now on your mobile device just to see how the chat popup appears. And if it looks like it’s actually hovering more than 20% of the content, you might want to maybe work with the chat company to redesign something that’s not so intrusive.
Jordan Kasteler:
Yeah, absolutely. So we’ll talk about in a minute the site speed for mobile as well, and that’s something we’ll talk about, but that falls under a lot of these on-page SEO factors. What one thing I would want to say here is that you cannot have two areas of optimization for your site on-page and off-page. Off-page, we’ll get into in a minute. It refers to a lot of times the link building and citation building that you’re doing and the press mentions you’re doing for your brand and your website. The on-page factors are all the SEO ranking factors that you do on your site that we’ll get into and name in just a few minutes.
But if you really want to boil it down, and this is arguable, but I would say that the on-page factors that you do on your site, your keywords, your titles, your image optimization, the stuff that you would uncover with the technical SEO audit, I’d say that roughly counts for about a third of your rankings. The biggest value is what you do off-page, and again, we’ll talk about that in a minute with link building and whatnot. But you want to have your on-page dialed in before you dive into your off-page stuff because your link building needs to be connected. You need to be building links to your site that’s optimized, and therefore they work together harmoniously to create ultimate optimization.
Jason Hennessey:
Great. All right. Let’s go to the next slide. So this was one of the examples that I used earlier, the importance of On-Page SEO. So this was just an example of a audit that we conducted where we looked at their FAQ section on their website. And so when we visually look at that page, it looks great, there’s some content there. Then there’s some links with some images to the right, which we blacked out just so that we couldn’t reveal who this is. But “Who is liable for a truck tire blowout accident?” And so there’s hundreds and hundreds of these questions that are on this website.
But when we conducted our audit, if you go to the next slide because they were using JavaScript, Google was seeing just a blank page. So even though they had hundreds and hundreds of these pages that looked like they were appearing on the site, Google wasn’t properly indexing them because they weren’t seeing them. In fact, the only way that they were able to see them is through a site map that they had on the site, but there weren’t getting any of the internal link credit or value. And so this is just one example that it’s just like a slight overlook. And next thing you know, all that content that you’re spending a lot of money writing isn’t getting the greatest value that you should be getting from it.
Jordan Kasteler:
There’s three ways to check your pages for this. You can check it through Google cache is what’s outlined and pointed in red here, and check to see if Google’s recognizing the content on the page. You can use through Google Search Console, the fetch and render tool to see if the search engines, the bots are rendering the page through the JavaScript or not. And then Screaming Frog is a Spider SEO tool that we use, and it has a new feature where it can render pages in JavaScript to see it, how a search engine would see it. All three of these signs pointed to no content showing up on this page.
Jason Hennessey:
All right, next slide.
So these are just a couple examples of some of the On-Page SEO factors. So some of the On-Page linking, which was one of the examples that we just used. If Google can’t see it, you’re not getting any of the link credit. And internal link sculpting is a big part of SEO, right? It’s not always about how many external links that you’re coming into your website. You can mold your pages, how you will by basically coming up with a clever internal linking strategy as well, too. Heading tags. So those are called like H1s or H2s. That’s just the way in which you format your pages. It’s one of the signs of relevance that Google looks at as far as like what is this page about? It’s like when you read a newspaper and you open up the newspaper, you’re scanning through the headlines.
You want to see what is the relevance of each of these stories before you get into the detail about the specific story. So those are the headlines. That’s one of the things that Google’s looking at. Word count. Again, we’re not talking about trying to put in the keyword that you’re targeting X number of times and the density. Those are the old days of SEO. We’re just talking specifically how deep is the page.
We’re going to get into another technique as well. It’s an SEO technique called the skyscraper technique. We’ll talk about that in a little bit where you just want to look at the site that’s ranking number one for the term and try to understand what are they doing right, and what can you do to make it ten times better than the first page that’s ranking for that term. So we’ll talk a little bit about that skyscraper technique in a while. But word count is something that we look at. Media optimization. Jordan, why don’t you talk a little bit about the media optimization, how bounce rates can affect and the indirect stuff?
Jordan Kasteler:
So yeah, with media optimization, some sites like restaurants are notorious for this, you’re looking for their menu online and their menu is actually a PDF, and you have to download the PDF in order to read it. Ideally, you would take PDF content and make it into HTML content, so it’s more searchable. But there’s things you can do to PDFs to optimize them through their own metadata. So media includes PDFs, but it also includes images and video. There’s things you can do to optimize images such as the Alt attribute that’s mentioned here, file naming, we’ll talk about that in a bit. Video schema, markup, transcripts on the page through video. So you’re just making sure that all your ducks are in a row for all the other elements that you’re adding to your page, just aside from the words.
Jason Hennessey:
And by adding the media stuff real quick before you go to the next slide, by adding the media stuff, you are also increasing all of the indirect things that Google is looking at like the time spent on page, bounce rates, things like that. By having a video there, people might be spending more time on the page. And so when people click on your website and they stay on the page longer, those are signals that Google’s looking at because they’re monitoring the time that people go on your website and the time that they click back to Google because it’s telling them that this is not the answer that they’re looking for.
Jordan Kasteler:
Yeah. And we’ll talk about that more in the content efficiency area.
Jason Hennessey:
Absolutely. All right, next slide. Meta Tags. So title tag, Jordan and I would probably argue together that that is probably one of the biggest signs of relevancy that Google looks at making sure that the title tags are properly in place. If you’re in a car accident lawyer in Austin, you want to make sure that you use a title tag on this page that says “Austin Car Accident lawyer.” And then you want to put the state in there too, “Austin, Texas,” right? Because maybe there’s a different Austin. And so the reason why you do that is because regardless of whether or not people are actually typing in “Car accident lawyer in Austin, Texas,” they might not be typing that in. They might only be typing in car accident lawyer.
But because Google can see that you are located in Austin, Texas, based on the title tag and some of the other things that they’re looking at for relevancy, and then they match that up with the IP address of where the person is actually conducting that search from, you will probably get the traffic from people doing a search for just “Car accident lawyer,” too, because they’ll serve up your page for that specific query.
Meta descriptions, that’s not really a direct benefit. Google doesn’t actually use that as a direct correlation for ranking. However, it does help improve click-through ratios. And so it’s important that you actually include a meta description, which is the little short description that’s underneath the blue hyperlink on your Google listing to talk about what this page is about and why people should click there. And so a lot of times we see people that just have blank meta descriptions, and then Google will just serve up whatever they want. It doesn’t help them.
Jordan Kasteler:
So let’s talk about that because that hasn’t always been the case. There was a day where meta descriptions were actually important to ranking and getting your keywords in there. They’re always been part of the search result, but there’s a time that they’re a part of the ranking factor. And in this webinar, we’re talking about 2017 ranking factors, and really there’s been a very, very much a consistency over the years. Jason and I have been doing this since 2000, 2001. There’s been a consistency of what elements come in play for SEO, but there’s been an inconsistency in the weight of those things, and if they’re used or if they aren’t used. And Google goes back and forth on things. So a lot of people say, “Meta keywords, Google doesn’t use them, they’re not worth your time,” and they aren’t right now. But Google’s gone back and forth on that throughout the years and this meta descriptions, maybe Google will change and say, “Hey, meta descriptions are important for your SEO rankings and you should have keywords in them now.”
Now, that’s not to say that right now there’s an indirect benefit. So Jason talked about, well, you have a good meta description on your site that shows a good snippet in the search results, and that’s going to help with the click through. Well, when we start to talk more and later on, we’re going to understand why click through is actually an important element to ranking. So there’s an indirect benefit when you’re getting more clicks on your search results because you have a more enticing description that’s action-oriented.
You’re telling search engines, you are a more relevant search result than people that might be ranking above you. And if you’re getting more people clicking on you, chances are Google’s going to say, “Hey, this is a better search result. We’re going to move it higher up the ladder.” So while there’s not a direct benefit of the meta-description and the actual ranking algorithm per se, right now, there’s that added benefit of the click-through rate (CTR), and that’s what you really want is you don’t need to be ranking number one if you’re getting the clicks, you want to try to create such a good description and title that you’re drawing those clicks and then in turn, you’re going to be ranking higher because of that.
Jason Hennessey:
Yeah. One thing I just will add is that this is not all theory. A lot of the stuff that we’re talking about is all practical, right? Because we’ve been doing this for so long and we’ve tested things out where we’ve experimented with different meta descriptions and removing meta descriptions, and that’s why we have all these different test sites. So a lot of this stuff is not just theory. This is real practical stuff here.
Jordan Kasteler:
Fast forward.
Jason Hennessey:
All right, next slide. Keywords and intent. Why don’t you jump into that, Jordan?
Jordan Kasteler:
Oh, yeah. So I talked a little bit earlier about the old days of SEO versus the new days of SEO, and I don’t want to dismiss keywords because keywords are still very important, optimizing for making sure you have the right ones and doing your keyword research and making sure they’re right. But I think SEOs in the past treated keywords is they really looked at which keywords had the highest search volume and just ranked for those keywords, they didn’t really take into effect and into account that what’s the user intent and the need that someone might have when they’re conducting those keywords in a search engine. So really, in the old days, SEOs have looked at keywords, they’ve done the research, they’ve found the ones with the highest search volume, and they peppered those keywords into the title, into the headers, into all the on-page SEO elements that we’ve talked about into the image file names into the image all contributes, and has peppered those keywords on the page as much as possible to be able to rank for those keywords.
That’s really not the best way to do SEO anymore. Instead, you want to look at those keywords and try to identify where in the buy cycle, in the consumer journey someone might be when they’re using those keywords to identify your product or service. So really, it’s about creating pages based around topics and answering questions that people might have and fulfilling the user need on a landing page versus just spreading keywords throughout. And we have an example of that we’ll talk about in a minute. But let’s take a look at the next slide and look at the keyword breakdowns as a whole.
So in general, when you look at all the keywords that are conducted on Google every day, about 80% of those keywords have informational intent. People are seeking out non-commercial pages, non-transactional pages. They are looking for information. So that might be in the form of a question for the example, what is an X, Y, Z? What is a blue widget? Most queries out there are information. So you want to make sure that you’re off, you have information, you have great content, you’re optimizing for those informational queries. Now those aren’t people that are buying from you, but those are people at the top of the buy cycle that eventually, if you can provide them the right content and get your brand in front of them at the top of the buy cycle, when they start to move down the buy cycle, you could be top of mind for them and be the one that provided that information to move them toward the sale.
The second layer you have, which is in the middle of the buy cycle, is commercial investigation. This implies that they have, they are ready, they are going to convert in the near future. This is about 10% of the search volume out there on searches as commercial investigation.
So they’re researching products. This might be looking at reviews. They might be comparing a blue widget versus a red widget because they’re getting near the purchase, they’ve already Googled the information, they know what the widgets are, they know what the widgets are about, now they’re comparing them. Now the bottom of the sales funnel is the transactional queries, that’s about another 10% of the search fine. That’s where people have explicit intent of what they want to do and what they want to buy, explicit intent to convert. So they might be typing in something like buy a blue widget because they’re ready to buy in the moment. So it’s important to make sure that your search keywords and the landing pages that you have on the site are matching all funnels of the consumer journey and the buy cycle to make sure that you are with somebody all the way from the beginning when they’re asking questions all the way to the end when they’re ready to buy.
And if we go to the next slide, we can look at a few keywords that we can look at and what we call modifiers to know if that can tell you truly if those keywords are informational, educational, transactional, commercial investigation. You look at modifiers. When someone’s looking at best or top, they might be looking for informational queries. When someone’s looking for the cost of something, that might be a commercial investigation, when they’re looking at comparing a brand versus another brand, that’s commercial investigation. When they’re saying buy, then they’re ready to purchase. So we look at these types of modifiers that people use along with keywords to understand what buy cycles somebody’s in. And the new trend now and for local is if somebody’s searching for “Near me” or “Nearby.” So a lot of times in the olden days of search, people used to type in, well, and they still do, but this isn’t as common anymore as search is changing.
They might type “Plumber, Salt Lake City, Utah.” Now, a lot of people are just using “Near me” or “Nearby,” wherever they’re at, they’re using their IP address, Google’s using their IP address to see where they’re at, and they’re saying, “Plumber near me” or “Plumber nearby. And Google’s serving up plumbers that are in those locations, in the vicinity of their IP address without having to type in a city or a state name in your search query. You can just type in “A plumber” and come up. So it’s important for SEOs now to try to optimize for those type of keywords. And we’ve been experimenting with that on a couple sites of optimizing for near me and nearby as keyword modifiers to understand people’s local intent.
Jason Hennessey:
Yeah, no, and that’s big in the restaurant business for sure. I do it all the time when I’m traveling for conferences. I’ll type in best Italian restaurant near me or nearby. Exactly. So you want to make sure that you are also doing that within your strategy. You can incorporate those into H tags, maybe H2 or H3s. So there’s different techniques that you can do to try to incorporate that.
All right, let’s go to the next slide. Won’t spend too much time on this slide, but just wanted to show you an example. Not sure if you can read this or not, but basically, this is a DUI law firm in Los Angeles. As you can see there to the left on that first query, this was an educational query that we were trying to obtain. And so the target keyword was, “How long does a DUI stay on your record in California or in Los Angeles?”
Well, because we made that page just detailed and answering the question with links back to different resources, that keyword generates… There’s actually 467 keywords that one specific page ranks for. And so that one page alone drives probably close to 1500 unique visits to the website each month just from that one query because it ranks for 467 keywords. If we go to the next page, next slide rather, because that page became so authoritative, Google is actually using it as the official answer. So they call that position zero, it’s above position one. But then we also, if you look below it under the questions there, we also rank number one in the organic position. So when everything starts to come together, when we look at fixing the website, all of the broken things, doing the right keyword research, understanding the buyer’s journey and their cycle, writing the content, and then building the links, this is the kind of results that you get.
Alex Valencia:
This was actually a topic that came up at a conference I was at, I think last week or the last week. Puma had their internet bootcamp, and there was a presenter that touched on this. Can you touch quickly because I don’t want to run out of time, but what the technical aspect of getting something like this to rank? Is there a schema markup involved? What needs to be done outside of the content and obviously the research on these questions for intent?
Jason Hennessey:
Yeah, Jordan, go ahead. Why don’t you take that?
Jordan Kasteler:
So yeah, you definitely do use schema on your pages to do certain things. There’s so much schema that you can do for different elements and market different elements of your site. And we’ll show that in a later slide here. Really, there’s still a lot of question marks on why Google decides to rank a page in the answer box. You don’t have to rank number one to already rank in the answer box. Google’s just looking for short, precise answers to questions. I’ve seen even listings that rank on number page two of Google that still have answer box rankings because they provided a Google answer. And this goes back to the skyscraper technique that Jason mentioned earlier is, what questions are popping up the answer box? Who has those answer box questions? What do they have on their site that seems to be so valuable into where they’re getting the answer boxes?
And looking at that and trying to make your page ten times better. And being able to answer those questions in a precise manner that Google can provide a snippet, the very clear answer is really important. If we were to look at this page, this answer, is was buried a little bit down on the page and Google scours the page and is looking for that precise element. So it’s not necessarily a matter of schema to get the rich answer box, it’s just a matter of having compelling content and being an authoritative site and having great content. I would say high word count would be a factor, as well.
Jason Hennessey:
Yeah.
Alex Valencia:
Awesome. And again, this all goes back to why audits and doing your research and competitor analysis are so important. If someone’s doing it right, why not find out what they’re doing and try to do it better? Thanks, guys.
Jason Hennessey:
That’s the whole world of search engine optimization, man.
Alex Valencia:
Exactly.
Jason Hennessey:
Search engine optimization will never go away, because even though you might get crushed with some update, there’s always going to be winners and losers. And so even though you might be a loser in this case, you just go back and reverse engineer the strategies and techniques that the winners are using and then you start to apply it.
Jordan Kasteler:
And yes, that’s right.
Jason Hennessey:
All right, content efficiencies. All right, so this is the stuff that we were talking about earlier, some of the indirect things that Google’s looking at. So when somebody lands on a page to try and to understand the engagement metrics, are people looking at your site and finding what they need? I’d imagine that if they landed on that page that we just used in the last example about, “How long does a DUI stay on your record in California?” they’re spending time on that page.
They might be reading through it. They’re seeing all of the information there, they’re seeing the bounce rates, they’re seeing the time spent on page, stickiness of it. And so if you start to read your content… I would do that. A lot of times people never read their own content. And so if you go to one of your pages that talks about, let’s just say “car accident lawyer in this city,” and you land on your page, and if you’re confused reading your own content and you wouldn’t feel comfortable buying from yourself, well then there’s probably a good chance that people that are reading your content are also bouncing back and going to the next result too. So that’s why it’s important to not find somebody on Fiverr.com to write your content for you. I understand that you want to get content up quickly and you want to build a website, but you got to make sure that the content is actually good content.
Jordan Kasteler:
Yeah. So here’s what you can do. So look at your high traffic pages, look for pages with high bounce rates. Look for pages with high exit rates. Look for pages that share both high exit rates and high bounce rates. Look for high traffic pages that have poor conversion rate. Look for pages with high rankings, high impressions in the search results, but low click-through rates. So that can indicate that you look in Google Search Console and you see that you have queries that have high rankings. They’re getting a lot of views to the impressions, but they’re not getting a lot of clicks. That means you need to optimize your title and description to get people to click more. You look for keywords with high impressions and low click-through rates, too, because there could be a disconnect there between what someone’s searching and what someone is seeing with a titled in description.
And then furthermore, a disconnect with what your landing page says. So by looking at these metrics, you can take a look at your own content and see what pages you can improve. Take a look at the search results as Jason mentioned, and try to be the best search result on that page. One really, really great tactic is adding video content to your page to make it more sticky, to make people spend more time on the page and to make people bounce less. When I worked at PETA, one of the biggest things that helped with that was like, we have all these video, we have this YouTube channel with all these great videos, and then we have the website with all this great text content. There was really no blend of the two. So taking those videos on the same topics and integrating into the same topics on the site made those pages so much more sticky in terms of how much time people spent on the sites. Therefore, people were spending more time, they were engaging more in those pages, then it ranked higher indirectly because of that.
Jason Hennessey:
So you made a big assumption that everybody on this call has Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Jordan Kasteler:
Exactly.
Jason Hennessey:
So in order to get that data, all of that specific technical data that Jordan was just mentioning, you have to, A: have Google Analytics on your website, have Google Search Console on your website. There’s probably a large majority of you that don’t even know what that is and probably don’t have it on your website or have never even logged in to look at it. But we can certainly do that. We can look at that for you and on the audit if you’d like. All right, next slide.
All right, so this is what we were talking about with the skyscraper technique, and I thought this was a really good example. And so the reason why I thought it was a good example is because not only is it a really good movie, if you have kids, definitely take them to go see it, but I would say that if somebody doesn’t search for Lego Batman, of course Google’s going to show the show times at the top there because they’re just trying to make it a good user experience for the people that are doing that search. But the first result is the IMDb, and it actually ranks above Wikipedia. And so the reason why that ranks above Wikipedia is because if you click on it has all of the information that anybody would ever need about answering a question about that movie. So go to the next slide.
All right, so here we are on the IMDb page. It’s got all the great visuals. You can watch the trailer, you can look at the gallery, you can look at the photos, you can see all of the different characters. You can play the game, you can visit the website, anything you want to know about that Batman movie you can find right on this page without having to go anywhere else. And so that is a really good user experience. And so that’s what Google wants to display. They want to create a page that is going to answer everybody’s questions about that query. So how can you make your page look like the Batman of all of the legal pages that are out there? Jordan, you have anything else [inaudible 00:52:04].
Jordan Kasteler:
It’s great that the IMDb, they match the user intent by providing all the answers to all the questions somebody might have when they come across the IMDb content. But another thing that they do really well is they anticipate what your next questions or your next needs might be. You might be searching for the Lego Batman movie trailer, and this page will serve up that need for you. But you also might be wanting to look at who’s all the people that are in the movie, pictures from throughout the movie, et cetera. And IMDb is just a great holistic portal to provide all that information, which is why they rank so well sometimes even above Wikipedia because they’re just a great information portal and serve multiple needs for multiple people.
Jason Hennessey:
Try to predict what people are going to search for next. So if they search “Lego Batman movie or trailer,” what are the things that they want to search next? “Who does the voice of this person?” “Who does the voice of that person?” And answer those questions, answer those questions on your site.
Jordan Kasteler:
Yep.
Jason Hennessey:
All right, good, Jordan.
Jordan Kasteler:
I talked about earlier about how about a third of your SEO ranking value comes from on-page SEO and really, about two thirds or maybe arguably even higher, 75% of the value of your SEO comes from your off-page factors, which are back links, which really what we’re talking about are links. Links coming to your site from other pages on the web. And those links count as editorial votes, if you will. When somebody is sourcing, they’re writing a journal, writing a blog, and they’re linking back to your content. They’re essentially editorially giving you a vote for your content and saying, “This is an authoritative site. This is where you can find more value,” et cetera. So there’s lots of ways we go about getting links, but we do web content, we do a lot of link building, and there’s various factors that we do.
But really, when we dial in the on-page stuff, we do your technical SEO audit, we get your site in ship shape, we start building content, make it really authoritative. The next step, or while we’re at consecutive step, while we’re doing that, is building links to your site and getting your site really ranking well by getting all those editorial votes.
And again, I can’t express enough how much important link building is. So let’s take a look at some of those things we do on the next slide.
So we look at different things. I talk about directories here, but we call these foundational links. Now, there’s been a lot of hubbub in the past about directory link building and how it’s not valuable. And this used to be such a go-to default for SEO companies. It’s building links and directories. Now, there’s been a lot of stuff in the web, WebSphere about how directories are not good links, but there are still good directories out there. So what we do is we seek out relevant directories. We seek out authoritative directories, directories that are going to provide a good value link back to your site. So for example, if you’re a law firm, personal injury law firm, there’s a lots of different law directories out there that you can be seen in. Jason, what are the big ones? Avvo?
Jason Hennessey:
I know when you advertise with Justia, end up with, in the Cornell directory, they have an affiliation with Cornell. So you get a good link from cornell.edu. And so that moves into the .edu links, which is a scholarship, is a great strategy to generate that .edu links. You just basically do a thousand dollars scholarship twice a year. You build a page. But then there’s real work. You got to build relationships with different universities and schools. We’ve been doing the strategy for so long that we probably have about 800 relationships with different schools that we can reach out to, to help get scholarships promoted on some of their websites. I’ve got another slide coming up next, which I’ll share that with you. Guest blog post, another good way to build links. Columnist contributions. If you can become a writer like Jordan is on Inc, or Forbes or whatever the other sites are. Press mentions.
Press, that is the form of link building. Content magnets. That Lego page is more of a content magnet because they’ve got so much there, it’s visual. Other web developers look at that page and be like, “Oh, look how cool they did on this webpage.” And they’ll link to it naturally. Building links that your competitors can’t easily build. And then of course, relationship building is big. I’m talking fast just because we’re trying to speed it up. I know that we’re coming up on an hour here, so we’ll go to the next slide.
All right, so this is just an example of looking at a link profile for one of our clients. You can see that we’ve got .edu links, we’ve got Yellow Pages. That’s one of the directories that are important. You’ve got Yahoo local, reference.com, so more .edu links. And then that number one link is forbes.com. That’s not an easy link to get. You have to be able to reach out to authors and ask them if you can maybe include some type of an angle on where they can include you. So that takes relationship building and really no fear of rejection, reaching out to 16 different Forbes editors to try to get maybe one inclusion. So there’s a lot of work that’s involved with getting those type of links. But once you have those type of links, again, that’s not an easy link that your competitor can get.
And if you look at this, there’s a domain rating for each of these links. So Forbes is a domain rating of 80 out of a hundred. And they go exponentially higher as you move from, again, 80 to an 81, or 81 to an 82. And so this is what we do is we reverse engineer the link strategies that are being used by some of your competitors and come up with the foundational links of what links they have that you don’t have, which ones can we easily get? And then how can we also make you so far ahead of your competition that they can never catch up?
Jordan Kasteler:
And just to note here, .edu’s are valuable not just because they end in .edu, but because every library and government and resource also links to these educational colleges and universities. And so they have all these great links from all these different authorities on their site. So when you get a link from a college that’s a .edu domain, it’s not because it’s .edu, it’s because those sites are so powerful because they’ve gotten so many great links that you start to take that some of that authority with you when you get a link from them.
Jason Hennessey:
That’s right. All right, we’ll go to the next slide.
Alex Valencia:
That was excellent. Yeah, that was a good explanation because a lot of people know that. Thank you. Next slide.
Jason Hennessey:
Jordan, touch on this quickly, just robots and directives.
Jordan Kasteler:
Just real quick. There’s ways that we can craft search engines to pay attention to the pages that we want. Pay attention to the pages that we don’t want. And a lot of people are surprised of how many pages on a site you really don’t want search engines to pay attention to. And this comes in if you have a blog, chances are you have a lot of pages that search engines just shouldn’t follow and shouldn’t crawl. It’s like blog pagination pages. When you go to your blog and you go to page two, page three, page four, page five, page six, you don’t want those all in the index. It’s creating bloat. They’re low value pages. People don’t want to come across those when they’re searching. Your blog categories and your blog tag pages, they just create multiple doorways to the same content that search engines are already finding within your blog.
So we use tags like Meta noindex, Meta nofollow, we use the robot .txt file, which is on the route server, which is a directive to tell search engines which pages just to crawl, which pages not to crawl. There’s ways that we can do to sculpt which pages are important for search engine, which pages aren’t. And the reason that is so important because the search engine comes to your site, they say, “I have X amount of data that I’m going to spend crawling through your site.” And when they crawl through all that data, they’re done. So we want to search engine to crawl from the beginning of your site to the end of the site and reach all your deep content. And if they’re wasting their time on pages that aren’t valuable, they’re wasting that crawl spend, and they’re not discovering your deep content. So that’s why it’s really important to direct search engines through this code and methodology.
Jason Hennessey:
All right. Real fast because right now it’s 12 o’clock, we hit our hour. We’re going to stick around. We’ve got a few more slides, but for those that only blocked out an hour, if you would like to get an audit, if you’d like us to hop on a call, the three of us hop on a call just with you and maybe your team to get a free audit. All you’re going to do is send us an email, info@WeDoWebContent.com, that’s info@WeDoWebContent.com. If you’ve got some additional time, we’re going to go through the rest of these slides and then we will save a little bit of time for some FAQs afterwards. So just wanted to pause there for just a second.
Alex Valencia:
And quick, I also want to add, again, if you’re following us on Facebook Live or Periscope, it should be linked to the audit, it should be on the description page. And to those of us that are following us on the go-to webinar, I sent the link through the go-to webinar chat feature, so it’s on there as well. Great. Thanks again.
Jason Hennessey:
All right. Next slide. All right. So when people are actually doing searches on Google, on mobile or on desktop, Google wants to make sure that, A: they serve up the right information and that, B: they’re creating a good user experience. And so somebody lands on a page, whether it be from a mobile or from the desktop, and it takes two to three, four seconds to load, that’s not creating a good user experience. And Google’s monitoring that time that it takes from the time somebody clicks on your link to the time that the page loads. And so there’s just a tool that you can use. It’s called “Google Page Speed Insights.” If you go to the next slide here, basically, just Google it. “Google page speed insights.” You put your URL in there, you press analyze, and then if you go to the next slide, Alex, it’s going to spit a number at you.
And so if it’s in the red, that means you’ve got a problem. And so you want to be in the green ideally. But if you’re in the yellow, that is better than being in the red. And so in this case, this random site that we pulled ranks 61 out of a hundred. But the good thing is that this specifically tells you things that you can do to improve the page speed. And it’ll tell you you can fix blocking JavaScript and CSS above the fold. So all these different things, image optimization. Jordan, anything else?
Jordan Kasteler:
Yeah, so we have mobile and we have desktop here. It looks at both of those separately. And mobile is the most important one you can look at because as I mentioned earlier, Google’s looking at a mobile first index. It’s looking at the mobile performance of your site and basing that on your ranking. So you want to make sure that you have your mobile site speed dialed in as quickly as possible, as fast as possible. Mozilla did a test some years back and tested down to the very millisecond of speed time and how that affects conversion rate and user engagement. And every millisecond counts. So you might say, “Oh, okay, well, I made my site go from five seconds loading to three seconds loading.” But it’s still probably two seconds slower than it should be. So you want to make sure that you just make your site as quickly as possible.
Now, if you want to get more detailed to this and have a developer check it out, there’s a site called gtmetrics.com where it analyzes site speed and shows you every single little element on your site and how quickly it’s loading. So you can see what’s called a “waterfall effect” of how your site loads. Because you can fix your speed here with Google’s tool, and you still might have some issues that you might not see otherwise. So you need a good SEO to be able to analyze all those elements to help you make your site quicker.
Jason Hennessey:
And the beautiful thing about this tool is you don’t have to understand what it takes to fix it. You just have to get somebody to fix it and then rerun the crawl. And if it’s in the green, then you’re okay. And just because it’s fixed one time doesn’t mean it’s fixed forever. I would run this crawl once a month because as you add new content, images get added that aren’t compressed. And so this can go from a 90 to a 60 really fast. So just make sure you monitor this on at least a monthly basis.
Jordan Kasteler:
And just real quick, the site speed is a small ranking factor overall. I’d say one of the most important things is don’t look at this as an SEO play. Look at this as a conversion and usability play. Make your site faster loading for people so they can get to the concept they want so they can convert so they can become a lease, so they can make a purchase in sale. Worry about that as opposed to looking at just for an SEO benefit boost. Now, it’s twofold, they work together, but conversion is probably one of the most important parts of the site speed.
Jason Hennessey:
There you go. Next slide. So this is basically looking at what we do is when we do an audit is we crawl the website similar to how Google or Bing or Yahoo would crawl the website. And we look for things like earlier we talked about that big jump where it went from 58,000 to 350,000. Well, that was because they were using a 302 redirect instead of a 301 redirect. I’m not going to talk about the specifics of that. We could probably do a whole webinar on the different redirects and the meanings behind them, but just knowing that there was the wrong redirect that was implemented caused that problem. 404 pages, those are just broken links. And if we were to run a crawl on your website, unless you have an SEO that’s monitoring that stuff, I would imagine that there’s both internal broken links as well as external broken links.
And so you start to lose points within Google because you’re sending Google’s search crawlers to pages that are basically dead ends. And so you’re wasting Google’s resources and that’s not good. And then also, if you link out to other websites that land on these dead end pages, again, you’re wasting Google’s resources. So you want to clean up both your internal 404 pages as well as your external links to 404s as well.
Jordan Kasteler:
And just a quick note, some of the common things we come across with redirects is redirects that redirect to redirects. And there’s a chain effect. We see this happen a lot with sites that are moving from HTTP to HTTPS, which is a secure server. A lot of sites are doing that these days, and what happens is you’re redirecting your http domain to your HTTPS domain, and then you might have redirects within your HTTP domain. So you might have a page that’s broken that redirects to a HTTP page, and then you move over to an HTTPS secure server. Now you have a hop in between that redirect. Ideally, the redirect needs to go from point A, the broken page, to point B, the fixed page. But if you’re going from broken page to another broken page to a fixed page, and you’re creating these chain redirects, you’re just going to lose SEO value in that chain, and it’s going to slow your site down considerably when Google’s happen to make several hops.
Google doesn’t want to make more than two hops to get to a final page. If it’s any more than that, you’re going to lose all the SEO value of that page. So you might have the best page in the world that might have lots of links in SEO value, but if you didn’t pass that value over through proper redirection from your old site to the new site, from your non SSL to your true SSL, you’re going to lose all that value. So that’s why it takes a trained eye in SEO to identify those things.
Jason Hennessey:
Yep. We’ll go to the next slide. Next slide just reiterates what broken links are. We talked about this already. I think we can skip this one. We’ll go to the next slide. Jordan, will talk a little bit about optimization.
Jordan Kasteler:
Yeah, so we talked about media optimization earlier. It’s really important that you’ve optimized your images too. It’s one of the most neglected things that happen on a site. So first of all, most sites are missing image site maps. It’s really an easy thing to create with a tool we have called Screaming Frog that tells search engines where all your images are. Secondly, search engines can’t read images and they don’t know what images are about. So there’s two ways that they can figure out what your image is about. One is called an “Alt attribute.” It tells search engines what that image is about. If we look at that screenshot here, it says, not set, not set, not set, next to each image. That means there’s no Alt attribute for those images. Search engines don’t know what that image is about. You need to write three to five words that tells a search engine what that image is about, and those words can contain your keywords, but helps your site rank better for the on-pages factors.
Second, your file naming is super important because that gets keywords in to tells search engines what that image is about. If we look at these three different file names there, you have “image-description.png, PNG as a file, an image file. Image_description.png and imagedescription.png.” Only one of these is the correct path, and that’s “image-description.” You have to use dashes between the words when you’re naming images, and you have to be descriptive with your file names because underscores… And then images that have nothing in between, no dashes or no underscores can’t be read by search engines as separated words. So when you see image underscore description, Google doesn’t recognize the underscore as a separator between those two words. It reads it all together as image description. Well, when we say it out loud, image description, that makes sense to us. But I-M-A-G-E-D-E-S-C-R-I-P-T-I-O-N to a search engine is not a word. That’s one word combined together. So you need to make sure you have dashes in between those words so search engines can understand what that means.
Jason Hennessey:
Yeah, very important. Next slide. Okay, so this slide, we really compacted probably about a three-day bootcamp that we could probably do about just this specifically about local SEO and citations and net profiles. But what we’re just trying to say here quickly is that it’s so super important if you’re trying to rank locally within the three pack underneath the search query that you have a consistent NAP profile. “NAP” stands for name, address and phone number. You probably heard this by now, it’s been the buzzword for the past two, three years on Google.
But all too often, even though it’s been a buzzword for so long, it amazes us that nobody really pays attention to it. And so when I say you want it to be consistent, well, what it says on your Google My Business listing, you want that exactly to appear the same way on your website and everywhere else on the web, on your Facebook profile, on your city search para profile on all of the directories that you’re on. So if you spell out “street” on your Google My Business listing, but on your website it says “St.,” that’s a mismatch. So you want everything to be matched up identical. Same thing with your phone number too. You don’t want to have different phone numbers promoted across the web. So that’s another thing that within the audit, we can look for this for you and see how well you’re doing with regards to your NAP profile.
Jordan Kasteler:
And consider this stuff your off-page ranking factors. We talked about off page before, we talked about backlinks specifically. This also includes citations because it’s off the actual element of your website. So again, this stuff is some of the most important stuff you can do, linking and citations to get your rankings.
Jason Hennessey:
Yep, next slide. All right. So Jordan, why don’t you talk a little bit about language markup. This is the stuff Alex was talking about from [inaudible 01:12:12].
Jordan Kasteler:
Alex brought this up earlier with the rich answers asking if we should use schema markup. Schema markup can provide so many different things. Schema actually is a language that Yahoo, Bing and Google came together and decided, “Hey, we’re going to recognize this one uniform code for microdata.” Because there was all these different languages out there like RDFA, and I forget the other big micro content language out there. But they said, “We’re going to recognize schema so everyone can use the same code on the site so we can mark up different elements of the site. So we know people can tell us what these elements are on a site.” There’s many different elements that a search engine has to work hard to understand, but when you mark it up with schema code, search engines can understand that information right away.
So though some of those things are the logo, your location, which is your name, address, and phone number, breadcrumbs on your site, you might see those where it says “Home page,” “Contact,” et cetera, the site navigation, “Products,” “Reviews,” “Recipes,” “People,” “Videos,” “Articles,” you can all mark that up with code to tell search engines it’s all behind the scenes. It tells search engines what those elements of those pages are.
And if you’re marking those things up, if we look at this screenshot here, this is the example where we marked up ratings on a site and reviews on a site. And what happens is, if you have a review on your site and your aggregate rating five stars, it’s going to show that five star snippet in your search results. It’s also showing the products pricing in here too, if you look at it. So it’s showing ratings, reviews and pricing, all in those rich snippets. Now, the important thing is this doesn’t directly help your SEO, but it has an indirect effect because people are drawn to search results that have more information, that have stars in them, and they’re more likely to click on those results. If they’re more likely to click on the results as I talked about earlier, those results are more likely to rank better.
And it really doesn’t matter as much with your ranking number one or number two, if you have a better search result but has more information, you’re more likely going to get the clicks if you’re number two. And then if you’re getting the clicks, you’re more likely to move up at some point in time to number one position. So using schema market’s really important for local because Google recognizes your name, address and phone number. Make sure it’s consistent. It’s super important for local, it’s super important for E-commerce that have products and ratings. It’s super important for recipes because it adds an image thumbnail to recipes. Videos can be as important even though if Google downgraded that recently, et cetera. So definitely have an SEO expert look at your schema markup to make sure your site’s properly marked up.
Jason Hennessey:
Even things like latitude and longitude of your specific office to give a better Google, a better understanding of specifically where you’re located. There’s all these different markups, and Google’s constantly changing that, and you want to make sure that you have somebody that keeps up to date with the different schemas as they get released and rolled out.
Jordan Kasteler:
Right.
Jason Hennessey:
All right, we’ll go to the next slide here. We’re almost done, I promise. So other things that we look at both for our clients as well as in our audits, is we’ll look at where do you rank, not only for the terms that are on page one, but where are the other near ranking opportunities where we’re on page two for some of the queries that with just some internal link sculpting or external linking factors, we can boost those pages to page one and try to get more traffic. And so in the next slide, we look specifically at some of those examples. Alex, click the next-
Alex Valencia:
Yep.
Jordan Kasteler:
And just while it’s going to the next slide there, the important thing is a lot of people aren’t clicking page two of Google. And so if you’re on page two, you might as well be on page three, page four, page five, you might as well be position 100 because people aren’t going to notice you. So if you are almost there, you’re almost on page one because you’re ranking number 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. It’s really important to look at those queries and try to optimize for them and try to push them to page one so you get that visibility because if you’re not on page one, you’re nowhere.
Jason Hennessey:
And so we would prioritize this list. So in this example, I go down this list and the first thing I’m looking at is the keyword volume. How many times people are searching for this keyword each month. So “DUI California,” there’s a page on in position number 12 at the top of page two that gets 1800 searches per month. So I’m going to go through my website and see which internal links that I can build to pass page rank from some of my other pages that have a lot of page rank to this page so that I can boost that internal page rank, but then also look at external linking strategies to boost that page as well so that I can come in and scoop up some of that 1800 search volume each month. All right, we’ll go to the next slide.
So at the end of the day, the theme here is don’t let these erroneous errors on your site affect your hard-earned rankings. And so what we’d like to do is we’d love to schedule an audit with you. Typically, they take anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes, sometimes an hour depending on your time. But you will definitely learn a lot. If you learned a lot from this webinar, just imagine us taking all of this information and focusing all of our attention on your website and your competitors, and it’s free. You don’t have to pay us to do this, and there’s no obligation.
So Alex, next slide, I guess. Oh, before I do that, one of the things that we’re thinking about doing as well is a three-day bootcamp where we would give you much more. This was just a synopsis of some of the knowledge that we’ve accumulated over the past 15, 16 years, but breaking that down into specific topics and presentations in a possible three-day bootcamp. So that should be coming soon. If you’re interested in that, please shoot us over an email as well, just info@WeDoWebContents, and then we can put you on the list. And I think that’s probably going to be sometime in 2018 that we do that. We’re still looking at locations, but right now, I think it’s probably going to be in Fort Lauderdale. But we’ll definitely keep you aware of that.
Alex Valencia:
Yeah, you’re going to get an email shortly along with the SEO audit. If you want more information about the three-day SEO and content masterclass, just go ahead and put your information in and some of the areas that you want to learn about, and we’ll go ahead and put you on the list because we’re only going to have a select amount of people. It’s going to be a true training. Everything from SEO audit, all the way to building out your own three-month campaign. So you’re going to be learning a lot, like in a hardcore SEO bootcamp, I would say, on the Marine Navy SEAL-level-type bootcamp. So hope you guys are ready.
Jason Hennessey:
Yeah, that’d be great. So next slide, Alex. Again, the email is info@WeDoWebContent. If you’d like to schedule an audit, you can give Alex a call at (954) 530-7296. And if there’s any questions, I know we’ve taken a lot of your time and we appreciate it. We really do. If there’s any questions, I’m not sure, Alex, has anybody posed any questions yet or?
Alex Valencia:
Nothing yet. Does anyone have any questions either on Facebook or go-to webinar that we can answer? Go ahead and type them in on the questions and we’ll go ahead and answer any questions for you.
Jason Hennessey:
Yeah, we’ll stick around and see if there’s any questions. I know we covered a lot and a lot of people have already started to drop off, but yeah, absolutely happy to answer questions. Hopefully everybody’s having a nice St. Patrick’s Day with a name like Hennessey, I’ve got my Irish blood in me. And then Jordan’s already-
Jordan Kasteler:
I’ve already started.
Jason Hennessey:
Yeah.
Alex Valencia:
I know. I was looking forward to get started. I will now. All right. Any questions, anyone? “Bueller? Bueller?”
Jason Hennessey:
And if not, if you have questions, just use that same email address, info@WeDoWebContent, info@WeDoWebContent.
Alex Valencia:
All right, so I don’t see anything coming through yet on Facebook or Go-to webinar. So I thank everyone who was able to stick through. We really appreciate you going past the hour mark. Thank you again for joining us. We look forward to having you on the next SEO Happy Hour. Please email us any questions that you might have and email us if you’re ready to go ahead and get that audit. Again, I urge you, if it’s something that you have not done, you’re going to learn a wealth of information that can potentially change the way your website is operating and generating leads for you. It really is a big deal.
We’re not the only SEO firm that that’s doing this out there. Some of the big brand name firms are doing this for their clients, and you might be missing out if you’re not doing this internally. So again, I urge you, if you haven’t done it yet, email us, it’s absolutely free. We’re going to take our time directly with you and show you everything that you need to be doing to enhance the visibility of your website and generate some more leads. Well, thank you again. I don’t see any questions. Everyone, have a safe and happy St. Patrick’s Day and enjoy your weekend.
Jason Hennessey:
Great.
Jordan Kasteler:
Bye-bye.
Jason Hennessey:
Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
Jordan Kasteler:
Take care.
Alex Valencia:
Thank you.
Alex Valencia is an influential entrepreneur, marketer, speaker, podcaster, and CEO of We Do Web Content, one of Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing businesses in America. His agency implements game-changing content marketing strategies and produces top-ranking web content for law firms, medical professionals, and small businesses nationwide.
