A Study in SEO

thank you thank you um i just want to start off by saying that i am very much a behind the scenes kind of girl so standing up in front of all of my peers is the most um terrifying experience but um you all look very friendly so hopefully it won't be as bad as i have spent the last week imagining um so my aim today is to make seo seem a little

bit less overwhelming and everyone can walk away with a little bit of something that they can take back to their business small business or organization and make their website a little bit better and make the internet a better place for everyone so i'll just do a brief little brief intro of where i started i was started my own little freelance business um doing social media management and then you know doing social

media management i realized that sometimes while social media is extremely powerful for some businesses they're not going to get leads um or see major business growth through social media it's more about awareness and you know all that kind of stuff so um you know after a couple years of doing that my sister moved into a business development role for a manufacturing company and they'd been around since um the 60s and they

had a it was around about that time that yellow pages were had they were still trying to go out to people and sell ad spaces but internet had started to occur and so they were like really scrambling so they were doing free websites if you bought like a little bit of ad space in the yellow pages so you know their salesperson came around and said you know do you want to buy

a little bit of um you know an ad space we'll do your website and they said sure um and what they ended up with was what looked like something from microsoft publisher in the 90s um and they even wrote the copy for them because being a small manufacturing company they didn't know much about copywriting um so you know after talking to her and seeing how passionate she was about her business i

was like you know nobody knows about this and um social media i think it's going to be a great like avenue to get your brand out there but i think that in terms of getting more customers and more business growth when you um need you know need to improve your bottom line you need people to come in for quotes so what do people do when they need to get a coat on

from a new business they google it so i said to her um free of charge can i just play with the business's website and they were like sure go for it we don't understand any of this and so um i started doing that just you know consuming every piece of content out there following all the thought leaders and seo um you know learning everything as i went um it was a long

process but eventually got them ranking like in the top three space for plastic injection molding um which was really exciting it was like you know i was like you know i think there's like 50 searches per month for plastic injection molding but i was just like yeah we're here but out of those 50 people that if you're searching for plastic injection molding you actually want some plastic injection molded so which is

um really exciting exciting for them because um you know if they they would get started getting a few more leads and when a plastic injection molding company gets a lead that can be worth anything from you know fifty hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars so they don't need that many leads per month or year to kind of keep growing their business so they were a business of three um with this um

um growing their business organically with seo they started getting more leads um and now they have uh like 15 people hired in their company they made i can't tell you what their turnover was this year but it was a record turnover and still to this day that was about seven years ago they credit the seo and the work that i did to you know helping them grow their business past that you

know really small mom-and-pop sort of business into now what you know they just did a massive um like had a massive project during covert which you know made them a lot of money and helped people around south australia so yeah so that was like really exciting to see how much you can affect a business's bottom line through seo so that really gave me a taste for it and i wanted to keep

doing it um so today we decided with the refill team then i would do a case study so we um put the word out there for people to see if they wanted their businesses audited and we got a few and the very lucky wea adult education won that spot we've got kelly over here who works for wa and she has allowed me to deep dive into her data to see how we

could improve the website okay so i just had to include this because every time i think of adult education you cannot be forget about um homer ruining two perfectly good jackets so so if you don't get that reference then you're a lot younger than me and lucky you um so as kelly is well aware that their website is a bit of a dinosaur it's been patched together through a lot of old

legacy systems if you've ever worked in education you'll know that it's a hard slog to get um people uh not only into your courses but you know having to keep them affordable um and to you know keep paying your teachers and to pay them a reasonable rate so it's kind of a hard sector to be in at the moment because you know people there's so many different options out there but wa

is a huge institution and having been through their sites so completely now i am like candle making tours like cemeteries tours like there's so many cool so much cool stuff and they're welding i could do a beginner's welding course for like 70 or something i'm very tempted um and actually like if you look at this you can tell that it's a bit dated on mobile it kind of is not doesn't look

as dated so it does work on mobile which is good because you know something about people using mobiles more now or something so i thought like this is just a really this is like the acquisition channel so um you can see that they get a huge a lot of this is from june last year to june this year you can see they get a lot of traffic through their site through a

connect search so it was just like proof that for them organic search is really important um you can see that organic search has the most amount of users the lowest bounce rate um the highest amount of pages per session the higher amount the biggest amount of session duration and if any of these things don't make sense just i'll move on to easier things kind of and you can see it's their highest

goal completion rate so most of their goals most of their enrollment completions come from organic traffic so you can see that it's something that is really important to their business they do run a lot of paid search as well so that's helpful um kelly's a gun on the social media so getting people from social over to their website um is working well um so this is i use semrush as my seo

tool of choice it's pretty expensive but um it's for me it's worth it's kind of like a one-stop shop for me so i don't have multiple tools i just use the one and then cross check them with some other things occasionally google analytics so the cool thing about this kind of dashboard is at a glance it gives us a bit of an idea of how the site is doing so you can

see there the the site health um up in the top corner there is at 62 which sounds bad but i've seen worse um 40 websites still ranking um so what do we talk about now is like the technical side of seo which is the kind of the stuff that makes people's kind of freak out and they're not going to know what i'm talking about but don't panic is what i'm saying everything

is googleable um so with this site there's 115 errors that came up so um you know are errors going to stop a website from ranking it depends so this is like one of the most famous terms in seo because it really does depend on a whole lot of factors um it depends on if your top competitor's website is worth than yours then your website's probably going to rank better than theirs so

you know it does depend and they're just another little gif um meme from uh it depends on seo adventure so every job is always different with seo because it really depends on what everyone else in the market is doing if everyone else has got kind of a shitty website then you're fine so being a live audit um we're kind of looking at wea and seeing what's wrong with their website so you

can see here that it's picked up there's 36 issues with duplicate title tags and so i'm not everyone a lot of people put their hand up that they did seo so most people know what a title tag is but you can see here this is the title tag so for every page on your website you will um assign a title tag and what a title tag means is there's just a little

bit of code that makes it a title so that google understands what the title of the website is and also you know how to display it in the search engine features um the reason why it's bad is because it makes it hard for google to understand what each page is about and the keywords and everything if it doesn't have a very specific title tag so this is for the home page so

that's a fine title tag for the home page i did find that one a big keyword that they could be ranking for is short courses so they could potentially put in their wa south australia short courses but yet it's really important to have a individual title tag for each page how to fix making unique and concise title for each of your pages that contains your most important keywords now being that this

is such an old website is there a content management system that you can log into no very limited amount so if you are using wordpress squarespace wix hubspot you know you would be given the opportunity to assign your own title tag but given that this is such an old system kelly would then have to write down all the title tags and send it to the team and hopefully that would go okay

sure whatever we don't understand why we have to do this but um it looks like the website's so old that um they've kind of just put a boilerplate kind of thing and all the title tags are exactly the same for the main pages i like to think of google as roz from monsters inc right you just kind of have to dot your eyes and crush your t's and like all these little

things that sound like they don't matter and you know it's kind of a weird relationship that a seo person has because you're kind of working in between digital teams with web developers and it's not that you are necessarily that a web developer has done a bad job it's just that um the things that they focus on um and the brief that they've been given often differs to what things that i'm going

to be looking at so um i try to picture um google like roz and that she's not very impressed if you haven't crossed your teeth and dodged your eyes so everything that comes up as an error think of roz being very disappointed in you um did i just go back oh that's scary isn't it okay so yeah duplicate i've just put them all here and the reason that i've shown them even

though it looks scary to see all these um urls is that one thing i noticed with the duplicate title tags is that there's in the first column you can see that they're all wea s a dot com dot eu and in this column you can see that they're the same url but with the www dot so at some point somebody hasn't set a redirect to tell them that we only want to

show one of the other so if you have uh www dot and uh not w dot and you don't make a redirect google's going to assume that those two pages are completely different things so it's going to be crawling through all those pages and then it's going to think that they're duplicate when they're not so this half of this error could be fixed up with setting up a redirect to say that

we only want to look at wea.com or being that wea has like an older audience we might want to put the ww dot in there because older people like typing in www dot and this will make more sense down the track as well so again 36 pages with duplicate meta descriptions um they're all the same pages as before this is what is a meta description um it's that bit of text underneath

the title where you tell people what the page they're about to visit is about and again somebody when they created the website they just sort of set all the meta descriptions to be the same for those 36 pages which is actually only what's 36 15 18 whatever it is um i can't do maths on the fly um so if you sorted out that problem we'd already have how many errors we have

already so um obviously you know if this was not the home page we would have you know it would be wea i've got that in the next slide we'll talk about that more in a minute um so obviously you want to provide a unique and relevant meta description for each of your web pages um yeah and again if you've got wordpress how many people use wordpress lots of you so yeah wordpress

obviously you're using yoast yeah yeah and so yeah most of your modern um cms's will have the opportunity to be able to not even just set the meta description but to help you choose a keyword for the page and then help you write your meta description using that keyword so again they're all those same pages again that have come up with the errors so if we fixed it in the first instance

we wouldn't have a problem with half of these pages so just um looking at the anatomy of the serp which is the search engine results page when you type in a search query um you will come up with obviously this is a branded keyword so they're ranking for this they're not ranking for pottery classes in adelaide but hopefully when they implement some of these tips they will be but you can see

that even though they haven't set the correct title tag google has just stolen it from some of their content on their page so google is pretty smart so it can go look this website's been around for donkeys years we think it deserves to be ranked um they do mention pottery on this page so we're going to add it to the results page so that people click on it because they have that

kind of authority to do that because um you know they've been around for so long it must be a trustworthy site so um in this one the title tag has just been chosen by google the meta description has just been stolen from the copy on the website um there was a when i did it there's a this second um is a test page that someone's created that hasn't been deleted after being

tested so that's another thing to look out for just keep googling your oh no i've got memes don't like the balls i think i think they're i think i've got through most of them um yeah so if yeah so obviously that web page needs to be deleted um or redirected somewhere else um and that next one because see how again it's got that um same title tag and but it's it's picked

up a different part of the website um which is for a different pottery thing that they've mentioned pottery again so google's pretty smart i can work it out even if you haven't got your website all optimized you know google will work out over time what you know what you should rank for but again you want to be in charge of what those things are because otherwise it'll pick up things that aren't

important to you so improving your snippets so obviously for kelly this is a lot harder because she can't just jump in there and start improving them without asking the team but for all of you using wordpress and all those other hubspot all that sort of stuff you can have huge control over what google shows in your snippet so my suggestion would be for pottery because there's a whole bunch of people searching

for pottery courses is that we mentioned in the title tag that there's pottery for beginners at wea and that it's um and that's our education um again so for that page um obviously somewhere along the line um people stopped setting um urls so like with some systems like if you don't set a url title page it'll just assign like a a number system so obviously it'd be good for google to know

that if we change that to wasa.com.iu pottery for beginners that would help google know what the page was about um and then we could play around with the different meta descriptions to make them obviously more descriptive so that when people are scrolling through their google feed that they can just see exactly what the page is going to be about there's no question that they're going to get to a page that they

want so there's lots of different options there for um creating a better snippet and you can play around with that so you know adding the word adelaide in there because people a lot of people search for pottery courses adelaide you can you know just play around and see what works best depending on what your keywords are so the next one is duplicate content issues so again it's the same thing with the

other ones is that they because there's been no separation between the wwe dot and the non-www.um google thinks that there's two lots of pages and they're exactly the same so the next one is um five pages returned the four x status code which is you know your 404 errors so um obviously if the 404 error pops up that means that it's the result of a broken link so it's not a very

good user experience so obviously when you're going to a website and you reach a 404 link you're going to go crap you're either going to press the back button or you're just going to leave for google's like crawling bots it's kind of like so they're crawling your website quite regularly and the better your website is the easier it is for them to crawl so as they're crawling through your website if they

reach somewhere that they can't get to they just stop and sometimes they'll just leave they won't like backtrack and go oh where is this supposed to go they kind of it's kind of just like telling google that you know this is the end now you've reached the end of our website information go away and that's not what you want you want google crawling your website as deeply as possible so that it

finds every single page on your website and obviously google sees this as a sign that you're not maintaining your website as well so they're saying well if they can't even be bothered maintaining their website why should we index any of the other pages as well so it kind of ruins your overall credibility with google imagine ross again rolling her eyes at you because you haven't maintained your 404.

um so these are the pages that um had some the 404 errors and one of them is actually the phone number which just means that it's not clickable which is obviously a great user experience is that on mobile that you want to be able to click the phone number and just click to call so that obviously that would be a great feature to have on their website because i'm sure you get

a lot of phone calls and just some other ones the robots in the site map we can talk about later because they're pretty important too um is there a lot of government businesses government people here yeah so big massive government websites obviously have so many resources and those resources change over time and policies change over time and things get taken down and things get moved um and you know even with other

websites where you're linking out to um you know other resources to um you know inform people but every now and again a link will break and you won't even know so you will have linked to another website and then the website gets taken down and then all of a sudden you've got a broken link so again you're kind of saying to google i haven't checked my links um i've now given someone

a poor user experience because they were on my website they were looking for information they went to leave my website to go somewhere else and then i took them nowhere um so then again google's going to go well if you're not bothering to maintain your website why should we bother to rank it because you know all google really wants is for everyone to have a great user experience so they keep using

google so they keep being able to sell more ads basically um so obviously follow all your links always check your links do it regularly there's free programs out there they can go through and do link checks for you to make sure that they're all working and then you know just replace it with another resource or just remove the link altogether so warnings in my software is items of medium severity so they

might not necessarily impact your ranking directly but um it's a good idea to have them all fixed up um for either for user experience or because if you're in a competitive industry um you know if your competitor has their you know this perfect working website and you don't then obviously they're going to rank above you so one of the issues that is comes up a lot is uncompressed javascript and css files

it just means go to your developer and say hey can you compress all our javascript and css files you don't really need to know um all about that unless you want to work unless you want to learn about it but you just need to know that it's an important thing because it will make your website uh load slower if they're not compressed um and the thing about this is that google has

just recently had a big change where they're looking at core vital signs or they've got a special word for it um and so page speed has never been more important so you want your website to load as fast as possible um you want this for rankings you want it for your ad quality score so if you're running facebook ads you want to run be sending people to a really fast website if

you're running google ads again they look at quality scores so you want to have a really fast website um also it's a waste of money if you're running ads and people are leaving before your web pa website's even loaded so and and e-commerce sites especially like you know there's all the stats going around like you know every second that your website takes the load you lose a percentage of your um potential

customer as well um so yeah just enable compression i say that like it's easy but your web developer will know what to do and if they don't you probably need a new web developer so again this isn't another similar thing it's called the files haven't been minified so basically um this happens a lot when you've got like say like a wordpress theme or something and you keep adding things to your website

like you add images and then you add some text and then you'll change the text and then what happens is your website ends up in the back end with a whole lot of code that is not particularly necessary or there's spaces in the code so um the minification process takes out some of that white space takes out unnecessary lines of code which then speeds up your website because otherwise google's and the

browser is looking through all this code trying to work out what to load and if there's too much code there that's unnecessary it takes a little bit longer so it's going to make your website faster to not have any unnecessary code there and this you know for like legacy websites and even like particular website themes that are like real they're really good and they're really easy to use like divi and stuff

like that after a while of using divi you will end up with a whole bunch of unnecessary code so it's it's good to um go back and remove any unnecessary stuff so it loads faster does everyone know what an alt tag is yes okay so alt tags are both for humans and for robots so the image tags are used by search engines to understand the content of your images so if you

had an image of a say this for example robot shaking a cartoon hand you would put in their cartoon robot arm shaking human hand with on orange background for example and this will allow um google to know what google doesn't have eyes like ros has eyes but google doesn't so it's relying on you to tell it what the image looks like although i'm sure there's some sort of weird ai thing going

on back there where it can um basically work out what images are um that's probably why it gets us to do all that you know that how many traffic lights and how many car signs in the um to prove you're a human um and the most important thing is for accessibility so if somebody's got vision impairment um neurodiversity like dyslexia they might not be able to even if your website goes it

doesn't load an image at least you've got the text there to tell people what it is so especially important for visually impaired people and also for seo purposes even though you should do it anyway you should make the internet as accessible for people as possible um you can put some keywords in your images so that um it also lets google know what the image is and that it's related to your topic

and in saying that um you can read that disabled and you're divergent audiences make up to over 20 of every mainstream product audience and within that there is a lot of diversity with what comes to barriers to experiences so you know you should just make your website accessible because one you know you do have people of different um experiences coming to your website and you don't want to be missing out on

that and also i think the internet should be as accessible for everyone as possible just like society should be and just to drive that home one more quote accessibility is a necessity that should never be deprived so um back to the wea website um there's 84 urls with the temporary redirect so these are um most of those pages that i listed before have a temporary redirect so what a temporary redirect is

doing is it's telling google that they should still look at those pages because this is just a temporary situation that we want you to look mostly at the other page but we might change our minds and we want you to look at the other pages as well so we're hedging our bets both ways but you need to really decide one way or the other whether you want a temporary redirect or a

permanent redirect because um a permanent redirect will mean that all those www.pages they'll no longer be viewed by google you'll only get one version of the page and also most of the time when you're redirecting something um you just don't want google to know it's there anymore so it's a redirect to go we don't want you to go here anymore we want you to go over there so what is a redirect

um it's a way to send both users and search engines to a different url from one they originally requested so you would be redirected all the time and probably not even know about it um but yeah basically you can just it's you know it's a directive to tell a search engine and the browser to go don't go here go over here instead so it's an easy way to get people to go

from one place to the other without having to say hey this page doesn't exist anymore or you know whatever and now you have to click here it just takes out that whole middleman so 36 uncompressed pages and i think this is just to do with the the age of the website most cmss these days would just do this automatically or there'd be some plugin which would just compress the images and compress

the page so that it loads faster so most of you probably wouldn't have this problem but it's probably just due to the age of the website 30 pages don't have a h1 heading so does everyone come across h1 headings yes so yeah so your heading system in is just like a little bit of code to tell google what's the most important thing so your h1 will be so you've got your title

tag that you're assigned to your page and then your h1 title will usually be that big bit of text at the top that will say what the page is about so for example refuel digital i'm sure that their title text is something along the lines of digital marketing in adelaide or something like that so it basically has your keywords in there it tells people what the web page is about and you

can set assign a different one for every single page but you should only ever have one because it works in sort of like a hierarchy so h1 is the most important um heading tag and then it sort of works like a like a book like a chapter system so h2 would be like a subtitle h3 would be like a less important subtitle but you know as you go down you kind of

work through those and then you would just have your paragraph text in between but google loves those it reads your title text and then it reads your h1 heading and then it starts trying to get gather the intent of the web page so that you can understand where to rank you why to rank you and what your page is about before it even has to start filtering through all your images and

paragraphs um so another old website um this is um usually you don't see this very much anymore but you should always use a little hyphen in your url so you don't use an underscore it's always www.sa wea always use hyphens underscore is sort of like is used in coding language so if google has to read and underscore it's going to have to take a double look to go is this part of

the code or is this part of the url so it's just it's just a google google just wants uh no underscores please rozz does not like underscores 16 pages have low word count so back in the day the um the more pages you had on your website were seen as like you know um your website must be so good and great and we're gonna rank you because you've got 500 pages on

your website and people would try and game the system by just having more and more and more um pages on their their site um but obviously they'd have like you know a load word count on there so google's like your game in the system i want to see if you're going to make send somebody to a page there's got to be a big slab of text on there and there's going to

be a reason the page exists otherwise it's just like you know what's the point in um waa's case um probably just due to the the way that it was designed there's just like one word description one uh one line description of what the course is about so you could easily rectify this by adding a couple of paragraphs of what the course is about if you can't find enough information to write you

can use things like testimonials you can you know you can find other ways to pad out that text but obviously good copywriting is key google's super smart now so it knows when you're just writing things for the sake of writing things so try and make each web page as you know rich as possible so that people can get all the information they need for just from viewing the one page and again

this is the same sort of issue that it's picked up so if your page has um not a lot of text but a lot of it's it's then going to have so much code in it because then um because you've got hardly any text the web you know it's going to be all code and a tiny bit of text and google's going to go this is a waste of my time i

don't want to be here your people don't want to be here put more things put more words on your website um so obviously the they use that as a ranking tool so obviously the more text that you have on your page and to that html ratio means that you're going to get a better position in google also less code increases your pages load speed helps your rankings and helps the search engines

crawl your website faster so in this particular case a sitemap.xml was not found so a sitemap wow really wow i'm doing it guys a sitemap.xml file um is used to kind of just tell google what's on the website so it's basically just a little cheat sheet of saying like here's all the pages on the website you know here's the ones that you should be looking at um you know and it's just

it's like a little map little mud map for google to go all right here's all the ones that you want us to look at we'll follow that list and it should match up with our crawling thing and it's just the easiest way to provide direct information to google about what which pages you want them to look at so as i was saying before you know in terms of a landing page experience

it's not super rich i can see that um kelly's obviously had a fight with someone to get some content on here so they've embedded some um instagram content on here which is great i'm sure you had to fight tooth and nail to get that done so obviously um that pottery for beginners is not a h1 so basically all the um i say all the developers should have to do like i'm a

developer and i know what i'm talking about but um he needs to or she needs to put a h1 tag around that pottery for beginners just to let google know that that is the most important sort of words on that page and also it would be in the title tag as well so then you'd have the title tag saying pottery for beginners you'd have the h1 saying pottery for beginners and google

would go i think this is pottery for beginners and and then as well to make it more rich obviously in terms of you know digital marketing as a whole we'd want to have like a couple of paragraphs here about the course we'd want some testimonials i see that there's some great youtube videos available for some of the courses we can embed the youtube videos into the page google loves video as we'll

do videos the future videos now all that kind of thing so video is great um so yeah obviously using your other h2s and other heading titles and creating that hierarchy of information and just without stuffing it full of pottery for beginners um you know making a rich readable text that people makes people want to do your course not only is it great for humans it's great for google so we want to

impress both um so this is just like um an opportunity that i saw it's not particularly i guess technically seo related but it's just in terms of like conversion rate optimization which always helps and i think it was jacqueline was talking about the customer experience so well they actually rank um pretty well for learn to world adelaide and welding courses in adelaide um i can see that the course is full so

obviously if i had full control of this website i'd be adding in a um email opt-in here saying do you want to find out more about our course um and grabbing the email so that you can let them know when a course opens up and yeah that's what i would do um and also you know websites that have more flexibility where you can add modules in you know all those so you're

interested in welding you might also be interested in furniture upholstery and all that sort of stuff so that's another opportunity there that's all my slides you can breathe now i can breathe um also this has been filmed so you can watch it back at half time if you don't understand what i said um just slow it down to about 50 where do you think you're going you can't go yet it's question

time you got like five we've got for a few minutes here does anyone have any questions for lovely amy looks like we've got two over here so one two three any on the side of the room today four yes all right we'll start over here and then crisscross rachel nobody yelled taxi this is my australian audience the thing is that with google rolling its updates all the time like you know this

year it's about page experience and while coming in the morning i was reading by schwartz tweeting about that now google page experience update does not count pdf downloads and when we you know talk about seo it's usually long term and it's like i said it all depends on what we are doing on the web page yes so when it comes to user experience on a website which is a very broad phrase

what do you think are the most significant user experience parameters that you know we should keep in mind okay so speed speed is really just so it gets speed is really important um i think that you know being really clear and concise and having um like a slab of text right up front that tells you exactly what the page is about answers people's question um you know looking at the intent of

the search query so if somebody's typed in how to run a excellent digital marketing conference over two days um you would want to come up with you know like a probably like a blog that talks about how to run an excellent digital marketing conference for two days rather than the home page for digital marketing adelaide because that doesn't really answer the intent of your query so i think you know matching intent

is another really important one giving people multiple ways to access your content so put it in text have a little video add an infographic you know give people because there's so many different ways people learn so having those multiple different ways to um consume your web page content would be my top three also in my flip across the louise and then while microphones making its way up that side hi amy thanks

for all the great tips today over here over here um i i really appreciated you i'm breaking everything down and it was really easy to understand today um where um could you recommend any um learning resources for um for going on and i'm just learning a little bit more about seo and how to manage our businesses websites of course we still want to go to agencies and get really interest knowledge but

absolutely um yeah so there's so much out there um you know you can do course after course after course there's so many so many free resources google offer um google academy um semrush have semrush academy hobspot probably hubspot however they do have a seo certification yes yeah um shopify will have their own so um whatever sort of cms you're using i'd probably start with them and then like just as you run

into problems um google the exact problem that you have and google's really good at finding the exact answer to the question that you have so yeah i'd google i just see the other one i mean where were semrush users as well so i can't speak highly enough for some rush but moz actually have a really in-depth beginner's guide to seo um it goes for like it's like 21 modules or something it's

really in-depth um it will take you some time to get through but worth the effort also got a shortened version on udemy which is like like a 10 20 minute overview which kind of gives you a good kind of taste if you just want to decide if you want to learn more and then muzzle also do those friday whiteboards i don't know if they're still doing those but i think rand fishkin

i think he branded he left yeah so okay but they're still all but they're still all there but those were really good resources yeah kind of just giving some you know just jotting things down and kind of giving some practical examples for how to improve things yeah i think ultimately when it comes to search um the intent these algorithms are smart now you can't just stuff the keywords you actually have to

address the intent of the search all right we'll just jump up to the back here for another question uh thank you it was really informative um so i have a questions about non-branded keywords so you know like usually because i don't use sam rush but i use href but then it was like yeah okay these are the such intent how do you even find opportunities just to build content around that to

leverage the brand because for branded keyword is easier because you can run yeah um so yeah non-branding keywords obviously depending on how competitive your market is um and i guess it's um if you're using already using a tool that can tell you what keywords um you know have the highest volume um what i always do um like as i was saying before about my the first company i worked with you know

just like sometimes something with a really small search volume like with 20 people searching it for per month it has the right intent to know that those people are actually looking to buy your service or to buy a product straight away so it's not always looking for the keyword with the highest things so i've worked with like some lawyers over the time that's a completely so competitive that market because obviously every

lead is worth you know a lot of money i don't know how much but um so like you know so lawyer adelaide for example if you were to start your own law firm now and try and rank for like a really generic term like lawyer adelaide that would be really tricky but if you kind of like nailed it down to try and find like a a query that hasn't already been answered

by another law firm in adelaide it could be something like you know am i allowed to take my step children overseas without getting their mom's passport information and signing for it which is you know people type in really long specific queries these days so you start with like a really good content strategy i'm really starting to identify what questions people are asking that would really match your business and could lead to

them then you know coming to your website and then possibly hiring you or you're buying your product i guess that's the other thing too just on long term search queries voice search isn't something we really talk much about but with the rights of siri and google assistant you know typically you'll be like well i still ask my google assistant basic things because it seems really dumb it doesn't know anything siri i

think is smarter um but you know it's certainly those kind of words you also i think need to start thinking about how your copy reads when it's read aloud as well because if you're the right answer then it'll just read the answer via those platforms as well so it's another thing the age of your target market as well so um i've got a nearly 15 year old and they would literally prefer

die rather than click on an actual website if they cannot find the answer in google answers that it doesn't exist to them they would not click on a website they will google so many like 20 different search terms and just look at the search results and try and get the answer from the meta description they will not click on a website and they call me a boomer because i go to websites

and read them so crazy yeah so we're all boomers we're all famous now that's a new one i haven't heard that um so i think we've got one more question up the back there were there any other questions so that we can run the mic around any other questions yep just that one up there um i was just wondering if you can expand on duplicate content yes um especially if you know

you're a business that has a lot of products and you have to upload hundreds of products at a time do they need to be unique district descriptions it's a lot of work um so there's a lot of misconceptions about duplicate content i think that google did a massive campaign a few years ago going duplicate content will get you banned you know if you copy web copy from another website that's going to

get you banned i think it's a huge misconception that duplicate content is going to like get you banned or blacklisted but yeah obviously it's not if you want a product to rank it needs to have an individual title tag it needs to have an individual meta description it needs to have a unique copy and i understand your pain and it's a very specific i don't particularly work with e-commerce sites because the

idea of writing 5000 different meta descriptions for each product makes me want to cry so yeah so it's a it's a very unique issue but it is one if you're in the industry that you need to identify who was it yesterday talking about the um copywriting ai bot um sarah jane yeah yeah i would have a look at getting jarvis on the case to kind of make it a little bit easier

for you but i feel your pain i think we've got one last question in the back corner hi uh just wondering so our website is uh predominantly offshore users um with quite a variety of internet quality access to internet so we are always conscious of developing and optimizing for the lowest common denominator i'm wondering if you've got any advice around the latest trends in terms of video if we're embedding if we're

only embedding on e-pages are we still linking off to vimeo on youtube what's the yeah so i think um embedding is the quickest uh ryan does a lot of video embedding is the way to go i think it gives you the option um i don't think it starts loading any of the video content until you press play so i think it just reads the code to let the browser and google know

that it's there so i'm definitely embedding rather than actually uploading the file to the to the website is much quicker and also um people just want quick easy access to information so if they're having to wait three seconds to see your beautiful panscape of whatever you're selling um if it's their 50th time to your website they really don't care um yeah if they want to watch the video they can just click

play on youtube and that's you know that works just as well for seo if not better than having the actual website uploaded to your website the video uploaded to your website very cool are there any final questions for amy no i'm free well thank you thank you for braving your fears today i didn't realize how much of an ass this was for you i also i just wanted but you know enjoy

and calm your nerves with that i hope to see you at the drink for a drink