Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #58: More SEO Basics to Improve Your Rank

Chris Raines: Welcome to Episode number 58 of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast. We're glad you're joining us. My name is Chris and this is-

Michael Utley: Michael.

Chris Raines: And today, Michael, we're going to talk about more SEO basics to improve your rank. So these are, again, kind of foundational things that you can look at with your website and what you're doing with SEO so you can build on top of that later. So let's get into it.

Michael Utley: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So even more good ideas here. So number one.

Chris Raines: Even.

Michael Utley: Yeah, even more. So, yeah. Number one, understand and use Core Web Vitals. I always think of SEO as falling into, sort of, three legs of the stool: site architecture, and, sort of, the usability and the website content and content strategy, and then off-site factors.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: Lately, Google has gotten hyper-focused on what they're packaging up as Core Web Vitals. And it really is a lot of information and ideas and kind of best practices and things that they're judging websites against around page speed and usability. Google is, this is my opinion, but very concerned about being number one for the mobile user market. They're very concerned and want to make sure that websites work well for mobile users. And so they're looking at things like whether phone numbers and elements that are to be interacted with are “thumbable” or clickable.

Michael Utley: So, having elements like text and a phone number that's clickable too close together might make it difficult for a user to hit that button on a phone in bright sunlight. Oh yeah, bright sunlight. Another one is contrast. Elements like text being a light gray on a white background on a phone in high sunlight. That's just not going to show up. And so Google knows that. And another big one is page speed. We keep working ourselves out as the human race onto the tiniest end of the branch with HTML and page speed and delivery of content. It's like we get these great smartphones and we're able to get content on them. And suddenly, we just want to go where we've got a bad signal or we want to load more content than we should have ever expected to be able to load to a device we can carry in our pockets.

Michael Utley: So part of this arms race for Google is making sure that if people are trying to use their search engine, that the websites that have the content that they're trying to load, that it'll actually work.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: And so they're very concerned about page speed, even applied to desktop users. So this kind of affects everything, even though the mobile experience is driving a lot of this. So Core Web Vitals is Google's new framework and way of understanding what's good and what's bad. So we recommend just doing a search for Core Web Vitals in Google and reading the content and understanding with your folks, your team. . .Or if GoEpps is your shop, we'll talk to you about how the stuff we're doing sets us up for success for Core Web Vitals. But yeah, it's a major element of the internet going forward. And it's really, in my opinion, driven by protecting a good mobile experience. But it's critical. And it's in that site architecture category, but it has to do with both usability and page speed, but it's critical going forward.

Chris Raines: Right. Core Web Vitals. That's a good one. Number two is to use meta descriptions well. So when we talk about meta descriptions, we're talking about the little text underneath the blue link. Whenever you do a web search and you've got a set of your 10 results there, you've got the blue link on top and then underneath it, that's your meta description. That short piece of I think 160 characters, right?

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So up to 160 characters. So be purposeful about how you're using that and what we mean by that is include a meta description. Because Google will show a meta description no matter what, but if you don't input that into the architecture of your site, it's just going to scrape some part of the page that it thinks is the most relevant. So you want to actually use that area for two things. Number one, you want to actually use it to enhance your clickthrough rate.

Chris Raines: So you want to persuade people to click on the results, tell them what they're going to get. And number two, you want to include your best keywords that you want to rank that page for in that. And if you'll notice whenever you see a search result, it will bold the words inside of that meta description that the user typed in. Right? So if you use those, it's just going to make your listing, your search result listing, stand out even more because it's going to be bold every time you use that phrase, it's going to have it bolded down there. So two reasons, again, to recap, one is to just use it to influence people and control what it says. And then two, make it stand out using that bold feature.

Michael Utley: Yeah. And I would say, just to comment on that one, I would always protect readability. But yeah, you definitely do want to use your keywords. The people who say SEO is dead are the same people who say don't pack your meta descriptions with keywords. Well, guess what? You need to use your keywords in your meta descriptions. That's not going away. That tactic is real. It matters, it's relevant. And if it's well-worded and readable, then it's an SEO best practice. So I think there's a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Michael Utley: People like to kind of dump on SEO and say, “oh no, just focus on good content”. Well, this is focusing on good content. This is what it means to just focus on good content. So there's kind of a mantra of don't do SEO. Just focus on good content. Well, come on, let's put some structure on what it means to focus on good content. Well, it turns out that's called SEO. There's a whole industry around it. So yeah, meta descriptions are really good.

Michael Utley: Next up, know your competitors and their online activity. This is something I'm really excited about. We often work with clients and we have a little bit of a flicker during an intake call or getting started with a new client, or maybe who they're trying to beat or who they see advertising or showing up in organic search results. And maybe there's a little bit of competition. Maybe some staff have kind of moved between these two companies. And so sometimes competition kind of rises on the radar a little bit.

Michael Utley: But we actually take a different approach to thinking about the competition. We see them as an opportunity for us to develop our keyword data. So what we like to do is identify a new client's competitors and then pick a few companies that are really excellent at internet marketing even if they're in other markets and they're not a competitor. And then we have a big checklist of data and analytics that we build and use to monitor the activity of those competitors.

Michael Utley: Some are tools where we have data that we're getting to estimate things like website traffic. And so sometimes you have to have kind of an account with the tool to get that data. And so we get all that and we use that in the campaigns we run, but a lot of the other stuff is stuff that's hiding in plain sight. It's just that we have a mindset of tracking it and reporting it and watching how it changes over time.

Michael Utley: For example, it would be easy to pull up one of your competitor's websites, go to their YouTube channel and see a number of metrics. How many videos do they have live? How many playlists have they created? How many views has their channel gotten for the videos that are currently published? How many subscribers do they have? How active are those subscribers? For example, how many comments do they have on their videos? You can imagine here that if you capture these metrics and monitor them over time, you can see when a competitor has decided to invest more heavily in video.

Michael Utley: And right now there's really no way that this data exists except for us producing our report. So yeah, knowing what your competitors are doing on the internet is a really big way to understand what's happening. And when you see them developing new strategies, new content, for example, the example I just gave for YouTube, we can do that with social media content, social media channels. We can also do it with their blog, their website.

Michael Utley: And we can say, well, how often are they publishing to their blog? How much new content related to their products, how many case studies are they producing? How often are they touching search engines with new pages? How often are they registering new content around certain subject matter that you want to rank for? And if you understand that, for one thing, it's good to know what the heck you're going up against so you can compete. But besides that, it's a really good tool for creating a budget for your own online marketing.

Michael Utley: We have in advertising, there are a lot of great tools, Chris, for us to go head-to-head in the world of advertising with paid search or other types of advertising. And so you can pull that data and help us understand that with competitors. But with SEOs, some of the stuff we have to manually go get. And it's kind of hiding in plain sight. And so, having a comprehensive sense of what's happening only happens if you decide who you're going to measure and how you're going to measure. And then create that data and look at it every month. We think it's a missed opportunity. We've got a lot of benefit out of it because it helps us identify areas that are emerging, where there's competition emerging. And we are able to go develop keyword data around that because we see competitors investing in it.

Chris Raines: Yeah, good. Number four here is to use video content on your key pages. So there's a myriad of benefits to using video. And we're just going to go through them here because there's a lot of benefits in one. Number one, video is just a better user experience. You can develop more of a close relationship. You can communicate emotional content more with video. You can show things with video that you wouldn't be able to show otherwise like a product demonstration or you can impact someone emotionally. I mean, it goes on and on and on. Two, it increases. . . and we know this Michael because they've done landing page studies on this, it increases conversion rates on page. So if you take a good video and put it on a page that you want to convert on, so a phone call or a form fill or something like that, that conversion rate goes up on the whole. If you have a video on that page.

Chris Raines: Thirdly, it increases your time on-site because people have to push play, and they have to wait for the video to play. If you have a good video, maybe it's two or three minutes long. Well, that's two or three extra minutes that they might not have spent on your site before because they're there consuming your content. That's a good signal back to Google that people like your site, they're staying on your site. So that enhances your SEO as well.

Chris Raines: And then lastly, there's this kind of a conversion relationship with your video and your YouTube or I'm sorry, your website and YouTube channel. So the YouTube embed on your site helps your site because of all the reasons we just mentioned, and it also increases your views on your YouTube channel, which then increases people's propensity. . . it increases your YouTube SEO. It increases people's propensity to click on your view. If it's got 5,000 views, instead of 50 views. Right? So there's this kind of symbiotic relationship that can happen with your YouTube account and your website account or your website. So for all those reasons and more using video, taking your key pages. So we're probably talking about your service pages, your product pages.

Michael Utley: Or even an overall video on your homepage.

Chris Raines: Or your homepage is obviously a key page. Developing video content for those pages.

Michael Utley: Yeah. And you happen to have been someone who owned a video production company.

Chris Raines: I own a video- Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah. You owned a video production company.

Chris Raines: Yeah. So, I'm good at articulating the benefits, but—

Michael Utley: You really are about this.

Chris Raines: There really are more and more and more benefits to using video. And you don't have to hire a professional company a lot of times to do that.

Michael Utley: That's right. Not very many people have owned both a video production company and a paid search and social advertising company, but you have. Yeah, so the last step in this episode, this is a small one. We're just going to throw this in, understand your robots.txt. There are so many little goofy things that can happen with technical SEO. And one of them is robots.txt. We had a website one time where someone in a company had gone in and manually edited. . . the robots.txt file. And essentially, they inadvertently said don't index this website.

Chris Raines: Oh my gosh.

Michael Utley: And it's one of those goofy things that can happen.

Chris Raines: And just for the benefit of people to know what robots.txt is-

Michael Utley: Yeah. We'll explain what it is.

Chris Raines: It's a small file that has a few different indicators on it that communicates to Google, here's what we would like you to do with this site. And one of those indicators is the no index tag. N-O-I-N-D-E-X, no index. And if Google sees that, it'll say okay I'll forget about your website. So that's a huge deal when you have that.

Michael Utley: And so, yeah, so we went through a whole cycle of analytics before we kind of saw what had happened because it wasn't one of our optimizations. It wasn't something we did. It was something. I can't—

Chris Raines: That's the opposite of an optimization.

Michael Utley: Yeah. And what they were trying to accomplish was not a bad idea. They had launched a new patient admin area and they had introductory content on that login page.

Chris Raines: So they didn't want people to find it on.

Michael Utley: And they didn't want people to be driven to that very informative login page, which asked for credentials for logging in. So it was more like a page that did have a lot of keyword-rich content but was not intended to attract attention. It just, they wanted it in the button bar, in the super-header, and nowhere else.

Michael Utley: And so they did what they were supposed to do. However, they just typoed and, and said something hit, save, or, they didn't save their work correctly. Something happened where what they thought they were submitting and saving just didn't work. Yeah. And it wasn't a big deal, but it did kind of break stuff. And Google, in that example did recover the website pretty quickly, but it was just a lesson learned. So make sure that when you've got these big, here's the real lesson. It's not necessary to understand what robots.txt is. If you don't know what it is, Chris explained, it is a small text file that says, “Please include this in your index. Please ignore everything else.” They do index everything, but they exclude it from search engines if we ask them not to. It's really making sure here's the real lesson, make sure that you've got a system in place to check this occasionally.

Michael Utley: Go look at it, evaluate it. Often we see old site sections that have been removed are still included in a robots.txt, or a URL for a section of something that someone is trying to take out of rotation in people's awareness is maybe still included, even though it's been removed from the website. And so it's good just to maintain those and keep the text really clean of any old information that's no longer relevant. Just so it can be audited quite easily, maybe on a quarterly basis. Kind of, along with that routine, which we've talked about before of checking your sitemap, make sure it's getting updated with new content.

Chris Raines: So much comes down to just good processes and checklists.

Michael Utley: Yeah. A lot of what we focus on is not knowing about it and remembering it and being really smart, but thinking in terms of operational excellence and having processes and checklists in place. And having somebody on the hook to go look at stupid stuff that can break.

Chris Raines: Think like a pilot.

Michael Utley: Yeah, think like a pilot. Yeah. Excellent. All right. I'll close this out. This has been episode 58, even more. It wasn't even more, more SEO basics to improve rank. This is kind of a technical SEO episode and yeah. Follow us on YouTube, comment below.

Chris Raines: Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn. All those platforms. I think Friendster and MySpace, too.

Michael Utley: We're not on Friendster anymore.

Chris Raines: We're not.

Michael Utley: We finally dropped Friendster.

Chris Raines: It's a missed opportunity.

Michael Utley: Yeah, we're on The Facebooks. Yeah. Okay. All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time.