Short video tutorial on how to optimize your page or post copy for search

Presented live on Tuesday, April 17, 2018

You’ve seen when to use SEO landing pages vs blog posts – and now it’s time for you to write a page or a post. What do you do? Where do you find the right keyword(s) to focus on? And what about writing the H1 vs the meta title vs the meta description? Oh, and do you even need to think about H2s and H3s, or are those “dead” in the world of search?

In this tutorial, SEO expert, speaker and founder of Software Promotions Dave Collins walks you through the 7 steps to follow to optimize your page or post for organic search.

Software Promotions. BONUS: Go here to book an SEO audit for as little as $99.

TRANSCRIPT

Joanna Wiebe: We are recording this tutorial. Some house keeping again. Our people are already chatting over. So, if you would just like to say hello, please do. Use chat for that, and if you do to everyone, versus to all panelists. Panelists, that’s us. So, we’re the only ones who will see it. If you chat to everyone though, everyone will see that you’re from Colona, or that you’re just saying hi and your name is Jenifer, or we’re in Phoenix or LA or Atlanta. All the different places. So, feel free to chat those over and Dave can feel just how international this community really is. Dave are you extraordinarily impressed?

Dave Collins: Well, I’m seen some of the past recordings, and you know whenever you watch your recording, you always think, “Is there anyone there? Are they just faking it?” And you just started … hello to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Estonia. But no. This is real, unless you’ve paid people to come and say hi from.

Joanna Wiebe: No. We would never do such a thing. Yes. So, all the people are really live and doing all of the chatting. So, awesome. So, chat over stuff that you just want to share. You can share with us or share with the group … Paris. Q&A is for questions that you need Dave to answer. Last week for our Tutorial Tuesday, we finished off with 35 questions unanswered, so-

Dave Collins: We can beat that.

Joanna Wiebe: We’re going to beat that. SEO’s a very … always going to be a very interesting topic, I think with a lot of questions. So, feel free to bring your questions for Dave. But yeah. We’re going to get started right away because Dave, you’re going to give us a tutorial on optimizing your blog post for search.

Dave Collins: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: The background, for everybody who doesn’t know Dave, you should know Dave. He’s an awesome dude. I’ve had … oh. Awesome. God. I said awesome and he hates awesome so much. It’s like the one word you’re not allowed to say. It’s like, Dave is equivalent of moist. Don’t-

Dave Collins: I did actually buy don’tsayawesome.com but I never got around to doing anything with it.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. You should do something with that, because I keep forgetting. Do you think there’s a … Groovy Ariel said, groovy.

Dave Collins: Groovy is good.

Joanna Wiebe: Person. So, we’re going to go with that. Met at [inaudible 00:02:28] years ago. I stalked him after that for many many years, and now he’s here sharing, not awesomeness, but genius-

Dave Collins: Grooviness.

Joanna Wiebe: Grooviness.

Dave Collins: And genius is pushing it a little with-

Joanna Wiebe: Geez. I was like-

Dave Collins: Don’t set expectations are high.

Joanna Wiebe: Cool. Now, he’s going to share decentness. It’s going to be a decent training session.

Dave Collins: Share something. And I won’t leave 35 unanswered questions. I’ll try to be as unclear as possible.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. Yes.

Dave Collins: Game of the system.

Joanna Wiebe: Well, good Dave. So, what are you going to share with us?

Dave Collins: Okay. Is that a subtle cue for me to [crosstalk 00:03:08].

Joanna Wiebe: That’s the subtle segue into sharing your screen.

Dave Collins: Let’s see. That should hopefully work.

Joanna Wiebe: You have started. Yes. It’s 5:04 where you are.

Dave Collins: It’s 5:04. Okay. So, the idea is I am going to show how to actually update something that you’ve already got. So, rather than creating new content from scratch, most websites, most have more content than they can use. So, rather than setting something like a content calendar investing all that time, let’s just use what you already have. I’m going to show you an outline of the basic steps that I take. And it’s really easy. And it really really works very well. The whole thing isn’t text by the way. This is just so I’ve got something to see in front of me. I could have printed it. I didn’t think of that.

Okay, so, the first step is to choose the post or the page that you’re going to optimize. Basically, you’ve got two ways of doing that. You can either do it in Google Analytics … Oh, I should mention I’m using data here for our, an ancient horrible website that we have, that we only used for training. Davetalks.com. Don’t bother going. It’s really awefull. So, one way of doing it is going through your analytics and what you want to find out is, for instance, pages on your website that don’t get much or maybe even don’t get any traffic at all. So, all you do is very quickly click on all users. Best is to go to system. Organic traffic. So, what we’re now going to do, we’re going to drag all users out the way. So, we’re only seeing, is a segment in analytics, we’re only looking at organic traffic.

What we’re interested in, in particular is if we go down to behavior landing pages. What we got there are the pages that organic traffic content, perhaps Google is sending you. This is where the landing … so, in a way, you’re looking for the inverse. You’re looking for pages that don’t get much or even any organic traffic. So, anything you see where you’re not getting traffic, you’ve got … it’s like a … you got a wild card. Go ahead and do anything, and you’re not going to break anything.

Another place to go is search console. Google search console. They give you similar, but in a way slightly better. In that you go to search analytics. You choose pages, because by default it’s on queries, a search terms. You choose pages and then it shows you the pages that Google are reporting searches for. But you see here you’ve to clicks and at the top you’ve got clicks impressions, clicks through right. What you want is actually all of them is pretty good. So, then you see pages … the reason why this is particularly good, I run analytics, analytics shows you pages where people have come to. But it won’t show you pages that you were somewhere in the search results, but you’re so low down that no one actually clicked on it.

So, we can see for instance here, this article, Who Wants To Live Forever, was in position nine manages to get 125 clicks. This one is in position 46.9. So, actually no one ever gets to that page even. So, a page like that, is in its own way, it’s got some good opportunities. Very low down, and you could get it higher.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: So, that’s the idea of how to choose the actual page. Once you’ve chosen it … I’ve chosen, like I mentioned, a very … it’s a very ugly site, and it’s very ugly content. I’ve chosen this one just as an example. It’s really easy to over look this, but what you want to do is read it. You can’t optimize a page, especially if it’s a post for a page that you’ve written … this is more than 10 years old. This is probably 15 years old. You can’t optimize it till you really know what it’s about. Don’t just skim like I always have the impulse to skim the first paragraph and then move on. You’ve got to be familiar with what you intend to optimize.

Then, we’re going to Google search console again to see what’s working so far. Now, what do I mean by that, if we go back to our own pages here, this is the article that we’re going to optimize right now. So, if I click on that and then click on queries, what I then see are the search terms that this page is actually showing for. So, it’s only only this pages it’s showing for. So, you start to get an idea for … it’s from the keywords that Google are serving this up for. [inaudible 00:07:43]. What’s worked so far, what isn’t. So, what you want to do is you want to see for instance, we’ve got position here. Anything really low down here, the tens or lower, 96. So, in theory, this article is ranking in 96 position for someone searching for relevance of product lifecycle. So, you’ve got to use a bit of common sense and think how many people are going to search relevance of product lifecycle over advantages of product lifecycle for instance.

So, basically, that’s where we start in this information, but do be aware, this only shows what’s working. It doesn’t show what isn’t working. So, there could be phrases that are completely relevant to what we’re doing here, but it’s not ranking at all. You’ve not optimized it yet.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: Does that make sense so far?

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah. I’m just wondering, I can’t help because I’m like … with SEO. When you look at this-

Dave Collins: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: Are you trying to optimize for the ones that are already, like the top position or the one at 6.7, oh, it’s not top position but it’s got the most clicks. Would you say, “Let’s just go to town.” On that keyword phrase?

Dave Collins: No. It’s a judgment call. The way I look at it, what you look for is as high up in the list as possible. But it has to be relevant. You might rank for some phrases, that just aren’t relevant at all. In which case you ignore them. I really like this first one, because you see it’s in position 6.7. If we tweak that page, we should be able to get two, maybe three positions higher, maybe four. So, we might be able to get all the way up to position two or three. And in which case, we’re going to get a lot more clicks. Whereas, if we’re optimizing for this one, position 96-

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: It’s unlikely we’re going to go from position 96 to position five. So, I’m sort of balancing. Is it relevant? How many people are searching for it right now? What you see is a lot of impressions on that.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: 166.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: And also position. I would probably go for that one. Advantage of. That makes sense?

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah. It does. It does totally. I’m now really curious about it. But, yes. Proceed.

Dave Collins: Proceed.

Joanna Wiebe: Thank you.

Dave Collins: Feel free to interrupt any time. I’ve got the chat turned off right now. So, you’re the official interrupter.

Joanna Wiebe: Perfect.

Dave Collins: Okay. So, go back to this again. What I’m going to do next is what I call suing Google as a searcher. This is so obvious but so easy to overlook. Let’s say we’re interested in advantages of product lifecycle. That’s our keyword, we’re going to choose. So, what I’m going to do, I chose a wrong one there. Advantages of product lifecycle. What I’m going to do is, just run it through Google and see what shows up. Because in a way, if you want to rank highly, these are the sites you’re actually going to be competing with. The first thing you’re looking for, is does it make sense? Would it make sense for my website? For this article? This blog post to be in this list? Or is it something completely … yes. Something completely different?

As an SEO, the things that I see here are … there’s some pretty good SEO opportunity. Because these headlines aren’t particularly appealing. Pros and cons of a product lifecycle. Then it’s got the website link. Benefits and limitations of product lifecycle. It sounds like, I don’t know Victorian English or something. They’re not particularly compelling. They’re not going to get me. And probably not many [inaudible 00:11:17] click on them. And there’s that article. Yeah. That’s us. The Advantages of Product Lifecycle. It’s ours. We joined, we own it now. See, I make sure that the results are what you expect to see. Next stage is fall in love with Ahrefs. Ahrefs is pronounced Ahrefs. It’s written ahrefs.com. It’s a really good SEO tool. I rate it nowadays as the best SEO tool. You have to pay for it, but they have a seven day trial for $7 and you can do a lot in seven days.

So, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to take my [inaudible 00:11:56] that we’ve got here, so we’re going to go for Advantages of Product Lifecycle. And all I’m going to do, is run that through. I can’t talk and type. Advantages of Product Lifecycle. I’m going to run it through Ahrefs. We’re tight for time, so I can’t go into why it’s so great. But it is.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes.

Dave Collins: And what I’m looking for … obviously it’s for Ahrefs [inaudible 00:12:24] you work. What I’m looking for is similar keywords that might be actually better. So, I’m going to pick start with all. So, what I’m saying this is all the keywords without being filtered or anything. So, what Ahrefs is telling, there’s roughly 29,000 people a month, roughly, searching for it.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: Whereas, if I went just for lifecycle, which is obviously a slightly different thing. But, there’s not the same volume. Product lifecycle stages is obviously relevant, but we can see 3,500 versus 29,000. So, this is the one to target.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: This KD, again not getting too deep into it, is difficult. If you lower score, the easier it is to rank. The higher the score, the harder it is to rank. So, 27 is pretty good. Goes all the way up to 99. So, this is, without going any deeper into it, this is a good one. This is a good one to work with. So, I did the page, right. This is flying through at a speed.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: So, if you grill me on the specifics as needed. So, what I’m then going to do, if you go back to this, scroll down here. I’m going to pick what I call a main keyword or a primary keyword. So, in this case, product lifecycle. So, I’m just going to write that here. And then, if there’s a good supporting keyword or a secondary keyword, if there’s a really good fit, that’s slightly different. So, maybe if I can work product lifecycle stages, maybe. We’ll try. And I’ll show you what we’re going to do with these. So, the main keyword that we’re focusing on here is product lifecycle. So, I’m going to … this is on WordPress. Dave Talks. What I’m going to do, is first thing I’m going to do before anything, is see, “Is this page actually on the content?” Forget about the title description, all that stuff. That comes later. Does it actually exist anywhere on the sites? So, these were just in Chrome at least. Is to just do a search on what I expect to see.

Joanna Wiebe: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Dave Collins: Yeah. It’s all over the place. This was probably written, like I said, 12, 15 years ago. It’s clumsy, which is precisely something that you want to optimize. You want to optimize something that’s old and you don’t really care about. What I can see from that is I don’t need to worry about getting the phrase product lifecycle into this page anymore. Because if there’s plenty of anything it might actually be there’re a little bit too much. Like the advantages of the product lifecycle concept, you could lose product lifecycle. You don’t want to repeat too heavily. The rule of thumb is if you read the text out loud and it makes sense, and it sounds right, that’s fine. If you read the text out loud and it sounds as though you’re repeating the same words and phrases over and over again, it’s not good at all.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: So, what I could see here is that particular, what the keyword that we’re going for product lifecycle, we don’t need to worry about putting it in the body. This at the top, you could see this is an H1. This is an H1 tag and Google pay a lot of attention to H1. I think, even tough I’ve called it, Who Wants to Live Forever, sometimes you have to balance between SEO and a cool title. And invariably if you can them, better. I think Who Wants to Live Forever is … it’s okay. But, I think in this case, I’d rather just have the Advantages of Product Lifecycle concept, is horrible. So, that’s nice and clean. If I had time, I would tidy up the text a little bit because there’s too many repetitions. There’s an image here, so, I want to see what the old tag … caption don’t worry about. This is the product lifecycle graphic graph. That shows that this was written a long time a go. The graphic on my page. So, I might change that to, I don’t know chart.

Because this is another signal if you like for Google, showing them what the image is and it’s a ranking factor.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: And then I’ll update it. Any other images? No, right. This is using Yoast.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: Which most people, well, a lot of people on WordPress use because it’s a free version and it’s really good. One of the things I like about it, this part, this text here, this little box, is showing what the page might look like in Google in the search. If Google use all your information.

Joanna Wiebe: Why wouldn’t Google use everything you have written here?

Dave Collins: Sometimes, Google decide they know better. And also, sometimes what you have is so bad and it’s so junk ridden that it doesn’t actually makes sense. Especially with description, they might take your description, or sometimes they’ll say, “We’re just going to pick some random text.” So, in a way to encourage Google to show the right thing, you’ve got to stick to their rules. This is breaking it. I didn’t even have to prepare this. This is horribly horribly … well, actually it’s horrible, full stop. It’s far too long. The theory is a title should round about 60 characters. Not beyond 60 characters.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: The meta-description’s just gone up massively and you can now have up to 300 characters.

Joanna Wiebe: Oh.

Dave Collins: Though, this one, this title that I’ve got here, if we paste that in. What I can see … I can see that’s far too long. So, if we do a correct account, 109. So, it should be so much smaller.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: Which we’ll do. We’re about to do that now. The key thing is, aside from the actual length, which is horrible, that’s a really ugly listing. No one’s going to click on that. If that’s how it’s listed, The Advantages of Product Lifecycle concept, article on product life dot dot dot. There’s nothing compelling. If that was and ad text, we’d really work hard to make it look really good. Make people click it. We want a high click through, right? And the same actually applies to SEO. It’s just that people don’t usually do that. So, what I want to do … sorry.

Joanna Wiebe: So, you think of when you’re writing the meta-description title and all of that, you think of it like you would think of writing an [inaudible 00:19:15]?

Dave Collins: Yeah. There’s different lengths. 60 characters for title, up to 300 for description. But, I think it was … I think years ago Rand Fishkin from Moz run an experiment where her got people to click. Basically said, “Search for this phrase. You’ll see this blog post,” I think it was under Moz, “and browse the pages though you’re a human being and then just click on the Moz article.” Wat happened, is it went up. It rose up. Because Google have analytics installed on Google. So every time you’re searching on Google, Google are tracking what you’re works.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: What doesn’t. And they won’t push you down to penalize you. But they will push you up if they think this is what people are looking for.

Joanna Wiebe: Great.

Dave Collins: If you have a better … it’s just like and ad. If you have a good well written headline, people are more likely to click it. And when the more likely to click it, Google will slowly but surely work you up, because they’re assuming that this what people want.

Joanna Wiebe: Cool. Okay.

Dave Collins: So, what’s our title here? What’s the keyword that we said? Product lifecycle. You’d think I’ll remember that. So, if its 5:00 PM here, so I cannot write a good title right now. But, if you start with product lifecycle, in a way, standard correct grammar goes out of the window up to a point. They shouldn’t really capitalize it, but it makes it stand out a little bit, and that’s what people are searching for. So, if it was something along the lines of product lifecycle … it’s not particularly inspiring. Step by Step guide … let’s make it Step by Step Practical Guide. I find [inaudible 00:21:05] point in the day, I can’t judge a length at all. So, what I can see is characters, 49. So, that’s okay. That’s not … no one … I’m not going to win any awards for a title like that. But, if we put that in to here, I think that’s more likely to get clicked. Even that, and obviously, you have to spend a little bit of time tweaking these things, just like you do with copy, because it is copy, and people are going to click on it when it reads well, and that’s a more compelling one. If we had more time, we’d do the same thing to the description.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: The key principle with the description is … the theory is that description isn’t a ranking factor. In other words, having your keywords in the description shouldn’t make any different at all to why Google ranked you. But, it’s displayed. So, if you’re lucky enough if Google decide they will display your title, then it’s going to be shown here. Now, obviously, especially now, it’s up to 300 characters. No one’s going to read. They’re just going to skim.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: But, if you can make it a little bit more compelling, so if the title captures your eye, captures your attention, then you’re far more likely to … with a well written description, you’re likely to get someone to click on it.

Joanna Wiebe: So, this [inaudible 00:22:26] so, you’re writing the title for Google largely.

Dave Collins: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: Also means writing for the user, but you’re really writing the description for the user. Google doesn’t care that much about description.

Dave Collins: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: And while also, I should have mentioned … there’s so much we’re cramming trying to get it all in.

Joanna Wiebe: I know.

Dave Collins: When you write for Google, you never want to write purely for Google spiders. Whether it’s title or the content at it’s most basic level. If I click on the link to an article on someone’s site, if it’s garbage because they’re repeating the same phrase over and over again, I’m just going to leave instantly.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: And Google are tracking that. Remember they’ve got analytics installed in on your site probably and certainly on the searches of it.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: So, if they could see everyone … they put you in first place, everyone clicks on it, comes back after a second.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: Clicks on second place, you’ll drop like a stone there.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: So, you always want to put humans, human users, people. You always to put humans before the spiders every single time.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah [crosstalk 00:23:30] sorry, a year ago. A talk I don’t know what conference it was at about the problem with the back button, and how it’s critical now more than ever to make sure people stay on your page and don’t hit back.

Dave Collins: Yeah. Exactly. So, it’s like I said, if people see you land on my blog post and you leave within a second.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: If Google see that … again, it’s not penalize, but it’s Google saying, “They’ll not find what they’re looking for here. So, we’re not going to keep serving it up.” There are exceptions. There are exceptions. There exceptions, for instance, weather forecast. That someone wants … they’re going on vacation. They’re going to a place. What’s the weather forecast there? You’re not going to spend anytime there. All you’re going to do, “Is what’s the temperature today and tomorrow?” And then you bounce back. But Google are surprisingly smart at these things. I think for a normal website, it’s a good signal.

The best thing of all in a ways, they click on your link. They get there. They spend time there, and click on more of your content and engage with your site. So, again the signal that you’re sending is, “This is good.”

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. Fantastic. Sorry I kept interrupting. I’m just-

Dave Collins: Yeah. That’s okay. You’re the chief interrupter. That’s you job, not my description of you.

Joanna Wiebe: No. It’s good. It’s going on my business card. Cheap and direct.

Dave Collins: [crosstalk 00:24:44]. How many characters?

Joanna Wiebe: Well, we’ll try. Can everybody who is putting their questions in chat, just a quick reminder, throw those in Q&A and we will get to them at the end, thank you. Okay.

Dave Collins: And we are almost there. The final step, this is really skimming the top of the whole thing, but hopefully it’s useful.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: The final step is to always keep a track of these changes. I hear there’s a bonus. There’s a little bonus. If you optimize a page, like let’s say, this particular page. We’ve worked on it. We’ve tweaked it.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: I’m going to click on that page because like I said, I just don’t care. It’ll probably give me an error. You need to keep track of it and log it with the view to, if nothing else, date, the actual URL, the keywords that you’re trying to rank for. And so, you’ve got a record, because what you want to do is monitor it and see [inaudible 00:25:38] coming to the page. Is it ranking. Is anything actually worked. But give it time. You can’t change it five days later.

Joanna Wiebe: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Dave Collins: If however, you see that Google, just for whatever reason, they’re not picking up a change at all, nothing’s happened, there is a little trick in search console. I don’t recommend doing this too often. Copy the URL without the domain. So in this case, /article, /whowantstoliveforever. If you go into your search console and you go to fetch as Google under crawl.

Joanna Wiebe: Oh.

Dave Collins: What you can do is put that URL in there. You can fetch and render, which it basically makes your work, so you can just click fetch, which is a good first step anyway, because you can make sure Google are seeing it. There’s no issue. And then you’ve got that little button there, request indexing. Now, this is Google. So, no alarm bells go off and someone goes running to feed your page into the database. It’s a request. But if you click that … I’ve got to capture. I’m not a robot. What you can do is you can select to have it crawl only this URL.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: Which then used to have a number show up. Now, they don’t anymore. Or you can crawl this URL and it’s direct links. You’ve got to use this very very very sparingly. If every time you want more people to come to your site, if you just tell Google, “Crawl this URL and all its’ links.” They’re not going to pay any attention. But this, we’ve seen this work quite well. If you’re at a point where no one is coming to this page, it should rank highly. You’ve tweaked it very well. You’ve given it time, you’ve got links coming in. You [inaudible 00:27:23] done all that sort of stuff. Then this can be a good option, but generally, I’d only go for the crawl only this URL.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: And it says, just a request. That doesn’t guarantee anything. But, it’s the only way we’ve got to get Google’s attention.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. That’s cool. Great. I have on quick question still.

Dave Collins: Yes.

Joanna Wiebe: We’ve updated the H1 and removed that, Who Wants to Live Forever, but the URL still has that in it. So, wat would you do? Do you live it? Or what do you do about the URL?

Dave Collins: Well, that’s a really good question. That’s the standard reply isn’t it? Everyone replies, “Hi [inaudible 00:28:04]. That’s a really good question.” Quickly Googling, “What should I do? Or should I update a URL?” I would say, as a general rule …

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: It’s over simplifying it, but you never want to over optimize. So, you don’t want to have the title of the page, Product Lifecycle with description to a Product Lifecycle, with an image with a follow name of Product Lifecycle.jpeg and the link Product Lifecycle. If I was writing this article from scratch, I would choose a better URL. Not necessarily Product Lifecycle, but even something like, Product Cycle, or Lifecycles. So, it’s vaguely related but it’s not too much repetition. They do penalize you for over optimization as well.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay.

Dave Collins: So, if it’s especially with Yorks, that could very easily just change that URL, and Yoast will handle the redirecting.

Joanna Wiebe: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Dave Collins: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: Ah. That’s awesome.

Dave Collins: They actually set up the redirect for you.

Joanna Wiebe: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s amazing. Cool.

Dave Collins: Yoast. It’s a great tool.

Joanna Wiebe: Yoast. And I mean it was already … this page is already ranking with that as the exact URL and it was ranking for Product Lifecycle.

Dave Collins: Exactly. Well, the theory is, it’s very hard to measure these things. Because if we make secondary changes here, all the things we’ve done today …

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: And the URL, then if we see something works, we don’t know what actually played a part. And actually even if you did, just scientifically, just change the URL than wait for six months, and then change the title … Google are going to change in the site that you’re competing with who are above you right now. They’re going to change. So, you can drown in over analysis basically.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: And they do regularly.

Joanna Wiebe: I doubt that. Okay. Dave. That’s awesome. Can you pop back over to the notes, the Google docs so people can just what those note are again. The steps-

Dave Collins: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: And maybe just leave that on, while we take … oh. I have a question now before jump in, sorry. I’m sorry, but log and review. What do you use to log and review? Do you just use like a Google sheet and like track it?

Dave Collins: It can be anything. I wouldn’t recommend pen and paper, because you can’t search it. And I can’t read my writing. It can be a Google sheet. It can be a spreadsheet. It can even be just a text document. You’re never going to really work with that data in any way other than have a look. So, it’s really easy to lose track if you got a large-ish site.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: Or optimize these things. What you don’t want to do, is optimize a blog post a day, and three or four weeks from now, re-optimize it because you totally forgot what you did. You just sort of … it’s like competing with yourself over the same page. It’s not vital, it’s so easy. Even I you put URL date, and nothing else, that’s better than nothing.

Joanna Wiebe: Excellent. Okay. I will let other people ask their questions now. And by the way, Pamela just said, “This is one of the most useful webinars you’ve had.” Thanks so much, so, yay.

Dave Collins: [inaudible 00:31:11].

Joanna Wiebe: Please do.

Dave Collins: Is that me who’s … did I say that about myself? I might have been-

Joanna Wiebe: It’s like [inaudible 00:31:17] chatting it over. Dave, you look so good today.

Dave Collins: Best ever.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. Okay. So, I’ll begin at the top of the questions. Dave-

Dave Collins: Shall, I leave this screen share on right now?

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. Well, you don’t have to. Just maybe for a little bit more, and then …

Dave Collins: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: People are always interested, and if you haven’t written this down guys, take a screenshot of this, so you’ve got this process and the recording of course will be available later. Question from Cathleen, “When you update an article,” right. So, this is just the URL actually. So, “when you’re updating articles, should you update the URL and then redirect it?” But you said, no big deal.

Dave Collins: If it’s vital, then it makes sense to. So, like if you’re moving your blog from /blog to something that makes more sense nowadays, fine. But, if it’s purely for SEO purposes, I wouldn’t bother. But, that’s my personal opinion. Some people swear by it. But we cached all these things constantly and I’ve never seen … it’s hard to gauge. I was saying that I’ve never seen that have a huge impact at all.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. Fantastic. Joey says … oh, same question. And then really asks, “What weight does the URL have?”

Dave Collins: Yeah. There’s all these ranking factors. If you do a search or if you really get [inaudible 00:32:39], do a search for SEO ranking factors. There’s a survey … I think that was Moz as well who used to carry out, where SEO would I’ve their theories. Ultimately, it’s all speculation. Only people inside Google really know the weighting factors. I go by a sort of a golden rule if you like, of common sense. That if I over optimize and over tweak, I could damage myself. And if I just use common sense, Google will figure this out. I look at SEOs helping Google, if you like, guiding Google, rather than kind of forcing or tricking them.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: So, actual ranking, how heavily weighted is it, the honest answer is I have no clue. But I think if you rename all your URLs on a site, I don’t expect your organic traffic will suddenly go up significantly.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah. Makes sense. Okay. Bridget asks, “Should article title be H1, be similar to the title in the Google search results?”

Dave Collins: The article title-

Joanna Wiebe: If you wrote your H1 as you did, would you just copy and past that in Yoast into the meta-title?

Dave Collins: Again, it’s a balance between the user and Google. If it’s in the title, I don’t think I’d ever copy and paste it, because Google have this information.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: If I can’t have something that’s related … I didn’t show … yeah, should have mentioned this. When we carried out our search here in Google search results …

Joanna Wiebe: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Dave Collins: There’s a really nice technique I call using Google as an SEO and not a searcher. So, I’m interested in, for instance, here people also ask. And searches related to. If I can find even just one of those phrases that I can put inside the content, that makes sense, this is me saying to Google, in a sense, “Hey, what’s related to this?” Google give me a list and I pop one [inaudible 00:34:37] in. It’s using Google’s own language that’s [inaudible 00:34:41].

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: So, if there’s a really good opportunity for a second phrase and make them from here, I’m more likely to use that in the H1 rather than just repeating. Repeating never works in SEO.

Joanna Wiebe: Nice. That’s goof to know. I had no idea about that. Okay. Fabulous. Nataley says, “I’ve just published a new page and it’s on page one, sometimes on two. But Google is pulling then text from my page, not my Yoast description. I resubmitted it to fetch as Google, so should I just wait for it to update or do I need to do something?”

Dave Collins: A couple of things. First of all, when you search … I don’t know, is this a Nataley did you say?

Joanna Wiebe: Nataley, yeah.

Dave Collins: Okay. So, I’m not sure how she’s, or how you Nataley are searching. If you’re Chrome for instance, if you’re logged in … actually forget the browser. If you’re logged in, Google can sometimes give you tailored results. So, you’ll actually see slightly different results from the person next door and they different results from the person at a different state or country. In theory, that’s to help you. So, if they see you’re often carrying out searches and you end up clicking on your own site, Google might take that as, that’s what you’re looking for. So, that to make it easier though, they’ll put you higher. So, you might not be seeing what other people are seeing.

Joanna Wiebe: Great.

Dave Collins: That’s one thing. There are ways around that you can use incognito for instance in Chrome. If you really want to go weird or [inaudible 00:36:04], you can use a different IP address or VPN, or that sort of thing. But, if everything you’re seeing is they’re not using your description, I would rewrite the description. Try to get some of the keywords relevant to your title and again, not directly copied but relevant. Fetch as Google could be a good way to bring you to their attention. But again, do not over use it. It’s something generally you should be using it very rarely.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. And that’s the next question. Meagan asks, “Why should we not fetch too often?”

Dave Collins: If you imagine … I like analogies. So, if you imagine that the fetch as Google is someone yanking on your arm saying, “Hey. Hey. Hey. I’ve got a question.” The more they yank … I have two children who do … I wish it just confined to yanking my arm, but the more they ask me, pester me, the less I listen. After a while I just tune it out. And I think with Google, they’re more likely to take it seriously if it’s something that you’re not over using. This isn’t really based on anything concrete. But my guess is, if this is something you do four, five times a day, everyday, Google are going to ignore it. They’ll have like a little flag on your account. The basis of Google version of, “Irritating nutter. Pay no attention.” It’s not going to work. As an occasional thing it might. It’s the boy who cried wolf type thing.

Joanna Wiebe: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. I know how far along we are in this. If we like, kind of, maybe take like two more questions?

Dave Collins: Yeah. I’m in your hands now. I’m completely fine.

Joanna Wiebe: Thank you. And for those who have to drop off, and I know that, that’s a reality for people. Sarah has chatted out a few ways to get a hold of Dave on Facebook, on LinkedIn and of course getting on his newsletter. Do that. I’m on it. I learned a ton. And his core website audit. Dave what is it? It’s like ridiculous. It’s like how much? Can I ask how much it is?

Dave Collins: The cheapest … you can. The cheapest one is $99.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: It’s just to review the website.

Joanna Wiebe: Awesome.

Dave Collins: You actually get a video of me. So, if you really like British accents, so it’s a free bonus. If not, then, sorry.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. That’s awesome. So, check that out. Great for your clients. Great for your own sites as well, the website audit. Sarah can you chat those two links out one more time? Thank you. Okay. Going back then to the question. Adele asks, “So, if Google chooses a random snippet thumb to copy and it’s awefull, versus the description tag that you write, what’s the first step to convince Google to use your description tag?”

Dave Collins: I’d go for a complete rewrite. I don’t think a tweak of changing the word or putting two exclamation marks instead of one. I would go … I think if this was a really important page, I would go for a little bit of restructuring. A little bit tweaking the page. In a way, Google aren’t going to get excited when all you do is go in and tweak the description. But I think if this was an important page and I hated that description, and I know mine is better, I’d write a better one and just tweak the page a little bit and hope that Google find it through a site map or again through fetch as Google.

Joanna Wiebe: Awesome. Okay. Amy asks, “Adding H2 and H3 tags matter much for SEO?”

Dave Collins: The short answer, minimal. Very very minimal. You will never raise rankings by adding some H2 and H3. And again, all this stuff ultimately … remember the humans before spiders thing.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Dave Collins: If it looked horrible because you got these weird H2, H3, don’t do it. It’s got to look good. If you can make it look good for Google and look good for people, then that’s the best way to go.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. Dave. Thank you.

Dave Collins: You’re welcome.

Joanna Wiebe: We have eight unanswered questions, so you beat it. You beat last week’s. Well done.

Dave Collins: I wanted more unanswered questions.

Joanna Wiebe: Oh, that. I thought we wanted-

Dave Collins: I’ve failed. I’ve totally failed.

Joanna Wiebe: [crosstalk 00:40:22] like crazy. No, Dave. That was awesome. Thank you. And if people would like their unanswered questions, sorry the 20 minute tutorial was amazing. The questions always stack up. So, if you would like to ask Dave those questions, his Facebook page is in the chat, if Sarah can pop that out one more time, and just go chat Dave up. Right Dave? You’re cool with that?

Dave Collins: Absolutely.

Joanna Wiebe: Cool.

Dave Collins: And if people find the website through the link, send me an email dave@softwarepromotions.com. I’m more than happy to answer. Twitter is best because then-

Joanna Wiebe: Oh, yeah.

Dave Collins: It makes me feel important, which is always good.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. You are @thedavecollins on Twitter.

Dave Collins: Yeah. Thedavecollines.

Joanna Wiebe: @thedavecollins. I just read it … anyway, it doesn’t matter. Okay. Cool. So, Dave thanks so much for this. That was awesome. Hopefully people will get on your newsletter. Follow up with other questions. Again, the replay will be available with the transcript and everything later on in the library that Sarah just chatted out. Lots of thanks coming in from everybody who attended, and thank you all for attending today and asking great questions. We will see you next week as we round out April’s SEO month. Thanks again guys.

Dave Collins: Thank you.

Joanna Wiebe: Thanks. Bye.

Dave Collins: Bye.

How to optimize a page or post’s copy for SEO

Presented live on Tuesday, April 17, 2018

TRANSCRIPT