Video Transcript – Has your SEO been done by a monkey with a hammer?

Has your SEO been done by a monkey with a hammer? – original post here

Hey, welcome back Rankers! You having a good time? We’re doing the live show this week. We’re here with people on Meerkat and we’re here with people on Periscope, so thank you and welcome. We’ve been having a great chat. Well, not great chat. It’s been an okay chat, I guess. I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things this week. You know the exploit that we were talking about three weeks ago? Yeah, we’re in top five now for that phrase we were talking about, so thank you for that. Little bit concerning, though, and when you go over to the site we were looking at, Microworkers, and the reason I’m talking about this is again is because I listened to a great episode of Beers, Blokes, and Business this week. Came out yesterday, and they were talking about the merry maker Internet report, and they were also talking about things like Periscope, Meerkat. Or talking about things like remote workers, Upworks… what is it called? Up something? Upworks? Yeah? And a few of those and eLance, but no one talked about Microworkers because Microworkers is interesting because it’s like 20 cent jobs, 10 cent jobs, 15 cent jobs, where you go and do this one thing and you get paid 20 cents.

This one here is interesting, and for those of you who are in the live audience, hi Yvonne! Yvonne’s in. For those of you in the live audience, what I’m looking at right now and for those of you on podcast, I’m looking at a site, Microworkers.com, and one of the jobs I’m looking at on screen says that you’ll earn 21 cents if you perform this task. And the task is basically go to Google.com.eu, search for one of the following terms, ah comments work. Yes they do. There’s going to be a bit of a back and forth with the audience here. No one on Meerkat seems to be chatting. I don’t know why.

But anyway, this particular job is to go and go to Google.com.eu and search for about four different terms. This is similar to what we did three weeks ago. The business or I should say the person who’s doing this optimization. Optimization, yeah right. The person who’s doing this exploit, I should say, is looking at motor mechanic type phrases and they’ve said in this job ad that they’re currently between page three to five on Google. Now I’ve gone and checked all those phrases, they’re all on page one. Dun, dun, dun. Yeah, I know right? So, yeah, make of that what you will, but here’s an interesting thing and this is… Courtney mentioned this yesterday. He was saying, “Shouldn’t we be optimizing description tags? Metadescription tags?” and I said, “Well, metadescription tags, Google has said for years that optimizing a metadescription tag is not going to help you rank any better.” Here’s the thing, though. This is what Courtney said, he said, “Yeah, but if click through rate does.”

So your metadescription tag is about advertising, if you like, in the search engine results. That’s essentially its reason for being, these days anyway. And if you’ve got a killer description tag, and you’re on, say, page one around four or five and people click on your result more so than the ones above you because you have a killer metadescription tag, is that gonna help you rank higher? Food for thought. Anyway, we’re running some tests on that because that’s an interesting one. So rather than going off to sign Microworkers and all these other places and hiring third world labour to perform some really perfunctory tasks, you possibly can gain this exploit in a very legitimate way. Anyway, if you’re going to try it, I’d be interested to know your results.

But I just wanna quickly do a review for an old mate who owns the Swanton Inn. Or Swantown Inn? Bed and breakfast in Olympia, Washington, US. And the interesting thing about this site is that it’s a templated site. All right? It’s templated for, I think it’s for the industry, the accommodation industry, and Nathan Allen, who I’ve known for nearly 20 years, one of the things that he said he wanted to rank for was bed and breakfast Olympia. And as it happens, he’s number one for that, which is great. But he also said he wanted to rank for hotel Olympia, and he doesn’t rank for hotels Olympia. Now one of the reasons that he ranks so well for bed and breakfast Olympia, if I go to Screaming Frog, and if you’re doing SEO and you’re not using Screaming Frog you’re really missing out. So, for instance, I’ve gone and had a look at Screaming Frog and what I can see straight up in Screaming Frog is that there are a lot of 302 redirects, which is a big no, no. The pages that they’re redirecting have actually been indexed. It looks like the redirects or the 302’s a temporary redirect.

Reason it’s bad is because Google has no way of knowing whether that end destination on that link is going to change at some point, as opposed to a permanent redirect. And if you’re permanently redirecting something, you really shouldn’t have the old link on the page. You should just have the link on the page that you’re redirecting to. Make sense? The thing that stood out, though, for me, apart from that was that when I went and had a look at his page titles, they all had Swantown Inn Bed and Breakfast. Which is great, because that’s what it is and that’s his business name as well. Now, quite often you’ll find businesses putting their business name at the start of page titles, which is normally a bad idea because usually the business name won’t have any of the key words you’re trying to rank for in that name. So you’re using valuable real estate in that page title area.

But, a couple of things. Number one, it works for what he’s doing. It’s not the first phrase on every page of the site. In some page titles it’s a little bit lower down in the words than really actually the page title. But Swantown Inn Bed and Breakfast is working for him, so I’m saying don’t fix that. But if you want to rank for hotels, you’re gonna need a target page specifically targeted to hotels. By and large, the templated site, I think, is pretty good apart from all those 302s, which it looks like it’s been for language or geographic reason. Get rid of those. But the H1s are in the right place, they’re getting followed with a H2. I mean sometimes we see sites, I’ve looked at several this week, where it looks like the SEOs been done by a monkey with a hammer. And quite frankly, look I love monkeys, right. Who doesn’t love monkeys? And I love hammers. I own several hammers, but I don’t want to put the two together.

And certainly a few of the sites we’ve looked at this week for clients and doing our site audits, because we have a product which is a site audit product. Some of them you just sit back and shake your head and think, “Why? How could this have been done?” I mean there was one client this week who, well not a client yet, but we went and reviewed the blog section of the site. They’d been blogging for about 12 months, not one page of the blog was indexed. Literally not one page of the blog was indexed. Only a third of their entire site was actually indexed, and they’ve had SEO done. How does that even happen? And to give you another example of the power of the page title, if you like, here is a site that is one of the ones that I’m working on for our blogger’s SEO system. So, if you’re a blogger and you want to know about SEO, we’re bringing out a product, looks like September now. We’re doing some Q&A up at the Pro-Blogger Conference. I’m just trying to get some feedback from bloggers about what the hardest things are for them with SEO and all those sorts of things.

And part of putting together the system, I’ve taken several bloggers sites and I’m working through the sites piece by piece. And this one here, this graph here is really interesting and for the live viewers, what I’m looking at is search analytics search console, and I’m looking at clicks and impressions. And I’ve filtered it for a specific keyword, which is Thermomix. Now for those of you who don’t know what Thermomix is, it’s a cult, essentially. Okay? My wife’s part of the cult. Anyway, it’s a real cult. And what I’m looking at here is this particular site; they wanted to rank for healthy Thermomix recipes. I spent literally, I mean this tweak that I’ve done to her site literally took less than a minute to do. She went from ranking nowhere for healthy Thermomix recipes and then she went straight up to number 19. I think today she’s 14, but I haven’t done anymore work since that initial minute.

So ranking from outside the top 200 to number 14 simply by changing a page title. That’s all it took. Now, that’s why I always say to people, “Look, don’t worry if you’re number 50. Right? If you’re number 50, we know something’s wrong.” I have this conversation with clients all the time. We’ve got large ecommerce sites and they’ll come in and they’ll say, “We’re still number 90,” and I’ll say, “I know you’re still number 90. We’re trying to work out what the problem is.” Because until you get on page two or maybe three, depending on how competitive it is, it isn’t real. So, the real work starts when you get on page two or three. If you’re down at number 90 or 100 or 50, something’s not right. Google is not liking something about your site. When you get on page three and page two, that’s when you can start to do the hard work. These two lines here, I’m looking at two graphed lines for our live viewers, and ones a little bit bouncy and the other one’s got this nice curve up. This nice curve up, the one that goes like that, that is because of the number of impressions the client’s now been found for.

So, if I just look at that one in isolation, you’ll be able to see there that before I made this one page title change, we were number 370. Oh sorry, we were getting 370 searches per day. After the change, which was made about here, we’ve been as high as 990 searches per day. So we’ve more than doubled the searches that she was getting with a change that took less than a minute. And that’s what I’m talking about with SEO. It can be fantastic sometimes. I love it when that happens. Because the thing about bloggers and the reason we’re bringing up the bloggers’ product is because bloggers are already doing the hard part. They’re already producing the content. They’re already doing the reach out to other bloggers, and they’re getting back links. Not because they want the back links for SEO, but because they’re getting involved with their communities. And that’s one of the reasons. But what they all do wrong is that they have really, really slow sites, typically. The ones I’ve looked at, anyway, because images they’re uploading are absolutely huge because a lot of them are very visually intensive blogs.

And the other thing they’re doing wrong is that all their index is a huge mess in Google. Typically what we’ve found that they’re doing is their tags are indexed, their categories are indexed, their archives are indexed, their attachments are indexed, their galleries are indexed, all these extra bits and pieces of the site that are indexed that we really don’t want indexed. So, the reason that we brought out the blogger’s products, well they’re doing all the hard stuff, right? If we can give them a product that just allows them to basically configure their site properly, their ranking’s going to go like this. And that’s what I’m finding with the little bit of work of the few blogs that I’ve done already. Which is why I’m really excited about getting up to Pro-Blogger Conference this week. Hopefully that’s helpful. We’ll see you next week. We’re gonna have a chat in the live room in a second. If you want to be in the live chat then you’ve just to get on Meerkat or on Periscope and it’s every Tuesday, Australian Eastern Standard Time at 12 pm. We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.