Video Transcript – SEO Not Included

SEO Not Included – original post here

Welcome back, Rankers. I’m back from overseas, just got back from Hawaii actually. Went from Las Vegas, drove to LA. No, I’ll never do that again. Then caught a plane to San Francisco. Got really sick in San Francisco. Got the flu that everybody in Melbourne had. I took it with me. Shared the love around. So all those of you who are now sick in San Francisco, sorry. That was me. And then we went to New York and then back to Hawaii and then back here.

So the reason we went to Las Vegas in the first place was because of the ThinkGlobal Retail Conference, which was fantastic. It was Phil Leahy, Melbourne bloke, who organized the conference over there. And it was a really interesting conference for me in that I got to hear people like the likes of Brett Tabke. Tabke? I’m saying his name wrong. You know what I mean. Brett from PubCon.

He just gave this immense presentation on all the developments that are now happening. Talked a lot about Google, but I think the most interesting part of his talk for me anyway was what’s happening with VR now. It’s going insane. And there are going to be psychologists who are just going to make a living from unplugging people from VR units. It’s like; have you ever read any Red Dwarf? It’s better than life. VR units, basically is where we’re heading.

And then Marty Weintraub from AimClear, who is just a big brain when it comes to search. Great catching up with him and listening to some of the things that he said.

We caught up with Facebook. Facebook was on the panel that I was talking on as well. Talking about…I asked them point blank about conversion optimization and they…well, conversion metrics, as according to Facebook. And I thought they were a little bit rubbery. We’ll bring you some more about that in the next two weeks. I just want to get some clarification from Facebook on that.

But one of the people that went there…and I spoke to a lot of people and we looked at a lot of sites. We had a booth there and talked to a lot of people about their SEO and what was wrong. It was always the same common problems, especially for people who have had professional SEO done before. Usually it starts with, “Okay, we’re going to remove all your back links that have been created by these professional SEO companies.” But then there was one there, Susie from Shop 603 whose site I didn’t get to on the day. But she’s since come back into the Facebook group.

Incidentally there’s an excellent Facebook group just search “ThinkGlobal Retail” in Facebook and you’ll find that Facebook group. I think it’s open to anyone to join. And you can ask a lot of questions to the professionals in that group, of which there are many. Great group.

But Shop 603 now, Susie has said to me as early as, or as late as five minutes ago, “Thank you so much. We are like virgins,” when it comes to setting up the site and getting it found in Google and AdWords and all those sorts of things. Now Shop 360. I’m just going to…great looking site. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a great converting site. The thing that worries me a little bit about the site when I first open it up like this, is that we’ve got a massive image at the top of the page.

And you may know someone else’s site that is a little bit like that, which is about to get changed in the very near future. But what worries me about something like that, having a big home page like that. If we have a look and see how Google sees it as the text only version, the dominant thing on this page right now is, “Follow Us on Instagram.” Okay?

There’s no keywords, no heading tags, any of that sort of stuff on that home page. And really nothing about what it is you do. We’ve got sort of a couple of brand name type things here, Pool Party. But we don’t have any of our keywords in just straight text. There’s nothing in there that tells us about the shop and what the shop sells. And that’s what we want on that front page. That’s one of the first things that certainly stands out.

When I do a site call on Shop603.com, I’m seeing 489 results there. When I do a crawl with Screaming Frog…if I just switch to the HTML…and this is just the page that we’ve crawled here. We’ll just start that up again. Now what we want as we spoke about a couple of weeks ago, we want the number of pages on the site…or in the case of an eCommerce site like Shop 603, we want the number of SKU’s if you like…to closely match the number of pages that have actually been indexed. And we want that also to match the site map that we’ve submitted to Google.

Now my guess is Susie, because you’ve said that you are quite new to all this that we don’t actually even have a site map set up. So let’s just go and have a look. We’ll get back to this page title in a moment, which is a bit ugly. So typically we’ll find the site map at…incidentally live on Periscope again today.

Not that many people there, because we didn’t promote it. Because I didn’t know if I was going to be able because we got so sick. I was hoping to be able to do the show last week, but I had to miss. That’s the first show I’ve missed in eight years, not doing a show last week. Yeah, site map is this. And we’ve got…let’s see. How many site maps within this site map? We’ve got a few. So let me just see if I can bring up one of those, because what I’m looking for is I want to see that the…

Yeah, this is an auto-generated one from Shopify, which is what the site is on. And we don’t have nearly enough…no, we don’t have nearly enough pages in this site map, by the looks of it. I’ll just go back and have a look and see where…Yeah. No, this is a…it doesn’t look like we’ve got product, product-level indexed. Oh, I see. Yes, we have, but it’s not very good. So that site map configuration certainly needs work.

And okay. So this is the main one. So what I want to find out is how many products are in this site map? And we’ve got 630-…no, we haven’t. Because what we want to see is the same amount in…So we got 158 products in this site map. So I’m guessing that’s how many products you’ve got. This is an auto-generated site map. When I go and have a look at the Screaming Frog, it’s crawled 469 pages. So what I would hope to see in here is a bunch of them no-indexed. But we don’t have any now indexed.

So… [coughs] Excuse me. That’s bad. Still got the flu. It’s what I do for you. I’m here working, you know, not well. And if I go and have a look at the back at the index, so we’ve said 158 here products in the site map. I’ve crawled 469 pages. Right there we’ve got a problem. We’ve got too many pages being able to be crawled when I compare it to the site map.

So one of those numbers is wrong. Either 158 is wrong or the 469 is wrong in the Screaming Frog. So they have to equal one another. And then when I go and have a look at, of course, the Google index…hey, do you love the new Google logo? They’ve got a lot of people working for them, so they must have researched it. Anyway, yeah, good on them. Someone said it looked like the eBay logo. I thought that was very funny.

So over 489 results, we’ve crawled 469, but we’ve only got 158 pages in the site map. So I would say there’s something wrong there. But look, one of the things right off the bat here that just stands out apart from the mismatch of pages in site map verses the pages index and those sorts of things is the home page title. It’s not doing anything for us. It doesn’t have any keywords in it.

So the page title is the first thing that Google sees on the page, and your home page is probably your most important page. This site feels like it’s loading slowly. I’m going to check that in a tool in a second just to see. So our page title, if we have a look here, is pretty useless really when it comes to actually ranking for anything. It basically says, our brand name, we’re in Fort Lauderdale. It’s wasted use of real…keyword, real estate. Still can’t talk. I’m blaming the jet lag, incidentally, in case I didn’t point that out earlier.

So it says, “Shop 603, trendiest boutique on Las Olas Blvd.” Yeah, well, we probably don’t need…and then we’ve got it in the description as well. So we’ve just basically popped it in the page title. We’ve popped the same thing in the description of the home page. This description of the home page, as I’ve pointed out previously is your sales pitch. You’ve got to entice people to click here. You’ve got to stand out from everybody else in the page.

It’s not clear here yet what you want a rank for. I’m guessing it’s something to do with shorts and clothing and those sorts of things, but there’s nothing here on this home page that tells me exactly what you want a rank for. Now presumably you’re number one for this, because you’re the only site in the known universe that’s actually got this on their site, so there we go.

So we’ve got Google Places set up, which is great. But we don’t need this in our page title and we certainly don’t need it in the description tag either. When I go to one of the product pages, a couple of things stand out pretty quickly. We’re actually having…okay, let’s go to this Flirty Florals blouse. Let’s have a look here. Okay, that looks like…okay, now what immediately…I think this is my browser. I need to upgrade to the faster, quicker, new Google Chrome, which I haven’t done yet.

So what sticks out here is your use of heading tags. We’ve got this on every page, every product page, Shop 603. We don’t need that. It’s not helping us. People already know that they’re here. So this is a setting in Shopify that can be changed. We’ve got this Flirty Florals blouse as a h1, which is great except that we’ve got this Shop 603 here as a h2.

And then over here we’ve got ‘More in this Collection’ as a h4. I’m not that worried about that. It’s a wasted h4. But for me, what I want to get rid of first is this Shop 603. And if I go…what I want to do is check to see and make sure that this product description is unique. Well, you’re ranking number one for it, so there must be your product descriptions, which is a win, great. You’ve got your own unique product descriptions. That’s what you have to do.

I notice you also have a blog. I don’t know what your content strategy is for that, but get onto that. Get onto that and set up in a calendar on…”Good day,” someone…oh, Bam-Kapow has just come on, on Periscope, by the way. Yeah, get onto that blog. Get an editorial calendar set in place to at least once a week. Try to do 500 words per article if you can. If not, at least 300. Throw some images up there as well.

And one thing that I would always go and check too, when you’re on a hosted service like a Shopify is going to have a look at your page speed insights, because you may find that you need to upgrade that level of hosting that you’re on for Shopify.

So I’ll just quickly go into here. We’ll throw in…This is one of the things that always annoys me about Google, is that it penalizes everyone with panel dropdowns and those sorts of things for things being difficult to navigate and that sort of stuff, and yet their own products suck at it. Anyway, shop603.com. Why do I need that landing page? Why can’t I just come straight to this page? Anyway, don’t get me started.

Okay, so we’ll just see what Google says. What we’re looking for her here is a score of at least 80 out of 100. If you can get 95 out of 100, fantastic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen 44 out of 100. Well, on a mobile, it’s not great. We’re at 44 out of 100. And on a desktop, we are 51 out of 100. Lots to fix here. That means the site’s slow. Google doesn’t want to send its users to slow sites.

It’s also going to mean you’re going to have lower conversions, and one of the main things that we always see here is optimizing your images. We got some big images in there and we reduce the size of them by 90%, according to Google. So you want to go and do that. And look, if you’re on Word Press, there’s some great plugins that will go through and retrospectively compress all your images.

But you’re in Shopify so there’s not, I don’t think, but you might want to check that. But get in there and compress all those images and you will find that as soon as you do that you’ll automatically get a jump in the rankings if you can get up to about 80, from where you currently are. We don’t know what you want to rank for yet though, so there’s nothing clear on the site that says, “These are the phrases we want to rank for.” You need to establish that and get that in your home page title before you do anything else.

Hopefully that’s helpful. And we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.