Video Transcript – SEO & WordPress Permalinks

SEO & WordPress Permalinks – original post here

Hey Rankers! Having a good week? I want to tell you a little bit first about a webinar that’s coming up on November 26th. It’s about site migration. I’m doing it with our head of development, Jine Wu. She’s just celebrated her sixth year with us actually. Jine is the genius behind me actually. Jine’s going to be taking that along with me. I’ll be asking Jine. Basically, I’ll be interviewing Jine about site migration. This is when you take an existing site, decide to move it to a new site, and decide to change all the URLs and everything like that. That can kill you unless you do it properly.

This is Periscope people up here. If you see me talking up here, it’s people on Periscope.

What could happen with a site migration is that it could actually kill a business if it’s done badly, because Google will just not understand what you’re doing and blow it away. We’ve seen it happen to a number of businesses. There are a number of horror stories out there. We still see it happening to this day.

We’re going to do a free webinar on it Thursday November 26th at 11:00 a.m. If you want to be a part of that, I think we only have 50 seats. I don’t know, maybe 100. If you want to be a part of that then you just need to sign up to the newsletter at stewartmedia.com.au and we’ll make sure you get an email and let you know when that’s on.

I’ve been doing a series of shows on doing SEO tweaks and using the product that I’m working on which is the bloggersSEO System to show and to demonstrate certain things. A few weeks ago, we did some tweaks on one client’s site and it went up to number one yesterday. Back at number two today. That was simply by…You can see here. Here’s the graph. We look at it over time. This is the one that I showed you about a month ago where when I started the project this particular key phrase was outside the…It was about page three or something like that. It went to number one yesterday and then dropped back to number two today. It’s been about number two for about the last two weeks, three weeks.

That was simply by adding title elements actually to the target page. I did a show on that and how I was going to add all those title elements and Alt tags and all those sorts of things. That was just tweaking a target page. That one went up to number one. Back at number two. Hope to get it back up to number one in the next couple of days.

The other one was the Healthy Thermomix. I did that was it two weeks ago? Might’ve been last week, two weeks ago. It went up to number four and it went as high as number three. Back at number four today. We’ll get it back up higher. This is where I thought it would finish up by doing the changes that we did.

The changes that we did were really interesting that made this difference. That was simply by changing the URL structure. This is something common in many WordPress sites. I’ll just bring up our own one. Sometimes you’ll see a URL structure where you’ll have the domain name and then you’ll have archives and then you’ll have a date, or you’ll have a date and then you’ll have the post name. This is the permalink structure. You can change all that. I would strongly advise that you do, but you’ve got to be careful how you do it.

For us the best permalink structure is domain name, post name. That’s it. Nothing in between. That’s what I did for Skinnymixers, and she went from 9s and 10s to 4s and 3s by making that one change. Here’s the thing. Here’s the interesting thing. The target page that was ranking at number nine and ten and is ranking at three and four is the same target page. It never had the date in the URL.

In WordPress under your general settings…Bugger, it’s going to make me log in. I’m not going to go to that one. I’ll go to another one. I won’t show you on this one because I can’t log in. I can, I just have to go and get the password.

In WordPress under your permalink settings, you get an option where you can say what the URL structure or the permalink structure should be like. The one that works best is the one that is just domain name, post name. We jumped, well, essentially seven spots just by doing that. Didn’t do anything else. That’s all I changed, and it jumped up that much.

The change that we made didn’t actually affect the page that was ranking. It just affected all the other pages around it. It affected all the other pages that were linking to our target page. All that we can put it down to, and we do these things because we say look it just makes more sense for the user to get rid of the date and all the rest of it. Because one of the things that can happen if you see a date in a URL, if it’s an old date you may not think it’s current. You may not click on it. It can affect your click through rate, which as we know can affect your ranking. Your click through rate does have a bearing on your ranking.

By removing that date field in the URL every other page on the site, all of the sudden had more authority for the keywords that they were targeting, so each page had more authority. The upshot of that is that the page that it’s linking to, our target page, also jumped up significantly.

What that equates to in traffic…I’ll just show you that. Make sure I don’t show you…What I’m showing here at the moment people on Periscope, is what happens to the Google organic traffic the difference between say number ten and up to number 3s and 4s. I’m just going to take this back to when I started working on the site. When I started working on this site…Skinnymixers is an awesome site. She’s just doing gangbusters. This traffic increase isn’t solely what I’ve done. She’s been doing a lot of work as well getting the name out there and all those sorts of things. There’s a lot of brand related search with Skinnymixers.

When we started, we were getting about 1800 to 2000 sessions a day. Now we’re doing 3800 sessions a day. You can see there’s a spike there. That’s when we hit page one. No, this is when we hit page one, and this is when we went up to number four. Bump in traffic getting on page one, and then doubling from when we started. This one little change can take you from top of page two bottom of page one to the top of page one, providing obviously everything else has to be right.

That surprised even me getting that amount of a jump in traffic. I thought that was immense, huge, and pretty exciting actually. You can do the calculations for yourself. What I would do normally if it was an eCommerce site, I’d say okay, well your eCommerce conversion rate is X percent. If we increase traffic by Y percent then your revenue increase should be X. These are simple calculations you can make. That is significant.

When I started doing this…Well, yeah, her organic traffic has doubled. Her direct traffic has not. Her referral traffic has not doubled in the same period. Certainly, she’s contributed to some of this traffic increase but certainly been at numbers threes and fours for a really important key phrase. Of course, it’s not just that key phrase. All related key phrases around that key phrase also get a bit of a boost as well.

That’s why this notion of hey we’ve got to target five key phrases, no, we’ve got to target the whole site and optimize the whole site for the content that it has. We’re going to tell you how to write great content or we’re going to write great content for you. As an effect of doing all those things, all the traffic increases. It’s not just oh, these five phrases. You might have some hero phrases. The phrases are more about sensors to measure how the SEO is going.

That’s it for this week’s show. Hopefully that’s helpful. See you next week. See you at the webinar. Thanks very much. Bye.