53 - The Importance of SEO Audits

Episode Transcript:

Catelin: you're the MGM lion this morning.

Rich: I was doing, yeah, I'm very yawny in the MGM lion. We watched, um, I can't remember what movie we watched, but I always forget that Amazon bought MGM and it's like Amazon Studios, MGM and something else, but it was the lion and the dogs didn't bark at it, which was great.

Catelin: Dorothy, when we watched the Wizard of Oz. She's like, that's a lion. And I'm like, it is that. So like when I was younger, the lion at the beginning of the wizard of Oz was more scary to me than the flying monkeys,

Rich: the lion, like the MGM lion or the except on

Catelin: the wizard of Oz. It's all spelled out. Metro golden, golden, golden mayor.

Catelin: Yeah. L

Rich: D W Y. Yup. Oh, good times. Good times. Then it became a casino. Then Amazon bought it. It did become

Catelin: a casino.

Rich: Mm hmm. The MGM brand. All right. So we're not here to talk about, uh, lions and tigers and bears no more. Oh my. We're here to talk about SEO. Let's do it. Today. So we'll try to maybe ramble a little.

Rich: We're not going to ramble a little less. Let's just be honest. I don't think it's possible. We're going to change it all over the place. It's like a

Catelin: warm up game.

Rich: Yeah, so I had, we had friends in town this weekend from San Diego and one of them, he, uh, he works in HR and training, but he listens to our podcast.

Rich: He's like, I don't care about the marketing. He's like, half the time you guys don't talk about marketing anyway. And I'm like, okay. He's like, it's just entertaining. And I was like, why

Catelin: hasn't he left us a message yet?

Rich: Exactly. I said, call the hotline, Caitlin will be so excited. I would be

Catelin: so thrilled. Oh my God.

Catelin: And he

Rich: actually had like a legit question, but he's like, I don't know if this is something you'd cover. I'm like, if you call the hotline, we will make an episode around it. Whatever it is. I don't care.

Catelin: We'll talk about whatever you want us to talk about. I was going to say it,

whatever it is, we will cover

Rich: it.

Rich: Okay. We'll just cut it and see, you need to call, call. Yeah. Zach broke the, uh, the third wall, I guess, or fourth wall. Is it, or is it like the second wall? Cause it's just audio. Like, I mean, it's video too, but whatever. Um, all right. So today we're talking SEO. Uh, Lylee is back with us. It's SEO audit specifically, so how do you know if your SEO sucks or is great?

Catelin: Or is medium and you could hire us to help you get it to be great.

Rich: Correct. It's actually easier to deal with. Well, even none is better than bad. And I'm sure Radley will talk about that. Like if you get a negative score on an audit, we're probably just going to, no, it's going to be a torture site start over.

Rich: Honestly, yeah, I mean, even with a new domain, it would be easier.

Okay,

Rich: so he's going to talk about why doing regular SEO audits, so it's not a do it and forget it, just like websites, you can't set it and forget it. Uh, why they're important for maintaining and improving your search engine rankings. Yes. Um, what the heck an audit is, and how you do them, and then some tips for conducting an effective one as well.

Rich: I love that. And also, throwback to last week how an SEO audit and what you do from it can help you optimize your website performance and make everybody happy.

Catelin: They just, they're, they're amazing. It's all like, and I think I'm going to, it's all, it's all connected. And I think that's what I've learned more and more, like, especially through helping clients.

Catelin: Like we, you know, when we talk about an SEO audit and though the performance of your website and the like performance of your organic social, like those things all work in tandem and it's like weaving a little. A little basket together instead of like, trying to pull the string, you know, yeah. Yeah, and ignoring any aspect

Rich: of that is not great.

Rich: And what's fun is in SE Audit covers a whole lot of the things that we talked about last week in a website. So it's a really great, like, follow up to that one. Mm-Hmm. . If you're looking at your website and you're like, I don't know if it's good or not, like just you'll hear, hear how to do it. Uh, or at the end you can just give ri a call.

Rich: Well, you can't really call him. He doesn't have a number here. Mm-Hmm. Uh, you can drop call, drop us an email, call me and we'll forward it to her. . You can call Caitlyn. Yeah. She's on the tree. So am I.

Catelin: Yeah. Don't, don't call ri don't email ri. Um, you can come to me ,

Rich: or just drop us a note on the podcast and we'll, uh.

Rich: We'll make sure he gets it. Yeah. Um, okay. So today, uh, I feel like I

Catelin: want to, the segue here is don't torch your website. Tiki torch it.

Rich: Okay. I think, I don't know if Riley on his own likes a good Tiki bar. I know Zach does and Zach and Riley are friends. So I don't know if Riley's just Tiki by association or if he like legit would do a Tiki bar on his own.

Rich: I think it's probably maybe 50 50. I think he's more of a. Go ahead.

Catelin: Here's my, here's my theory. I think Zach is a tiki bar.

Rich: Oh, 100%.

Catelin: And Riley is like a, like a chill, like wine bar. Like a cocktail bar with like a low table and the, like dim lights and just like a, like a vibe y scenario. And Zach is like, let's do some weird rum drinks.

Catelin: Like, but then they both, they're both like on board to try the thing that the other person likes because they, they like the

Rich: challenge. Although, no, your in home bartender is the same personality at like the cool craft cocktail bar or the tiki bar. It's just the drinks he gets are slightly different.

Rich: Yeah, he'll be like, what's your bourbon and whiskey selection at the craft and, you know, at the Tiki bar, it's like,

Catelin: freaky rum drink. Yeah. We love an overproof rum. I mean, I don't, but he loves an overproof rum drink. Oh,

Rich: I do too though. I mean, that, that black strap is so good. Um, it gets you in trouble though, especially if you're floating in the pool, but I digress.

Catelin: So, um, the, this drink is, uh, something that sweet Zach tried on a whim, uh, in his, uh, now current home location, Charlotte, and well, not currently. Yeah, he lived, it's not important. Yeah, he lives there. It's near Charlotte. The Charlotte

Rich: area, the Charlotte metro area. It's fine. They're not as crazy about like suburbs versus city as

Catelin: Chicago is.

Catelin: Okay. Got it. Uh, enjoyed the spicy, sweet, and tropical flavors of the Tiki Torch. It was originally created at Little Branch in New York City, and it can be made with tequila or white rum. So this is a versatile little. little gal. I feel

Rich: like we should try it with both. I think we have both in the office, don't we?

Rich: I know we have tequila in the office. There's

Catelin: plenty of tequila. I don't think we have any white rum.

Rich: I don't think so either. I'm looking at the bottle tops because I can see the bar from here and I see the tequila one very clearly because it's white and blue and has a big silver ball on the top. So that one is clear.

Rich: Okay. I digress. Go ahead. It

Catelin: is. Six dashes of Cholula sauce, a pinch of cayenne pepper, three quarters of an ounce fresh lime juice, three quarters of an ounce honey syrup. Two ounces of tequila or white rum. I feel like this might also be interesting with like an ounce of tequila and an ounce of mezcal.

Catelin: If you wanted like a, like a hot smoky thing. Oh, I mean,

Rich: if you want a smoky torch, if you want the mosquito, like smoke, smoky tiki

Catelin: torch, could

Rich: you, let's just go all the way and you could just do a, you could do a, like a squeeze a lemon in it and make it a citronella tiki torch. There you go. I don't know if the lemon

Catelin: might be weird though.

Catelin: Like, I think there's

Rich: lime juice in it though.

Catelin: Yeah. Sometimes, like, uh, yeah, anyway. Um, and then half an ounce of passion fruit syrup or fresh passion fruit. Um, passion fruits are so interesting to me. They're this like purpley. Yeah. But you open them. They're weird. Yeah. They're so

Rich: weird.

Catelin: Uh, so in a shaker, you're going to combine the Cholula, cayenne, lime juice, honey, syrup, passion fruit, and your spirit of choice or two spirits of choice.

Catelin: If you want to be, um,

Rich: basically Everything. All of it.

Catelin: Uh, shake vigorously and strain into a rocks glass with a single large cube, and then you can garnish with a lime wedge and a dusting of, of cayenne pepper. The dusting might put it over the top for

Rich: me.

Catelin: I don't know. I suppose you could want that on the Yeah, I mean, but it's torch, right?

Catelin: Yeah.

Rich: That's, I mean, the cayenne pepper, the cholula, and the dusting, that's the torch part of it. And I think if you don't like spicy, just don't do this. It's totally fine. Mm hmm. Um. So when you talk about large ice cubes, there was a, it was a YouTube video or a TikTok video, I don't know, it was some video that was on somebody's reel somewhere that Facebook decided I should look at, or Instagram did, and it's this dude at like, like one of those like high end Japanese like steakhouses or sushi bars, and he takes like a rough piece of ice and he cuts it into a diamond, and it is the most cool thing I have seen with ice in a long time.

Rich: Aside from like the people who carve them with chainsaws, but that's a whole nother level. But like he was making the drink and cut the ice into a diamond, put it in the glass and it's wide enough that it doesn't fall over. And he spun the diamond and then spun the glass the other way. And it was like, I was like, please pour me a cocktail in that.

Rich: I want it now. That's

Catelin: cool. One of the places, one of the places we go in, Or we've gone to in Nashville. Um, they just do large, they just do the big chunks of ice and then they like, we'll chop them basically. Like they all have like a little pick, all the bartenders have a little pick in their pocket and they just like, and into the glass or like they crush their own ice right there.

Catelin: It's wild. So.

Rich: Oh yeah, there's the video. Zach has it. Zach, we need to post that, post a link to that in the comments or in the description. Is

Catelin: his night, is it hot?

Rich: I think it must be, I don't know. But see that it's all spinning right there, like in the front.

Catelin: How did you just like that so fast?

Rich: He's yeah. Oh, he's seen it before and probably had it saved.

Rich: I love that you

Catelin: two are in the same algorithm or that they're like crossing.

Rich: I mean, you know, we have the same hair. You know, we're the same age. Yeah, totally. Those things are true. We kind of have the same complexion. Like, we both sunburn easily, I think. But that's probably where the similarities, and aside from our algorithm, our algorithm serves up the same stuff, so that's very exciting.

Catelin: Shall we? Oh, we should

Rich: give, well, we should give credit. That recipe came from, I think it's called savour. com, s a v e u r dot com. It makes me think of Emily in Paris. Uh, and occasionally makes them up. So this one though, you had it a bar, and then you had to go Google it to figure out. What's in it. Is that what happened?

Rich: Okay. Um, so Zach reverse engineered this one with the help of sevouir. com. Cause I found, um, some bartenders will tell you what's in a drink and some bartenders are like, that's rude. You shouldn't ask. Oh, interesting. Like some of them, it's like this proprietary secret. Um, and then, you know, last time I was, uh, having a craft cocktail at a hotel bar, I taught the bartender how to do it.

Rich: And I think I sent that one to Zach. Like it's some riffs on the, um, Last word. Oh, yeah, yeah. Riffs on the last word and you'll love it because they take out the chartreuse and replace it with Aperol.

Beautiful.

Rich: Um, and so hopefully we'll do one of those on an upcoming episode. I would like to put that request in formally.

Catelin: Yes. All right. Now it's been recorded so it's official. Uh. It has

Rich: been. All right. He's got it. So. Yeah, break time?

Catelin: I think so. Enjoy your dance break. Gimme a break, gimme a break. Oh my god.

Rich: Alright, and we are back. We're back. And we have Mr. Riley Collins with us from a room not too far from me. Um, since I am in the Sioux City office today. Uh, quite literally. Yes. Exciting. Uh, Riley, how are you? Good. How are you guys doing? We're alright, we're alright. Riley's always super chatty. We'll get him warmed up here though.

Rich: Yes, yes. It takes a little bit of warming up. Alright, so we're talking SEO audits, dude. It's

Catelin: your wheelhouse, man. Let's do it. What is, what is an SEO audit?

Riley: Yeah, what is it,

Rich: first

Riley: of all? So, SEO audits, they can range from a lot of different stuff. Um, usually they can start very small, so they could just be, you know, just a page, if you want to just run an audit just for a specific page.

Riley: Yeah. But you can also do them site wide. Usually when people talk about an SEO audit, you talk about site wide and a lot of different, um, components kind of go into that. Um, a lot of the times it kind of specifies down to technical and on page stuff. So, it's basically what an SEO audit is. It kind of, you run it and then it gives you a very generalized, uh, you know, what your issues are.

Riley: Um, What some warnings might be, some things to look out for, all that kind of fun stuff.

Catelin: Can you give me just an example of like a technical thing that might come up in an audit when you talk about technical or on page for those of us and the audience that might not be as familiar?

Riley: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I know, I

Catelin: know the answer, but you know.

Catelin: Can

Riley: you guess what I'm going to say then?

Catelin: Uh, I would go with like your page, like your title tags, like H1s, H1s, H2s. That technically is on page,

Riley: but, um, something that's technical would be like page speed. So like something that might be blocking your page from loading correctly. So it'd be like your image sizes or exactly.

Catelin: Yeah. Cool. Okay. Extra JavaScript. See, I knew.

Catelin: How important is that? I mean, like, yeah. Just on a scale of like one to five, just to make things interesting.

Riley: On everything or just like the technical pieces?

Catelin: Like the, if you're going to run an audit, like how important is that?

Riley: I would say it's pretty important, especially for like a baseline. Um, usually we run them right at the beginning of like a kind of client relationship just to see, you know, where we're at.

Riley: Um, I know Rich might've mentioned it before. What are we getting into? Exactly. Um, But, you know, we don't, we want to know where you're at first before we can actually diagnose you. You know, that's, you know, when you go to the doctors and all that kind of stuff, they ask you, you know, what hurts or all that kind of stuff, you know, they can't just diagnose you just by looking at you.

Riley: Um, so

Rich: yeah, I'd have to, we have a spreadsheet, so I'd have to look at the spreadsheet, but I think the technical side is weighted at either 20 or 25%. It's a pretty big amount. There's some other stuff that's like 5 percent and 10%, like it's pretty small. Um, same thing we would do a social media audit. Yeah.

Rich: But, um, you know, certain things are bigger than others and are madder more. Um, but yeah, I don't even know. I created that spreadsheet too.

Catelin: You don't have it memorized. That's,

Rich: I don't use it anymore. Riley and Jamie do them. Um, I haven't done an SEO audit in probably a couple of years. Because they've gotten so good

Catelin: at them.

Catelin: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: Yeah, no, no, it's good. And I think that, you know, we've got a system down that we, we do the technical side on the spreadsheet, and it's an ugly spreadsheet. You put a bunch of numbers in, it kicks out a number, kicks out some categories, but then our design team takes It links it and makes it actually look better.

Rich: Um, you know Zac we could probably post our example one that we have. Um, I think we did one for us a while ago we could post that here. So you can see what the end result is which is really cool. Um, So, Why would I do an SEO audit? Like why would I? What am I going to get out of it? So you like lay of the land?

Rich: Yes. So you said regular SEO audits, or we said it, I guess, because that was part of what was in the, in the notes in the beginning that Zach provided to us. So why would I do these regularly instead of just do it once and be done?

Riley: Yeah. Um, you know, a lot of, I guess a lot of people might. I think that it's a set it and forget it kind of situation where you get a baseline and you kind of just roll with it.

Riley: But I know Jamie and I here do, uh, often audits, especially the page audits, just because SEO is an ever growing thing. Um, it's not just a one time deal. So you gotta always evolve. You have to know, you know, if issues arise at a given time, because like websites break, it happens. Random stuff might pop up.

Riley: So it's always good to know if you have issues that pop up or crop up. Um, and to know, you know, when they might've started, um, how you can diagnose them, like all that kind of stuff. It's just knowing, getting a constant baseline of what's going on on your website. Um, cause again, you know, you can't just do one and then think that everything is fine and nothing is ever going to break again.

Riley: Cause that's, you know, unrealistic really. But

Rich: yeah. Yeah. I think I want to jump into something you said a minute ago as well. Um, so you've talked about like page audits and site audits. So your site has its kind of SEO profile, but talk to me about individual pages and why you would actually dive into an individual page.

Rich: Like what prompts that?

Riley: Yeah, definitely. Um, usually doing individual pages is more for like keyword analysis and knowing, um, Um, what keywords are ranking or if your keyword isn't ranking to where you want it to be ranking, what is holding it back, all that kind of stuff. Um, usually those will highlight, those will include like your title tags, your H1s, H2s, H3s and so on.

Riley: Um, how many times you've included your keyword, where you can optimize it better. Are you including images and video, like all that kind of fun stuff. Um, but yeah, that's usually what page audits are. That's a big difference where they get more keyword focused. Whereas if you do a whole website, it's more technical focused.

Rich: Yep. Right, because your site, I mean the site is important and how the site looks to Google or whoever is important. But when I get a search result, a SERP if we will, Um, It takes me to an individual page, right? I don't just get taken to your site and I've got to go wander. It takes me to an actual page.

Rich: And so I think that's something that a lot of people don't necessarily know is you can, you can really optimize the heck out of a single page. Um, and it can become more important than your, your website. Um, and you can actually start to see that page move up faster and it also will lift the website, right?

Rich: So I remember one time we had, um, a client, this has been a few years ago who. They were starting to rank for a term for one of their services, but they were like the seventies or eighties, but it broke the top 100 and their competitors were ranking for it all over the place. And we went to them and we're like, Hey, like this is a part of another page.

Rich: You need to make a dedicated page for this. Here's what it should look like. Here's all the content you need to put on it. Um, you know, here's how not to overdo it, but here's how to make sure that it works. Um, and, you know, a little back and forth. But we, they were like, okay, sure. Like, let's make the page.

Rich: Um, and we did and their rank just shot way up. Right.

Riley: Yeah, definitely. Okay,

Rich: no one can hear you nodding. You have to say yes. Oh, yeah. Um, he was nodding, folks. He was nodding.

Catelin: I think, um, where that comes up to a lot of the times in ongoing client relationships is with blog posts. When we talk about, like, writing good, relevant, ongoing content, um, a blog is technically An individual page of your website, even though it doesn't necessarily have like specific navigation in the menu.

Catelin: Um, but that's one of the things that we found a ton of success with is like taking a successful blog or something that's performing well and then just pushing it a little bit farther to say like, Here's how we can make this kind of continue to bubble up in search results.

Rich: And I think, um, that leads me to like, you know, we didn't, we didn't have to do an audit to see this.

Rich: We can actually just see in our tracking. But, uh, if you don't, if you aren't purposeful about your SEO and if you're not doing an audit and doing a keyword plan, things can happen accidentally. Um, and we'll talk about penalties in a minute because those can definitely happen, um, but one of our number one rankings is for a blog that Zach did about late night eats in Omaha.

Rich: Um, and it is a fantastic list of where to go like for food, like around bar time or after bar or like just anywhere. You know, at night, um, as evidenced by the fact that it gets a ton of views and it's our number one ranking thing to the point where like SEO tools and AI think that we're like a food website and a food blog and it's like, no, we had like three food posts, but that's what really resonated.

Rich: And then I think the key to that is how do we leverage that into. What we actually do, which is marketing. Not, I mean, okay. So you could argue that we're like amateur food bloggers. Um, we love food. Um, But you can start to rank for things that don't matter to your business, but are cool. And that's great, but you've got to then bring that around.

Rich: Um, and so that's something that would, like, show up in an audit that we might say to a client as a negative. It's like, hey, your number one ranking is something that has negative value. So, um, that's great and it's bringing traffic to your site and you might happen to come across a marketing director in Omaha who wants to eat something late at night and then wanders off and sees the rest of your site.

Rich: Um, but that's, uh, That can also be a problem. Um, so what about penalties though? So like Google will penalize you. We know that, um, you talked about your keyword being there enough. You don't want it there too much. So what are some ways that audits can help look for things where you might be getting a penalty from Google?

Riley: Yeah, definitely. Um, one of the biggest things that I've seen a lot of the time is usually it's on the technical side and on the on page side. Um, we've seen before time and time again, where. Either clients or past clients might have pages that look really good to the eye, but you run an audit and it's like, Oh, well, one of these headings Isn't actually a heading.

Riley: It's a paragraph. It should be a heading or Yeah, these headings look fine, but they're actually listed as multiple H1s Which can be a penalty because you know, you see multiple H1s confuses the heck out of Google and all that kind of stuff Uh oh

Catelin: It's also confusing to like a screen reader or like I always go back to an accessibility standpoint.

Catelin: Like if that's one thing that you can remember is to just make it as easy as possible for like the simplest of technology to understand what's on your site. Like you have one H1, you can have several H2s, you can have several H3s, but only one H1 for the love of Pete.

Rich: Yeah, it's your, well it's not your title tag, that's a different thing, but you only have one of those two.

Rich: And we have seen multiple title tags on sites, which is always exciting. It's like having four titles on your essay that you, like, turn in, like, your professor's not going to take that, uh, if you're in college.

Riley: Yeah, definitely. And that's a good point, Cameron. Um, to, yeah. Sorry to cut you off, rich, but thank you so much.

Riley: Oh, it's fine. Wonder? It's a good point because it's like, sometimes it's not the stuff that's top of mind that is also there. Mm-Hmm. . So, you know, your accessibility. Not, a lot of times people look at their website and think about accessibility, but it still is a pretty big thing, especially if you have the readers and all that kind of stuff where Mm-Hmm.

Riley: stuff can get misconstrued or, um. confusing when it's reading out. It's more difficult to understand. Exactly. When you keep hearing, you know, here's a title, here's a title one, here's a title one, like all that kind of stuff. And it's like, well, what's the actual title? I don't know what's going on, you know?

Riley: It's all about, um, you know, just knowing that there's more beyond the one thing that you're focusing on as well. Um, and if you do it proper, you know, It can benefit you in multiple ways. Yes. In some ways that you're not even thinking about.

Rich: Yeah, that's, that's almost a whole episode, like how SEO and accessibility go hand in hand.

Rich: If you're doing one of them correctly, you're probably really close to doing the other one correctly, um, especially for like the screen readers and things like that. Um, high contrast, maybe, maybe not, but, um, definitely on the screen reader side. Um, I think the other thing is, like, if we did an audit of a site today, and we did an audit of a site six months from now, Um, it wouldn't be the same number, right?

Rich: Necessarily. No, it wouldn't. Um,

Catelin: One would hope that things had changed.

Rich: Well, no, but I mean, even if I did nothing with the site, Oh, interesting. I'll be gonna go down. Because Google's not static. They make changes all the time. They're constant. And it is important. So that's another reason is. It is important to know like,

Riley: you know, we're going to get like the tool side later, but, you know, with the numbers and like kind of stuff fluctuating, you may or may not.

Riley: It's good to run multiple audits at a given time, especially if you are using like free tools, because a lot of times they do have limited numbers that you can actually crawl to or page numbers that you can crawl to. So if you exceed that number, you know, you're only seeing a given. section of your website.

Riley: So it is important to do it multiple times just to see what kind of comes of it because, you know, if you patch half your website and think you're good to go you still have another half of your website that's not fixed, you know, it still isn't optimized. Yeah.

Rich: Yeah. And we pay for those tools. So we do a total site.

Rich: Like, I mean, sometimes sites are like 000, 10, 000 pages. E commerce sites are the worst because there's a lot of dynamic pages for variations and other stuff.

Oh yeah.

Rich: But it is important. Yeah. But I mean, most e commerce sites like, and that's why I like Shopify when I've had folks on e commerce, I've done a few stores there because you can put in the right, if you put in the right tools at the like, Variation level for color and for size and things it's gonna auto populate and it's gonna look right when it when it creates those pages

Catelin: Yeah, I I think that's what's so important to is like some of this stuff can be fixed down the road But some of the the really technical pieces it's important to get right from the start because otherwise you're gonna just spend so much time untangling just like a shitty ball of yarn that has been.

Catelin: Oh, you know, URL structure is

Rich: the worst.

Catelin: Yeah, exactly. You end up with like a thousand redirects and you, it's just, yeah, it, yuck, yuck,

Rich: yuck.

Mm hmm. A

Rich: hundred percent.

Catelin: Yeah. However, we're happy to do it for you. Just know that.

Rich: Well, and it's, I think if you come to us and you've got, if you've had 10, 000 pages and you've got a flat URL structure.

Rich: There's one work in defining that new URL structure and what it should be to make sense. So products are all under one and like products are together. I think you use the example, Caitlin, of like on a retail site. It's like, so I go to women's clothing, I go to dresses, I go to dresses with pockets, and then I go to an individual.

Rich: Well, all of that nesting is part of their SEO. And so if I'm looking for dresses, It'll take me ideally to the dresses page, but if you're looking for dresses with pockets, you want that dresses with pockets page to

pop

Rich: on your SEO.

Yeah. Hopefully

Rich: I didn't pop too much on the mic. I can kind of hear it in my ear when I did that pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, um, so yeah.

Catelin: And just understanding some of that upfront is really, really important. And we're working with a client right now who. Had a previously pretty flat URL structure, and their, their, one of their goals for 2024 was to really start cranking up their organic SEO and it was like this is probably going to be the, you know, the fastest way to do that is to actually structure this in a way that makes sense to a search engine and also to a user, right?

Catelin: Because you can see like top level domain, I want to look at your services. I want to look at this specific service. So I know if I go to top level slash services, I'm going to see A list of all your services and like somebody might not know that like as an end user, but you can build that navigation into your menu and make it much easier for them to find exactly what they're looking for.

Rich: Yeah, we naturally look for groupings and Google naturally looks for grouping

Catelin: patterns. Yeah.

Rich: Yeah. A hundred percent. So, how do I do an audit? I mean, so call us, we'll do an audit for you. End of story, episode's over, goodbye, thank you. Um, but no, so if you want to do an audit on your own, um, or if you just want to know more about it, how do I do an audit?

Riley: Well, first of all, you kind of have to know some tools. Um, a lot of the tools are, I mean, there are some tools that are free, but again, they do have limits. So like, Screaming Frog, we've done a review on that. You can go check that out if you want. Um, little plug. So, but, um. That one is pretty good. Uh, that will tell you a lot of different technical pieces, but also like on page pieces as well.

Riley: But usually it's just as simple as selecting your tool, whatever you're going to use. Most of the time you just have to input the URL or the specific page that you want into it and let it run. It will do its thing. You kind of let it sit and you can come back to it. Um, most of the process is knowing how to kind of deduce that information and knowing what to do with it.

Riley: Um, which might lead into the next question. But, um, yeah.

Rich: Okay. Yeah. And I think like for page speed, it's interesting because you can just, if you Google the word page speed, you'll get things if you Google like internet speed, you're not going to get it or site speed. You'll get more of like the speed test for your internet connection, but page speed is an easy one and Google page speed insights will come up and it's great and it's fine.

Rich: There'll be other ones that come up and you will get a different score on. 100 percent guaranteed, if you score 90 on one, you might score 72 on another. Um, and some of that has to do with the way they look at your site, but some of it also has to do with the internet at the time they're active. Um, if you have a thousand people looking at your site while they're crawling it and you've got a slow server, throwback to last week, um, they might, you might have a lower site speed versus if you did it at one in the morning and there's no traffic on your site, it might be better.

Rich: Um, so those are all really good. So, um. So what do I do? So you get these, so this tool is like SEO frog, SEO screaming frog, SEO spider. Yes. Screaming frog, um, is going to spit out kind of like literally either spreadsheets or a matrix or data that says all of these are your components of SEO. This is how you score.

Rich: What do I do? What do I do with that?

Riley: Yeah. Um, so you basically just kind of go through it. Um, and yes, it will spit out all of the above. Um, For those who have not used it. It's a lot. Yes. It can be overwhelming at first with how much information that it spits out, but there are specific areas that you can kind of focus on.

Riley: Um, there's a lot of areas that you don't really need to focus on at first. Um, one tip that I will say is just focus on the stuff that you can do and the easiest parts. Get those done first because it's not worth, you know, trying to do hours of research on, um, You know, how to make my page speed faster, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Riley: Just do the quick ones first. A lot of those are, uh, looking at your title tags, your H1s, H2s, H3s. A lot of those will mark if you have oversized, undersized, um, if you have multiple, uh, all that kind of stuff. Or even duplicate. Just doing those. It's just a quick, quick and simple rewrite, all that kind of stuff.

Riley: But yeah, just doing the quick win stuff first.

Rich: I think same with meta descriptions, that's an easy one. Um, I think when it comes to like, so those, the text is always the easiest. The images, um, there's a couple things that are easy. So like having alt tags on your images, super easy. You can go in and do that like in the back end pretty fast.

Rich: Um, resizing all of your images, it depends. So. Based on last week's episode, if you can get them all downloaded in a folder, you can use that tiny PNG site. And if you pay that 30 bucks a year or whatever, you can dump them all in there and it's going to spit them all, excuse me, back out and renamed or named, excuse me, hopefully the exact same thing.

Rich: Um, unless it was a JPEG and now it's a PNG. Yeah. Um, But then you've still got to replace those and renaming them. Cause the name of your image matters for SEO. Like it can't just be image 01, image 02, image 03. Nobody knows what that means. Um, but yeah, I think it's really important to like. Do the stuff you can do and then work on getting help for the stuff you can't, like some of that technical stuff.

Rich: Um, and some of it kind of requires even potentially changing your hosting. Um, you know, again, like really good companion to last week when we talked about kind of what server are you on? What is your hosting package? You know, all of that, um, and making sure that that's working for you, um, better than it should.

Rich: Like, we moved, uh, we had a local client who was just having trouble and struggling with, like, their web developer and some other stuff. And we were like, okay, like, yeah, we'll take over maintenance of your WordPress site, which makes Caitlyn just want to throw up. But, um, Stop doing that. It was, but it was a friend of the folks.

Rich: I'll allow it. Um, and I was like, okay, we'll do that, but we're moving you to our hosting environment. And when we just had the demo site moved over to test, like we'd cloned it in the new hosting environment. He wrote and he's like, it's like three times faster. I'm like, yeah. And he's like, he's like, but the hosting doesn't cost that much more.

Rich: And I'm like, it actually doesn't cost more than your previous hosting. You're paying us for other things that cost more, but it's not, I think it was like 13 a month, 18 a month, something like that. Um, but we are picky about where we put websites. Um, and I'm like, I don't want to deal with your speed and the server and all of that.

Rich: So.

Catelin: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah. So it was good.

Catelin: Fine. Last, last words before we get to the, the next words.

Riley: Riley? Not really. I mean, everything that you just said is, is great. Like everything matters, you know, especially where your stuff is hosted, all that kind of stuff. Um, it is technical. It is very technical. It is a rabbit hole.

Riley: You know, there's a lot of stuff that goes on. Especially when you get super deep and, you know, trying to dig through all the JavaScript stuff. Like it can get very tedious, very fast, but like I said before, just focus on what you can. Um,

Rich: yeah. And I think the important part here is you can't fix what you don't know is broken.

Rich: So do the audit. Exactly. Like, just do the audit. Even if you can't fix anything today, at least you know where you're at, and you can put a plan of action together. If it takes you two years, it doesn't matter. You gotta start somewhere, or it's just gonna sit there and be terrible, so. Do the audit, it's just checking to see what your website looks like to search engines and how it's performing for SEO.

Rich: Um, you should do those regularly because things change with your service, things change with the internet. Google makes changes, you never know what's impacting you. Um, we got some tools and techniques, I'm sure those will be in the description for this. Uh, since Zach is wonderful and thorough and Riley will give him all of those.

Rich: Um, so just try those out. Along with a link to

Catelin: the diamond spinning ice, right?

Rich: Yeah, the diamond spinning ice too, because that was a very important tangent earlier. Um, and Zach found that in like four seconds. He had it like ready. Um, so we'll have a link to that. And I mean, even our demo of Screaming Frog, so you can see that.

Rich: I think Riley did a really nice video demo of that, if I remember right. Uh, it's probably on our YouTube, Zach. Is that where that is?

Catelin: I think it's, yeah.

Rich: And it's probably also, oops, on our socials. I am a hot mess today. All right. And then like, do what you can. When you can. You don't have to do everything all at once.

Rich: Don't boil the ocean, just get it rolling. Yeah.

Catelin: One, one H1 and H2 at a time.

Rich: Exactly. Very good advice.

Catelin: Yeah. Uh, thank you all very much for, uh, your time today. Thank you listeners for hanging out with us. Uh. We love it. Yes. Uh, what's up next?

Rich: Um, up next, uh, funny that I did not scroll all the way down. You can tell I didn't read the prep sheet ahead of time because our drink is going to be the first word, which is a riff off of the last word, um, next time, which is very important.

Rich: And we're going to talk about HubSpotting on HubSpot onboarding FAQ. So questions that we've had from, um, all of the HubSpot onboardings that we do, and we do like 100, 120 a year. Um, it's a lot. And lots and lots of questions come out of there. So we're going to cover those for you and hammer those out so that you don't have to go hunt for them on your own.

Rich: If you're in a HubSpot. So definitely want all those HubSpot people to listen

Catelin: next week

Rich: or two weeks. Sorry. I keep thinking these are weekly and I know they're not weekly. They're every other week. But two weeks. We might be tired of each other

Catelin: too, anyway. Uh, again, thank you. If you can find our agency at antidote underscore seven one, if you have a question you'd like to send our way, you can go to ctapodcast.

Catelin: live to send us a little message, you can fill out a HubSpot form and it'll come right to us or even better. Leave us a voicemail on our hotline at 402 718 9971. Your question will make it into a future episode, even if it's not marketing related. What's your friend's name who listens? Can we like share?

Rich: Needle.

Catelin: Needle?

Rich: Yeah, Needle.

Catelin: Like, like, Pincushion?

Rich: No, N I D A L.

Catelin: Oh, okay, got it. It was like

Rich: I always want to say Nidal, but it's Needle. Needle. The emphasis is on the first syllable. I apologize.

Catelin: I was thinking it was like a nickname because I would think Nidal as well. But Nidal, please send, send us your message.

Catelin: I would love to hear your voice and also know everything about you.

Rich: I'm

Catelin: going to hear

Rich: about this. I'm going to hear about this. Yes, for the love of Caitlin's sanity, somebody leave us a voicemail. All right. Well, we will see you next time where we will talk about the first word, which is like the last word, but totally different.