Shelly Fagin: Hi, welcome back, I’m super excited to be joining you yet again for this wonderful Prepathon day. We have a phenomenal session for you. Some of my favorite sessions at events are our live site audit panels, and we’re not doing a panel, you’re actually getting a one-on-one with an expert here. I have Carolyn Shelby with us today, I’m so excited. Carolyn is absolutely brilliant, you may know her from Yoast, but Carolyn has a wonderful, very long history, like mine, and hers is so fun, you’ve had the opportunity to work for ESPN and Disney and the Chicago Tribune as well as Yoast, not to mention a wonderful background as a consultant. So Carolyn, welcome, thank you for joining us today, I’m very excited to hear what you’ve planned.

Carolyn Shelby: Thank you for having me. Okay, awesome. I know I’ve only got 30 minutes and I wanted to do some intro stuff, but it doesn’t matter, because what matters is that we have time to focus on these sites, so without any further ado I want to jump in. I do want to say that this is a little different than I normally do live site reviews, because when we’re in person I make the victims stand up and answer my questions when I need clarification, and I don’t have that luxury here, so you’ll have to forgive me if I make some assumptions, I’m doing the best I can because I don’t have the submitters here to tell me what it was they meant.

So the first site we’re going to do is BizAsiaLive.com. The reason I think this was submitted is because they’ve been seeing a decline in traffic and a decline in the keywords that are indexed. It looks like they peaked around January of 2021, and I think that peak matches the peak for traffic. So I went in and looked at a number of things, some of the things I found in terms of SEO were some global issues. There’s a lot of alt attributes missing, and you would say, Carolyn, alt attributes are not a big deal, but everything in SEO is like death by a thousand cuts, so the more you can stop the bleeding the better you’re going to be. When you’re in a news environment like BizAsia Live is, it’s a news site, they’re looking at ranking on Google News, getting traffic from Top Stories, and they’ve got a lot of very buttoned-up competition, so what you don’t want to do is overlook any opportunities for additional optimization. Up to 40% of the alts missing on some pages is a lot, and on some of the articles I spot-checked there was no alt attribute on the hero image, literally the first thing the search engine is going to encounter, a huge missed opportunity as far as dialing in the relevancy of the article, so you need to get those things cleaned up.

That being said, there’s too much information in the alt on the logo, which appears at the top of every single page. The logo has the name of the site and then all of the things they cover, so it’d be like having your slogan built into the name of your company, that’s not what you want to rank for. And you don’t want to set the stage that the page is going to be about all those broad things when the page in question might only be about media or a particular TV show, by setting that at the top you’re sending some mixed signals, so I would tone that down. Another thing that I saw that I wasn’t a huge fan of is the anchor text choices throughout the site are a little vague, there’s a lot of “read more.” Having home in the top nav is not actually necessary, the logo is the universally recognized symbol for, if I click on this it’s going to take me to the homepage, you don’t need home after that because now you’ve got two links to the homepage and one of them has anchor text that’s bad. And you say, well, home is descriptive, yes and no, home tells Google what you’re going to find at the end, but in the vacuum of space home means something different, so it would be better off not having that link there, the logo link is perfectly sufficient.

I would also take contact us out, it doesn’t need to be there, it’s already in the footer, it’s on every single page. 90% of the people coming to the page aren’t interested in contacting you right now, if they are they’ll either search for how to contact you or scroll down to the footer where they expect to find that kind of link. This is not a sales site, you don’t sell things directly, so that contact us button is much less important and doesn’t need to be taking up space in that top nav. So I’d go through and clean up anything that’s unimportant or redundant, the home button is clearly redundant, contact us is not really important, and that gallery link, it goes to photo galleries, but how much traffic are you getting from those photo galleries, I feel like the galleries would be something you could link to from within the articles.

The back to top link in the footer is the logo of the business, but for some reason it links back to the top of the page, that makes no sense, if you’re going to have a jump link that goes back to the top of the page it should say back to top or return to top, it’s confusing the search engines when you have your company logo jump back to the top, people see the logo and expect to go to the homepage, that’s the behavior they’re expecting, don’t deviate from the expected behavior. There are no tags on this news site and that confused me a little. The lack of tags I think could explain the noticeable decrease in keywords you’re ranking for. I went back to the Wayback Machine and looked at the design of the site in the month before everything started sliding, there were tags then, there were tag pages, and I would bet a dollar to a donut that is why you had a lot more things ranking then, so I would consider re-adding the tags, but that’s just me.

The flat URL structure, I expect to find more hierarchy in a news site, having everything hanging off the root is not going to make things rank better, that’s a misunderstanding of the advice, the simplified URL doesn’t matter when your URL is still 8,000 words long. So going forward, if possible, but this is a very old site so it may not be, I like to have the category or some means of chunking the URLs together, so have slash media slash something, slash history slash something. Part of the reason you want to do this is because it also makes it easier in your analytics to group stories by like stories and see if any particular type of article or page is getting more or less traffic than the others, when everything’s in that flat architecture it’s very difficult to group things together by channel.

On the article pages, the meta title, the SEO title, I hate calling it that because it’s the meta title, does not include the name of the site, it’s literally just the title of the article. I think that’s a style preference on my part, but every website I’ve ever worked for, including all the news sites like the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune, we put the brand at the end, ESPN puts the brand at the end, you want to know what the title of the story is, the headline, but you also want to know who the outlet is putting that story out. The breadcrumbs include a home link, I don’t know why that bothers me but it does. The big thing though is there’s no internal links within the article body that go to other articles or tag aggregation pages, I think that’s a huge missed opportunity to spread the love around the site and help create links for other articles, because the sample scan I did said none of the articles have more than one incoming link, not necessarily great for rankings, so I would add internal links, maybe some external links, definitely some internal links.

The missing author link is also something different today than it was when the site was at its peak, and I think that might have something to do with it. We know that in news, they really like to know that your writers are real writers, they want to see that your writers have written about that topic before, it’s necessary for your expertise, your authenticity, your trustworthiness, so I would really consider adding that. And on a news-specific item, the date is published in a non-text format, I don’t see any indications it’s a huge problem, but I would keep an eye on that, my experience at the newspapers was that when we tried to get clever about how we delivered the date, it invited Google to mess things up. The captions for the hero images could be far more descriptive, in this particular one it’s just “SMA Roy joins Swasti as head” and the word ended, I added “as head digital operations” which I grabbed from the story, it makes the caption a little more interesting and adds keywords, increasing the relevancy to the rest of the story. The lead is set apart stylistically but not within the code, I’d consider making that an H2 to emphasize its importance.

One of the reasons I would like to see tags reinstated is I think it’s going to help the rankings. I looked at what queries are pulling in the most traffic right now, and I’m not going to try to say the name because I’m sure I’ll butcher it, but her name alone, if you made that a tag and then linked to the tag aggregation page from each of the articles, it would dramatically increase the authority for that term, that tag page might then rank for her name. The search volume for just her name is over 240,000 searches per month, whereas the search volume for this really long-tail term you’ve got is a little under 2,000. Imagine if you were ranking number one for her name with that number of searches, the amount of traffic would go up crazy, and this is just one example, so repeat that with all these different tags and the traffic and visibility go up. So the TLDR is, tags and tag pages could help you rank for people, businesses, and shows that you write about the most, consistent internal linking is going to help those pages rank and elevate the expertise, take advantage of those image alts to expand the context of the pictures, and clean up the navigation and anchor text. So that’s this one, normally I would expect applause now, but I can’t hear anyone, so I’m just going to go with that’s where we’re at.

Okay, the next site is Key IVR. Again I don’t know why they volunteered, but my guess is because of this drop right here, and I would not say this is necessarily a helpful content drop, it could be, but I’m not 100% sure because I didn’t see a corresponding drop in keyword rankings, so it could be something else. The things I noticed about Key IVR, the sliders at the top of the page are huge and pretty, but they’re not really adding value because all the text is image-bound, so the crawlers aren’t going to be able to read any of that text, and there’s no alts for any of those, so that content, even if it’s good, doesn’t exist to the crawlers. Speaking of alts, you don’t need to add the word logo to every single image of a client logo, if you think about it in terms of a screen reader, you’re not repeating the name of the company, so as the screen reader goes through, do you really want it to say Bob Smith logo, Tom Smith logo, it’s not a great experience for people that need those screen readers and it adds the word logo a lot to the content on that page, and you’re not about logos, you’re about IVR, which is apparently some kind of payment system.

A lot of the other anchor text I found is very non-specific, “find out more” is not nearly as helpful as “call center sector solutions.” I would go through and see if you can make the anchor text for the links more specific to what you want the destination page to rank for, that destination page you want to rank for call center solutions or call center IVR solutions, you do not want it to rank for find out more, so what you want that page to rank for should ideally be in the anchor text of the link that points to it. There were some other minor SEO issues, I ran a Sitebulb scan, it was 84, a solid B, so I wouldn’t freak out, but again, death by a thousand cuts. I found this on some of the interior pages, this is an H1, all it says is “our guides,” not super specific, they are very specific guides, guides to how to use the software, education about the subject, so if you were a little more specific and keyword-rich in your anchor text and headings you’re going to find greater success in ranking.

This site has internationalization, so it has hreflang declarations at the top, while it is valid, it is missing the region-independent declaration for English. You can have an x-default, which you’re required to have, but the x-default does not take the place of a default for English or a default for Spanish, when the only other links you have for English are English US and English Great Britain, you also need a default for English. That being said, I noticed that when I flipped between American and British versions, nothing changed, so I don’t understand why that’s necessary, because what this is doing when the hreflang doesn’t work right is it creates duplicate pages effectively with slightly different URLs, that is not what we want. If there’s not going to be another language actually different from the English version, and your English versions are going to be identical anyway, I would get rid of the internationalization, it’s dividing things unnecessarily, and when you divide things unnecessarily you can thin out and spread too thin the authority you’ve accumulated, and I know that’s a plugin you’ve got, WPML, so uninstall it and embrace the fact that you’ve got a single international site.

Now unlike the other site where I said tags and tag pages are a good thing, I don’t think tags on this site are a good idea. The purpose of tags is to facilitate the discovery of articles, it helps the crawler crawl through deeper articles that got pushed off the homepage. The mechanism this site is providing to sort through the articles, they’re tabs basically, and it’s JavaScript, the crawlers can’t manipulate those tabs like a person can, so they’re never going to see the articles underneath each of those. And even if they could, the tag pages have been no-indexed, so completely negating any value this could create, and all this is doing is making hundreds of pages that can’t be crawled and indexed, it’s not helpful, so I would get rid of those, if you’re not going to provide a means of those being crawled and indexed, they’re serving no purpose.

Let’s move on, Benza Bacon Lovers, I love the domain, everybody loves bacon. This is legitimately the first sighting in the wild I’ve seen of a site that has definitely recovered from the HCU, this is clearly a helpful content update hit and recovery, so congratulations, I’m super happy for you, because that HCU was devastating for a lot of companies and I’m glad to see you pulled through. The minor SEO issues, the Sitebulb score was a 92, which is a low A, excellent work. Your internal linking and external linking, unlike some of the other sites, is very very good, no issues with phrasing. I did have a question, the bacon recipe index redirects back to the bacon recipes page, which contains a link back to the recipe index, which redirects, so it creates a little loop, and you don’t want the crawlers to get caught in a circular pattern they can’t get out of. So I have some suggestions, I think just a 301 redirect to force the bacon recipe index to the bacon recipes page, but then take that link off of that page, the link is what’s causing the loop, so get rid of the link and problem solved. The other thing that gets me is that the homepage doesn’t have any evergreen content or intro text, so you’re going to have an easier time ranking your not-homepage pages and maybe not so great a time consistently maintaining ranks for your homepage, so I’d add some evergreen content to that.

And then finally we’ve got a UX designer’s site. This is a new site, so it seems brand new, very few backlinks, but there are some, and some pretty standard SEO things I think could use work. Use targeted keywords more frequently throughout your text, especially in your headings. The alt for your logo is the domain name, and that’s not what you want to rank for, you’re going to rank for your domain name anyway, why don’t you change it to Deb, UX designer, because that seems to be what you want to rank for. The only way to contact you is from a button on the homepage, add contact to the menu, in your case, based on what you’re selling, unlike that other site where I said take contact off the menu, you need contact in a menu, you probably also need it in the footer, and that reminds me, I saw you’re using Divi, nice footer option available there, you might want to consider trying that, it has a contact link in the footer. You need more links to the contact page other than only on the homepage, people won’t know how to get a hold of you. You have too many headings on your homepage, you have 23 H3s, part of the problem is you’ve got some kind of slider that said, oh, this breaks a little in Safari, here’s the fix, and that fix is causing duplicates, restating everything only for the eyes of Safari, but the crawlers read everything anyway, so now you’ve got a duplicate of that entire section, and that’s what’s causing so many H3s.

As far as your backlink profile goes, I checked your LinkedIn, LinkedIn looks great, but you don’t have a link to your website on there, you have to avail yourself of every opportunity to link back to your website so you’ve got good authoritative links that are followed. You do have some links but almost exclusively user-generated content and no-followed, you need followed links, preferably where you control the anchor text, because just linking to “check out my website” is vague, we don’t like vague. So you want to use more descriptive anchor text for your links, there’s a lot of “link to case study,” “link to project,” that’s vague, “learn more,” vague, use the keyword you want to rank for. Also, all of these links on your portfolio page link out of your site to things that I can’t even necessarily open unless I create an account, that’s no bueno, if you want Google to index it and the content associated with your site, there has to be text that can be read and it has to live on your website. I would create pages within your site, one for each of the portfolio examples, and even if the bulk of the content lives in a PDF, you can summarize that and write some text around it and make value for that, and that was actually my last slide, so good timing.

Shelly Fagin: Carolyn, wonderful job auditing, I know the comments have a lot of compliments, no surprise. I think the biggest question that’s most important, since we are out of time, is where can we get a copy of your deck?

Carolyn Shelby: I’ll send it to you guys and you can disseminate it, or if somebody wants to hit me up on X, is that what we’re calling it now, or LinkedIn, or I will also share it with Cloudways and you guys can disseminate as desired.

Shelly Fagin: Thank you so much, I know we appreciate it, I was definitely making notes. I totally appreciate everyone sticking around, I want to give props to our next session that’s coming up, because it is specific to WordPress security practices, so fortifying our WordPress site, if you’ve been in the WordPress ecosystem for a long time you understand how important security is, so please stick around. Thank you for joining us, Carolyn, I hope you have a great day.

Carolyn Shelby: Thank you.