Brent Weaver: Back to the Cloudways Web Growth Summit. I’m Brent Weaver, Director of UGURUS and our agency coaching division here at Cloudways and DigitalOcean. We have another amazing activity coming up, but first I just want to give a shout out to my co-host Shelly Fagin, hosting Alex and Gert on that amazing session on navigating AI amidst the search landscape, tons of value in that session. It’s been fun to watch chat over the last little bit, seeing the diverse audience we have here, I think I saw somebody based in Australia staying up till two o’clock in the morning, somebody else on their first Cloudways event but been a customer for almost a decade, so amazing to be here with you all.

I’m excited to introduce our next speaker and activity, we’ve got Carolyn Shelby with us here today, she’s the Principal SEO at Yoast, she’s going to be running a live website SEO audit session. We had some folks that submitted their websites to do a live SEO audit, which is always a little bit of a bold move, having your website and your search strategy torn down publicly, but I know Carolyn is going to be a great steward of your site and give some amazing feedback. Quick background on Carolyn, after leading SEO at Tribune Publishing and ESPN, Carolyn now serves as a Principal SEO at Yoast, enhancing their plugins and add-ons, if you’re a web pro right now and you haven’t used Yoast or don’t rely on it on a regular basis, I’m not sure where you’ve been these last few years. She also co-hosts the SEO Update by Yoast podcast, so if you’re in SEO or web and you haven’t heard her podcast, definitely go check that out. So Carolyn, welcome to our program, so great to have you, let’s get this party started.

Carolyn Shelby: All right, let me get my screen shared. We were given way more than we can get through today, so I took the first four, and I went through them. I don’t know if the people who submitted are in the audience today, so Kim, if you’re here, giving you your advice is going to be quick and easy, because your site is blocking robots, every page of your site has a meta tag that says no index, no follow, so you will not perform well in the organic search rankings because you cannot be indexed. The first thing I would recommend is removing that.

What I did though was I told my crawler to ignore the no index, no follow directive and crawl it anyway, and some of the things I found on your site that you might want to work on, the payload on your site is gigantic, and I suspect it’s because you have really really large images. You can upload smaller file-size images, not necessarily dimensionally smaller, but the file size can be smaller, and that will make it faster to load and easier for your users to see. Just a tangent real quick, Google is crawling everything with the mobile crawler, so everything has to load quickly and look good on a mobile device in order to be indexed well. So with your file sizes, you can resave them out of whatever it is you’re taking them in, if you had professional photos done, don’t send them immediately up to your website, you’re going to want to resave those with a lower resolution to make the file size smaller, or you can compress them, there’s a couple of different ways, but you want the file size, not necessarily the dimensions, much much smaller so you’re not forcing your users to load so much data onto their phone.

A couple of the other things I noticed, I don’t know that there is a specific keyword phrase that you’re targeting, so I’m not sure about the things you’re going to be ranking for. Once you get the no index taken off, you’re going to want to do a little bit of research to figure out what kinds of phrases people who want your services would be searching for to find you, and then make sure you include those phrases in your headings and your text, you want to repeat those phrases at least on the homepage so that your homepage is going to pull up for something other than your first name or the name of your domain. So the big takeaways here, do some keyword research and make sure you’re weaving those keyword phrases into your text naturally, take that no index, no follow off your site because that’s really going to hamstring everything you do, and make sure your file sizes are smaller. I did see you’re using WordPress, I’m not shilling for Yoast, this is a free plugin, you can use the Yoast plugin, it’ll take care of quite a bit of the basic technical SEO things, there are Pro premium things you can get but if you just want to stick with the free one, perfectly okay, it’ll also warn you when you do things like accidentally block the robots. So I hope this was helpful and I wish you the best of luck.

All right, the next website is Brainy Backpackers. I ran a crawl and I didn’t find anything terribly technically wrong with your site, there’s nothing terribly wrong with it period, you’ve got your redirects set up correctly, you got a 93 on your audit score, which is an A, and a 97 on your SEO score, which is an A, so all very good, also using WordPress, love it. The things I would make sure that you focus on are internal linking, so in the body copy of your blog posts, everywhere on your page, you want to look for opportunities to cross-link to other pages in your site, especially if you have a page that is ranking very well. Let’s say you have a blog post that does gangbusters, that blog post is going to be an authority magnet, and what you want to do is internally link to other pages on your site to share that authority around to pages that maybe aren’t getting as much, you want to spread the love.

I’m sure you all remember the Google leak that happened last month, one of the things I noticed when looking at the variables they’re keeping track of is the number of internal links you have going out in your copy, as well as the external links. And I have a theory, my theory is that if I wanted to determine if someone was selling guest posts and therefore doing something wrong, I might look at the number of internal links in the body copy, not the navigation, the body copy, compared to the external links, because for the most part guest posts are only going to link out to that other site, they’re not going to have those internal self-referential links, and that might be a dead giveaway. Not that you are running guest posts, but I’m just saying this is something I would keep in mind. So do make sure, if for no other reason than to make sure everything looks on the up and up, that you’re doing that self-referential linking, because it’s going to be good for your rankings and your keyword targeting, and it’s just generally a best practice. Other than that, things looked pretty good, so congratulations, best of luck, and let me know if you have any other questions.

Brent Weaver: Hey Carolyn, I had a quick question, not to interrupt you, on both those last sites, I’m just noting the home title tag up there in your browser, they both say home.

Carolyn Shelby: Yeah.

Brent Weaver: Is that a nitpick thing, is that old SEO of just really focusing on that homepage title tag?

Carolyn Shelby: It’s not old SEO, and it definitely will make a difference. At least on this first one it’s not going to make any difference until she gets those no index tags taken off, but the best practice really is to have something more like name of the site, some kind of separator, and then your tagline, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a separator, if you can make it into a sentence, something that explains what it is you’re targeting, what people can find you for. DMT did a good job here, it says what they do, and then the next one I did also has a good title tag, which is like Counseling in Melbourne, Clinic, Online, Bayside Psychotherapy, excellent.

Brent Weaver: The DMT one is “DMT film explainers, pipe, series recaps, pipe, comic books, pipe, and more,” so they’re almost going after maybe three keyword phrases within their homepage title tag.

Carolyn Shelby: Yeah, and the “pipe and more” was probably a goof, it’s probably somehow automated and they’re just concatenating things, I would maybe skip the extra pipe before the “and,” and I’m not even sure I would include “and more,” it’s like “learn more, click here,” it’s sort of empty calories, and I don’t know that we need that, it’s wasting characters, and like premium real estate, every letter counts, make it count. A long time ago we were told that the value each character has is related to how many characters you have total, so if you had 100 characters the value of each one would be one, so if you wanted to make each word have more meaning you would decrease and use only the words that were necessary, and that way the total, which we assume to be 100, is being divided by fewer parts, which means each part is worth more, but we’re not 100% sure that’s accurate, but it’s still a good rule of thumb, we don’t want to waste characters, we don’t want filler words, we want to avoid using meaningless phrases just to have them there. So I would clean up the title tags, but that seemed too basic, maybe I need to remember to be a little bit more basic.

Brent Weaver: Carolyn, what’s the less basic stuff?

Carolyn Shelby: Well, on this one I did a Sitebulb audit as well, and this one also has their SEO pretty dialed in, the things I noticed again were there’s not a lot of internal cross-referential linking. This one actually has more than a couple of the others, “the first season” is great for the user because it tells them they’re going back to the first season of this show, but this is not great for the search engines because it doesn’t tell us what show it’s the first season of, not horrible though, they did the same thing for season two, but there really aren’t a lot of other opportunities being taken advantage of for internal linking. And there are a lot of ads, which I do worry about a little bit, because too many ads can be bad, they can slow the site down and make people less likely to stick around, because I get to the fourth or fifth ad and I’m like, do I really want to read this that bad, I don’t think so. So I would make sure that every ad unit you’re using is actually getting clicked on, if you start getting to the point where you’ve got ad units that are almost universally not seeing any clicks, why don’t we consider getting rid of those, because they’re slowing the site down and making the users mad, nobody likes ads, that’s just a fact of life. We’ve already got this one ad down here that’s kind of blocking things, I apologize for the targeting, I like jewelry.

Brent Weaver: I think sharing went bye-bye, I think we’re back, looks like, Carolyn, your internet just dropped ever so slightly, so I think we’re back, I don’t know if it was those ads making it a little bit funky, but let me see, we might need to get your screen share back for our audience.

Carolyn Shelby: All right, cool, looks like we’re good. So I think those diamond rings were too much for the internet, it just broke, let’s get to a website with less ads. Could you hear me the whole time?

Brent Weaver: It dropped out just for a little bit there, I think after we talked about the ads, so if you had another point after the ads I think we can pick it up.

Carolyn Shelby: I do see a lot of opportunities though for internal links that aren’t being taken advantage of, you could be linking back up to the title of this TV show, which is a topic page, you should be linking back up to your topic pages and your category pages in the body copy, it’s very important that you have these links in the body copy, it’ll help Google understand the order. The other thing I noticed, which would be unique to what I assume is a news site, the XML news sitemap exists but it’s not linked to from the sitemap index, so I would make sure that gets included in your sitemap index. And then also in the RSS feeds there’s a lot of characters, I don’t know if you can see, that are turning into their ASCII equivalents, this isn’t necessarily bad for Google, however if you’re relying on syndication, I know that ASCII characters sometimes break the Google News crawler and they’ll break syndication, so you might want to consider making an effort not to use characters that turn into an ASCII equivalent. I worked at a news site that had a lot of syndication happening, and the weird characters would routinely break the syndication, and some companies when they’re syndicating your content and it breaks, they’ll stop going back and asking, so it’ll break and you won’t know they’re not syndicating you for a week, except you’ll notice a huge drop-off in referral traffic, so I would take a look at that.

There’s also an RSS feed that does exist, so if you didn’t mean to have one, it’s still there, and if you want it to be useful I would make sure those headlines aren’t generating those wonky characters. The other thing I noticed was that I’m not sure I like the meta description on the homepage, it buries the “explain films and television series” a little too far down the line, if that’s what you’re targeting I would move that to the front and find a way to phrase the sentence so you’re leading with the words you’re trying to be found for. We want to try to frontload all the important words in our headings, titles, descriptions, and excerpts, frontloading the important words is really the way to go, it indicates that they’re important and ensures they’re not accidentally going to get clipped off. The other thing I noticed on your homepage specifically, you have no H1 at all, no H2s, and lots of H3s, so on your homepage what I would do, in WordPress you can do a thing in the template where it says if this is the homepage then display this header, if not, display a different header, and for the homepage header you’re going to want to put the name of your site in that H1 and make sure you’re including good headings, good headings are very important. I did not happen to pull up the interior pages but I’m going to assume it’s the same, do make sure you have H1s, you do need to have them on your topic aggregation pages, your category aggregation pages, the archive pages, and on the homepage, especially the homepage, the H1 should have the phrase and the keywords you’re targeting, that’s some basic SEO right there.

I am burning through these a little quicker than I thought.

Brent Weaver: You’re okay, Carolyn, actually I was going to pull an audience question for you, it is specifically about Yoast, so I think people heard you’re a Principal at Yoast, let’s ask her about Yoast. Quick question here from one of our viewers, will Yoast be used in the future for custom-coded websites and not just as a WordPress plugin, any words of wisdom there?

Carolyn Shelby: So I don’t know how much I’m supposed to say.

Brent Weaver: We won’t tell anybody, it’s our secret here.

Carolyn Shelby: As much as we love the WordPress community and we are very dedicated to it, I do know that there are so many other platforms that would like to take advantage of the services that Yoast offers, so I don’t know how far along they are in the plans, and I don’t want to make any promises about when it’s going to come, but I do know there is a desire to make it more of a less platform-dependent system so that we can start allowing people who are on different content management systems, or maybe custom content management systems, to take advantage of what we offer. I know people are taking the open source and making modifications to work with their unique situations, but internally I know we are also working on something that will accommodate other platforms too, but I have no idea where they are in that process and I could not hazard a guess as to when to expect that.

Brent Weaver: Thank you, Carolyn. We can jump here to Bayside Psychotherapy, our next site for review.

Carolyn Shelby: So Bayside had a good title, which is great, they do have H1s and H2s on their pages, but they’ve got too many H2s, and my concern about the H1 here is “is it time to work on you,” that’s not as specific as we would like, I think what we need to work on here is perhaps “Bayside Psychotherapy, colon,” and then something that uses the keywords you’re trying to be found for. I assume the keywords you’re trying to be found for would be Counseling in Melbourne, or Counseling Clinic in Melbourne, so you’d want to repeat that in the H1, especially on the homepage. The problem with “is it time to work on you” is that it’s just a little too vague, and I don’t think customers, when I go to Google and say I need a psychotherapist, I’m not going to say “I think it’s time to work on me,” so think about how they’re going to phrase the way they search for that service provider and incorporate that language into your headings, that’s going to help you rank for those terms.

Brent Weaver: On that one, if I’m a copywriter or designing this and thinking about an attention-grabbing headline, which maybe isn’t always going to be in alignment with what Google wants to see for a descriptive headline, I can see what they’re trying to do here from a visual standpoint. Is it okay if “is it time to work on you” was your H3, and the smaller text below that, the Melbourne counseling, hypnotherapy, psychotherapy and psychology, was technically the H1, but from a design perspective you kind of flip it, is it okay for somebody to do that?

Carolyn Shelby: Absolutely. What is not advised, it can be done but it’s not best practice, is to have an H1 below an H3, I wouldn’t do that. You could put the H1, which would probably be Melbourne Counseling, Hypnotherapy, Psychotherapy and Psychology, above “is it time to work on you,” and with the CSS you can make it look exactly like it looks now and flip them, just make the H1 style look small and the H3 style look big, so visually to a human they’re going to see “is it time to work on you” first, and it’s going to accomplish the same goal, but to the robot, it’s going to see, oh, this is an H1, this is the most important thing on the page, and read Melbourne Counseling, Hypnotherapy, Psychotherapy and Psychology first, then see “is it time to work on you,” and see that that’s an H3, so it’ll say, okay, this isn’t as important as what I just saw, because what I just saw is the topic of the site, and that’s what we want the H1 to be.

Brent Weaver: I could just see, on a Zoom somewhere, there’s a designer and a content person and an SEO all arguing about this, and I think I’m hearing, Carolyn, that you can have your cake and eat it too, structure the HTML with Melbourne Counseling first, that’s our H1, and with CSS we can flip it from a design perspective and make that hierarchy look a little bit better.

Carolyn Shelby: It does take a little bit of custom CSS coding but it absolutely can be done, I’ve done this at Disney, at the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, you can do it, it’s really easy. You should not be using HTML elements as design elements, that’s not what they’re for, the HTML elements are there to convey meaning and structure, they’re not there to delight the eye, you want to use CSS to delight the eye, you can do whatever you want with the CSS, but try not to get loosey-goosey with how you assign your headings just because you want it to appear a certain way to the human eye. Speaking of which, I had a little bit of concern with some of these subheadings, because again I think they’re a little vague and we could tighten that up. “I understand what you need help with” is pretty standard to ask, but you want to put something, psychotherapy, in there. That’s another super vague one, “online and face to face,” what, online and face to face therapy sessions, colon, in person or virtual, you have to call them what they are, because the robots, and even as a person, I’m looking at this picture, the girl in the first image, “what do you need help with,” she could have just been arrested for all I know, she could need a lawyer, not a shrink, you cannot rely on the robots, especially, or people, to deduce what’s going on in the image or the context of a statement based on what’s in an image. So just make sure you’re not being ambiguous, very specifically say what it is you’re offering so no one’s confused, the search engines get confused about your message if you’re not super clear.

I know copywriters in particular, it’s less so now, but I’ve encountered them in the past, they were trained not to repeat things too often, and they say, oh, I don’t have to say the name of the product because there’s a picture of the product right there, the search engines are getting good at recognizing what’s in pictures, but they’re not that good yet, and you still have to have in the text what it is you’re selling, what you’re talking about, what you’re promoting, say the words you want to rank for, do not leave that to chance, if you leave it to chance there’s a high probability they’re going to not fully understand what you’re trying to say, so I would Spruce that up a little bit.

Brent Weaver: It reminds me, I know you’re from publishing, Carolyn, but like when people bury the lede, you start further down the paragraph and start to see the real attention-grabbing stuff, and when I click on that conditions page there’s actually a lot of really rich content on that page, and I feel like you could probably come up with a much better phrase to represent top mental health conditions or something that people might be searching for, that’s better representative, “conditions we treat,” jump out there and get their attention.

Carolyn Shelby: Otherwise the technical structure of the site’s not bad, I couldn’t find anything immediately wrong with redirects or things like that. All of these sites we’ve looked at so far today could benefit from more backlinks, more socializing, more brand building, but I’d say that’s probably true for the vast majority of sites out there, you can’t have too many backlinks, I suppose you could have too many bad backlinks, but realistically you want to get out there and make sure you’re sharing your information. Are you on the forums, don’t forum spam, absolutely do not forum spam, I am telling you that now, however if you are involved in the forums and can meaningfully participate in a conversation and happen to mention or reference an article you wrote or a post on your site, those kinds of things, especially on Reddit lately, are going to be good, because that’s going to get inhaled right into Google and help with your rankings, and it could attract some links and some traffic. So all of these places could definitely benefit from that. This page is a little long, but like I said, there’s nothing horrifically wrong with it, I would just tighten up the targeting, make sure there’s some keyword research done, and get those headings and title tags tightened up, the homepage title tag is good, just tighten everything else up. So those were the ones I had picked out, we were done at 11:45 my time, so I wanted to make sure I was done in time, are we doing a Q&A?

Brent Weaver: Yeah, we are right at time, so if there are questions, happy to grab maybe one or two. I know Diane van Eaton from the chat asked a little earlier, when we’re talking about those titles, would it be terrible to have an image that had the text “is it time to work on you” before the H1, so basically moving that text into an image. I’m not sure if you have a strong opinion, or if your recommendation would just be to put the HTML correctly and then correct it within CSS.

Carolyn Shelby: If it’s easier to do the image, you can do the image, absolutely, and where a comment like “is it time to work on you” maybe is adding value to the user but not necessarily to Google, it’s for sure adding value to the user, and you can even put in the alt attribute for that image “is it time to work on you,” and the alt image will have less importance than the H1 because it’s an alt and it’s not wrapped in a header tag. So if you’re unable to edit the CSS, which some people don’t know how, or their designer is not a coder, I can absolutely see situations where it would be far more difficult to accomplish the CSS fix than to just pop it into an image and put the image where they want it, so I think that would be perfectly okay.

Brent Weaver: Another question came from MM, this is regarding images, is it better to use WebP or AVIF in your opinion?

Carolyn Shelby: I feel like AVIF is not universally recognized, and I’m trying to double-check in my head, I think eventually they’ll both be okay, but for right now maybe WebP is the way to go.

Brent Weaver: Awesome, well Carolyn, this has been amazing, thank you for taking the time to review some of our amazing Cloudways customer-submitted websites for a little bit of an SEO teardown, whether your website was reviewed or not today, hopefully you all got a ton of value, I know I personally did, just thinking about things we might need to do with our business units’ website. Top of mind for me right now is title tags, making sure we have those internal links, which I know are a pain and very monotonous to do very well.

Carolyn Shelby: There are plugins that’ll do those for you.

Brent Weaver: What’s that?

Carolyn Shelby: There’s plugins that’ll do those for you, I’ve heard of one, oh no, it’s not even ours, there’s a different plugin that’ll do it, in terms of identifying opportunities and automating that stuff, no, it literally does it for you.

Brent Weaver: Very cool, well, anything to make our lives easier as web builders, there’s always endless work to be done, so we definitely appreciate those suggestions and the reviews today, Carolyn. Real quick while we have you, how has been your experience at the Web Growth Summit so far this year?

Carolyn Shelby: It’s always a lot of fun, and I find the information always useful and valuable, sometimes you forget to think about things and this is a good reminder, and there’s nuggets that you didn’t think about before at all that you discover, so I think it’s been a real good experience so far.

Brent Weaver: Very cool, well Carolyn, thank you again for being here, best of luck and amazing work in all you do at Yoast, amazing company, amazing plugin and platform, and I know personally we use it a ton, so keep up the good work. And next up at our Web Growth Summit we’ve got another session called Beyond Search, Leveraging New Avenues for Traffic, we’re going to be doing a bit of a panel discussion with Vassilena Valchanova as well as Jerry Broadway, both digital marketing strategists and experts, so we’ll be back here in about 10 minutes for our next session, stay tuned for more great content coming to you from this Web Growth Summit 2024.