Live SEO audit | Quick wins and opportunities
- We Are Pages
- Sep 12, 2023
- 41 min read
Updated: Aug 28, 2024
October 17, 2023
Turn your site’s untapped potential into rapid SEO gains. Watch in real-time as our hosts, along with Search Engine Journal’s Angie Nikoleychuk, analyze a business website and reveal which tricks of the trade offer the highest return in the least time.
In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:
Identify low-hanging SEO opportunities
Implement a low risk, high-reward SEO strategy
Develop a roadmap for future SEO wins
Meet your hosts:
Angie Nikoleychuk
Content Marketing Manager, Search Engine Journal
As well as heading up content marketing at SEJ, Angie has more than 15 years’ experience as a writer, researcher, UX, and CRO specialist. She is currently adding to her expertise with a BA/BSc in psychology and computer science.
Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix
Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more.
Twitter | LinkedIn
Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix
In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web.
Transcript: Live SEO audit: Quick wins and opportunities
00:00
Crystal
We're going to talk about SEO audits, we're going to do a live SEO audit about quick wins and opportunities. And there's me Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications. There's Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. And we are also joined today by Angie and I should have checked how to say her last name, I'm gonna do my best, Nikoleychuk.
00:21
Angie
Nikoleychuk, pretty close, you just kind of have to Nit when you start.
00:31
Crystal
She’s joining us for this fantastic session. So and she's joining us from SEJ. I know a lot of you found out about the webinar from SEJ, from Search Engine Journal. It's a fantastic, wonderful publication. And we're so pleased to have Angie onboard today to go through this.
So if you've not joined us for a webinar before, if you are not Simon Cox, who comes to all of the webinars, then you might want to know that yes, this webinar is being recorded. Sometimes people join late and they ask is it being recorded? Yes, it is. There will be a YouTube link that is sent to you in the email following the recording as well that you can watch everything back.
We're going to cover a lot of topics. And that's okay, if you don't take everything in, just in the first instance. That's alright, we're gonna go through a lot of things. But at the webinar, you can slow it down, you can pause you can go back and forth, as you need to. So go to the YouTube channel after the webinar to really get stuck into things.
We have the chat panel, which you're all very familiar with and have gotten right involved in, we also have the Q&A panel. We have people who are answering your questions there. So if you have a question that comes up while we're talking about different websites and things, jump into the Q&A panel, and we will try to answer them where we can. Anything we're not able to answer or any themes that we see in some of the questions that are coming up, we will try to answer them in the Q&A at the end of the session.
Finally, to learn more about our future webinars, we think we do them about once a month, go to the Wix SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com forward slash SEO, forward slash learn, forward slash webinars. And you will find all of our SEO webinars that are coming up and you can see all of the ones that we've done previously. Now to agendas. Mordy, did you want to get in on the agenda? Or shall I keep going.
02:12
Mordy
Oh, no, I can do that. Before I do that I just wanna remind you, we have our newsletter, which is Searchlight over at wix.com/seo/newsletter, you can sign up to a monthly newsletter. And you can also make sure to sign up to SEJ has a great newsletter as well. So over at searchenginejournal.com, to sign up for their newsletter as well.
The agenda, we've done the introductions, we're going to actually go through a few actual websites and offer, I hate to call them quick wins because nothing is quick in SEO, usually, sometimes, but it's very rare. But some, I guess, low-hanging fruit that websites can do in order to position themselves to rank better on Google and bring in more traffic. And what we did was, we each picked a domain and a website of a different type.
So Crystal is going to run through a new website that's new to the market, I'm gonna run through an established domain and what they can do. And then Angie is going to go through an audit of a website in a very competitive space, which is obviously a little bit more difficult, then if you're not in a competitive space, that sounds painfully obvious now that I say that.
At the end, we're going to do a Q&A session. So please ask your questions. If there are moderators don't answer them. We'll try to get to them in the Q&A at the end. And I think with that Crystal, I think you're first up.
03:32
Crystal
Yeah, so we're gonna share some links afterwards, as well. It's alright. These are some of the links we're going to talk about for new domains. And if I can just stop sharing while I grab this link for you.
So they'll be as Mordy said, the website that I'm going to be looking at today is a new domain. So the one that I found, it was somebody very kindly submitted, was a website called One Cake Street. And One Cake Street has a lot of great things going on. And a lot of things that I've seen quite regularly for new domains, and for folks who are new to managing a website, and some of the things that they might want to think about while they're going through there.
So you can see that this is clearly, you know, this is clearly optimized for their name. So they've got their their logo up here, they've got their name here, they've got that sort of thing contact us, it's very clear what they do. They’re you know, they're involved in cake. And they're getting some good first results for this. Now, if you are a new domain, and you're not sure which pages you're ranking for, one of the things you can do is you can use a search operator to see which pages you're ranking for. Now this page is ranking for 11 pages. Now the tricky thing with that is that there's about 20 pages on the website. And so that suggests that there's a few things that they could do to get a bit more visibility for some of their other pieces of content.
The other thing that we look at when we look at the SERP, is that we can see that they're ranking for their name. So there's One Cake Street, which is their Facebook page, we also see that they're ranking for their website, we can also see they've got their YouTube and we've got a few other things that are going through as well. So they're doing pretty good. And again, they've got their their Google Business Profile showing here. Now, there's a few core opportunities that we can see just from this, as well.
So first of all, we can see that they're ranking for their homepage, or they’re
ranking for their name, that's great. They have their Google business profile, that's also great. They also have all these reviews, which are saying this cake was fantastic, look at these beautiful pictures, look at all of these wonderful things, all of that sort of stuff. One of the things that's tricky that new domains that I see really often for new domains is they very often don't have a lot of content. So this is their blog, for instance. And they're a little bit thin on content here. So they haven't got a blog here, but they could use some of the content that they got from around some of their different profiles to create a blog, or to create more content. Now at the moment, they don't have a page that is talking very much about testimonials. But they could create a reviews page that pulls through some of these fantastic reviews from Google. And they can create a webpage that has those reviews on them, talks about the reviews that they get, talks about how they manage their clients. And they can have that on their website. Similarly, they have a web, they have an Instagram account, which has a great number of followers. So they've got 1000s and 1000s of followers, here they are getting you know, 800 likes on some of their things. And they've got some great content here. So another thing that they can potentially do is use some of their content, like they have their recipe blog here. This is a recipe that's got a full sort of breakdown of how to bake that cake, for instance, and it's got a video for that. And again, they can add that to their blog. So that's one thing that they can do, for instance, to get some content going on the blog.
Once they have the content, they're going to need to do some things about links. So looking at this homepage, you can see that there's not many internal links. And if people don't know what an internal link is, essentially, when you have a link that's underneath a piece of content here. Now buttons and things are great, but line links are even better. So when you have line links through to the other parts of your content, it can help Google to crawl your website and can also help your content to be better discovered.
Additionally, they got a couple of technical SEO things. Now I want to show you something. And again, if you're new to managing websites, if you're new to SEO, this is something that you might not be familiar with. Yours might not look like this, because I have a few things here. But one of the things you can do is you can use Chrome, the Chrome Dev Tools to see a little bit more about your website. Now on this one, I want to see what it looks like on mobile. So I'm going to click refresh. And look, it goes into mobile. And when I do that, I can see the idea of what it looks like on a different type of phone. So these are different types of phones and different types of things there. And I can see the menu here. Now the thing that's funny about this is that the menu is here, but the menu is not on this page. So Google is able to crawl these because they crawl mobile first. But users are not able to find this content, which is on this menu. So one of the things they could do really quickly is to optimize to make sure that their menu is showing on their on their desktop page, as it is on mobile, that's called mobile desktop parity. And they can make sure that that's working well, they can get a great uptake from that.
Additionally, as I said, they can also do something around with their content. So they can use some of the some of the great work that they're doing across their Instagram. And they can pull that through to create content on their website. And they can also use some of the content that they got from their Google Business Profile, where they've got lots of images, and they've got lots of reviews and things like that. And they can also use that to create some more content. So I think the recommendation I would make particularly for new businesses and folks who are doing new SEO is to think about making sure that you've got good content across your site, making sure that it's also well linked. And making sure that anything that's on desktop is also visible on mobile, so that people can see the content and that user and then Google can crawl your content appropriately.
09:15
Mordy
And that's one of the great things you have in there is that you're able to take content, say from your Google Business Profile, and repurpose the content. And if you're getting started, and generally if you're running a new site, or you're creating a new site, there's usually a gazillion things that you're trying to do all at once. And being able to be efficient and repurpose one piece of content in one part of the ecosystem, in this case, your Google Business Profile and then use it on your actual website is a win because you just want to be as efficient as possible when you're getting started.
09:44
Crystal
Absolutely. And I had a few people ask a few questions just now. We'll get to them mostly at the end. But just to say I spoke very quickly, but I think I had a couple of questions about a search operator there. So Google has lots of things called a search operator. I think Mordy is answering that question now. There's also a tool called Chrome Dev Tools. So as I said, if you right click within Chrome, you can see. If you right click on any website in Chrome, you can see this. So essentially, you click Inspect and then you can see lots of things. You can see lots of things over here and stuff like that, that you can see what your website looks like on mobile, which is really good. And I think that in terms of repurposing content, yeah, it's a great opportunity, particularly if you are somebody like this business, and I see lots of businesses like this, who started on social, got a really good start there. And maybe they think, okay, I should have a website now. And then they think that all of the work that they did on social has to stay on social. And that's not the case, you can take some of those wins, you can take that content, and you can move it over to your blog, you can move it over to your website so that everyone can see all of that content, including Google.
10:57
Angie
Yeah, another really nice thing about reusing that social content is you can almost use it as a really good litmus test. So you can use it to figure out what your audience actually likes on, you know, in general, but if you notice big differences between your social audience and your website audience, you can kind of find different opportunities that you might be missing, too, which is always kind of nice.
11:21
Crystal
Yeah, absolutely and that testing things, you know, for instance, if you test something in a short post, or if you test a blog like this one, for instance, has 518 likes, like, that's gonna be a pretty good post on your website. And if, but sometimes you're particularly if you're in a new blog, you might not know if like, this is something that's gonna resonate with your audience. But if you test it on social, and let's say you get a good response from it, then yeah, you're gonna know that works for you, before you invest all the time that it takes to create a blog to to do all of that stuff.
11:57
Mordy
By the way, on the search operators question, if you go into the chat, the great Simon Cox threw in a link to an article that will run through all the various operators that are there, the sight commands that are there that you can do, and it'll explain it for you. I was going to answer the question in the Q&A. That's why I've marked it live.
12:16
Crystal
There you go. Search operators are really useful in Google. But this is a great way to see which pages Google sees on your website. And it's really important to make sure that you understand that the number of results here responds to the number that you would expect to see there.
Mordy
Awesome.
Crsytal
Mordy, do you want to pass it over?
12:37
Mordy
Yeah, let's pass it on over. Okay. Let me see. Too many. I have too many screens open.
Crystal
So many screens.
Mordy
Too many screens. Okay. I'm going to start. Can you see my screen? Okay. Yes. Okay, great. I'm gonna move it over. This way I can look directly into the camera. One second, stop. Sorry. Apologies. Let’s try this again. One more time, the always awkward moment where you're trying to share the right screen.
13:08
Crystal
Just don't share the wrong screen.
13:13
Mordy
Yeah, with that, okay. Do we see the right screen with the website?
Crystal
Yes.
Mordy
Perfect. And we're on the right on the right track. This is a great website. It's a website about Mediterranean diets. And I basically eat a Mediterranean diet so it really resonated with me in particular. And it's been around for a bit and I ran it through a tool called Semrush. And by the way, for if you're a Wix user, you can access Semrush, directly in your SEO dashboard and your SEO Setup Checklist inside of Wix and connect to this and it'll actually pull you over to here, if you want to go into the actual Semrush tool. Long story short, because it looks a little bit overwhelming. I do understand, I was checking to see what kind of keywords the website is already ranking for. And we can see that they are ranking for 51 keywords. They've been around for a bit. But it was interesting to me that they weren't ranking for a lot of Mediterranean diet keywords, there's a few, but a lot of them weren't and I just want to make the point that it's sometimes great to get traffic, it's always good to get traffic I guess. But sometimes the traffic might not be aligned to what you're exactly trying to do with the website. So I'm going to try to explain a little bit of what I mean by that. I'm gonna focus on the site creating a little bit more identity around what it's doing. And it's a good lesson in what you do in order to translate your business to users in a clear and concise and digestible and explicit way [that] immediately translates into good SEO. They are really one in the same in a lot of ways.
So let's take a quick look. First off, I just want to point out that while the website does want to showcase their recipes if they are indeed a recipe website. I probably want to do this as the first thing coming off. I wouldn't want to first establish a rapport with the user, who I am, what I do, what the website is and then sort of push you into the the second click content, in this case, the recipes. So I’d probably remove that. Also, side, side, side point, I’d try to make sure that the hover over was a little bit more accessible to someone who might be visually impaired. There's a low contrast between the background image and hover over of the text itself, side point.
Let's just—when I looked at the website, the first thing I really noticed was I wasn't really sure what the website exactly did. You know, is it about Maya here? Is she a nutrition consultant? Is this really a website for recipes? Is [are] the recipes really secondary and the consultancy around the Mediterranean diet nutrition program is that the main thing? It wasn't very clear to me. And if it's not clear to me, I think I'm generally smart, it’s definitely not clear to a bot and it's not clear to Google. And we have to make that a little bit clearer. And so one of the first things I would do is move this down the page, this little recipe, repeater up here, pull down the page, and I would have a more explicit H1, right. Maya, Mediterranean nutrition consultant or Mediterranean, healthy Mediterranean recipes, or whatever it is. There's a great little tool, it's called Marketing Syrup, it's a Chrome extension. And it will tell you things like what the headers on the page are. And you can see there's an H2 of Hi, I’m Maya or H3 rather Hi I’m Maya. We don't really have an H1 on the page. So the best practice is to have an H1 header on the page, the H1 header is like your overall title of the page as a whole. Then you can have H2 headers, which are for the sections on the page and the section within a section would be an H3, you can go to H4, H5, you don't really generally have to. So we really need to have an H1 on the page. And that H1 should be about what the site specifically does, whether that's offering recipes, whether that's offering nutrition consultancy around Mediterranean diets, and so forth. And it should be about Mediterranean diets, because that's what the website seems to focus on, for example, here, the body content inspired by the Mediterranean diet, you know, etc, etc, etc. So that's really my first thing here to really focus on that, the site identity. And to also do that in the title tag.
The title tag is a, it's a piece of, it's a tag that goes in the header of a webpage. And it's sometimes or usually, it depends what Google shows on the actual results page. So when someone goes to Google, and they see this website, they will see you know, this web page, rather, they'll see Mediterranean diet and the name of the website. However, that's not very explicit. And by the way, even when Google doesn't show that particular title on the results page, because sometimes they do rewrite them, they'd still look at that in the HTML code to understand what the page is all about. I would be again, more explicit, Mediterranean diet what, Mediterranean diet recipes, but it's already in diet, diet, nutrition, consultancy, and so forth. So that's my number one thing.
The second thing I want to focus on is the about page. And I love about pages. We actually did a webinar, I think it was with Semrush, Crystal and I. We talked about the value of an about page, because about pages really, I know, we generally think of them as, okay, it's a place where we can offer you know our history of the company kind of thing. But it's really a page where you can establish trust and your expertise and your experience. And you could do it really explicitly. And it's a rare opportunity on a website, it’s really only the homepage and the about page where you can tell users and Google who you are, what you do. So again, we have about Maya, I would make the H1 to be again about what the name, the business, you know about Maya’s consultancy or about Maya’s Mediterranean recipes and so forth.
The second thing I would really do and and this is great, actually, because it leans into something that Google calls EEAT is called Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. In a nutshell it's what Google sort of kind of looks at to be able to understand that you're a trustworthy, relevant, expert source of material. And one of the great things that this webpage does is it goes to the personal experience, like this person, the consultant here grew up in Syria, and they grew up living and breathing a Mediterranean diet. So they have a lot, not just education around nutrition in the Mediterranean diet, but they have actual experience, it’s part of their very culture and that's a real advantage to a webpage like this, to a website like this, and I would really harp on that I would talk about that a lot more.
I would also list any certifications, any licenses here. Anything that would really tell you again because we're in, we're possibly in a YMYL space. I love throwing acronyms out [there], it’s what we do in SEO, SEO is an acronym. YMYL is Your Money Your Life, which means basically the webpage can either help or hurt you physically, emotionally, financially. So a health website, an investing website, Google takes those more seriously and wanted to make sure that it gets it right. So showcasing their expertise in terms of their licensing, education, any you know, places they've been featured or so forth really helps drive home, you should trust me in terms of either consulting or the recipes, because I know what I'm talking about.
Okay. Let's go to the actual nutrition page. And here again, like we don't have a lot of content here, what is this page meant to do? What is this webpage about? You know putting an H1 here and some and a little bit, just a few lines of content sort of give context of what this page is. If we look at the title tag, the title tag is just nutrition. Well, what about nutrition? Is it nutrition education? Is it nutrition education about Mediterranean diets. And again, that goes back to what I was trying to say before. If we're trying, if the business model is about the Mediterranean diet, then the title tag here should explicitly say, nutrition education for Mediterranean diets, and so forth. And it's a little bit confusing, because in some places, the website, it seems to be talking about nutrition as a whole. And then in some places the website seems to be talking about the Mediterranean diet, having that strong site identity would really do this site well, and again, having some headers on the page and so forth. And again, even the content itself, oh, by the way, just another accessibility issue, the hover over content here, when they set up the hover over when you hover over the actual title turns it to white, and it can't read it anymore. But um, again, some of the content here Mediterranean Diet 101. Great, that seems to be on target. Staying healthy, cold and flu season nutrition guide. Is that a Mediterranean nutrition guide? Or is it again, just general nutrition? Do we really want to focus on the actual niche of the Mediterranean vertical? Then we should make sure that all of the content, at least when we're getting started in establishing that identity is about that. And it's the same thing with the recipes, and I'll end on this.
22:30
Mordy
Again, a lot of the recipes do hit on the Mediterranean diet, a lot of them don't. Again, having a, they have a title here, Mediterranean Diet Recipes, and that's great. But then a lot of the recipes don't seem to be that, maybe they are, but they should be explicit. So I know. okay, it's tacos, but it's the Mediterranean diet version of tacos. So I don't feel guilty about eating it and I love tacos. Let's take a look again, at the H1, I'm sorry, the title tag. We're again, just writing recipes. But it should be Mediterranean recipes. So again, the site has been around, it has some traffic. But I don't feel like it's getting the traffic that it’s really going after because I don't think the site is consistently focused and explicitly focused on all things Mediterranean diet.
23:19
Angie
Yeah, I think I was looking at that too. And I think one of the, I think kind of at the heart of that problem is just not quite knowing exactly who it is that you're actually writing and who you're building your website for. I think if you kind of look at, you know, your competitors, people who are like you, or even people who are, you know, attracting the kind of people you're interested in, I think that would give that site like a really good cohesive direction to go in, and probably reduce a lot of their workload that they're doing for, in terms of like SEO and website management. Yeah.
23:56
Mordy
And that, that understanding your audience, and the whole business model really sets you up to either succeed or fail in SEO. And you pointed out we were talking about this last week, you know, to break the fourth wall a little bit. We're going over these sites last week. And you mentioned actually, like they have like, you know, the accreditations up here, MBA RDN. You ask, we know why is the MBA there? What's the relevancy to the website, you might have an MBA you might want to you know, that's great. You could talk about it on the about page, but to list it as the first credential, when you're dealing with a nutrition website, Angie made the point that maybe that's not the most relevant thing.
24:33
Angie
Yeah, particularly because like when we look at a website, we're always processing from top to bottom and from left to right. I mean, generally, right, like if you're typing and speaking English, you're gonna read from left to right. So the first thing and the last thing that you read are going to be the things that people notice the most, but also the things they remember the most and I mean, well, I understand why those credentials are in that order, and I kind of get why she would have them there, I think in this, in that particular space, that's not doing her a big benefit.
25:09
Mordy
Yeah. And again, you can list the MBA on the about page. But as like the top, you know, it's part of the header of the entire website, the first thing, that's a great point.
25:20
Crystal
And I think it's important to bring in opportunities to, like, I think you were talking about which kind of topics she was covering over it. And I think like, it's a great opportunity to think about where you're focusing, and your keyword research, the way you do your keyword research. A lot of times people think keyword research has to be like loads and loads of tools and lots of things. And like, there are wonderful, fantastic tools. But with something like this, you can do keyword research in a lot of different ways. Someone in the questions asked, where can I get ideas, for for a website like this? You can get ideas from people that you know, you can get ideas from a website, or sorry, from like a Facebook group. If people are talking about about Mediterranean diets and a Facebook group and you see people discussing the same topics, then you can write something about that. And then you can post it back into the group, for instance, you can go on to Google and look at their related searches, you can look at their predictive searches, Google Trends and things like that, you don't necessarily have to have a big complicated tool in order to get that detail, but it helps you to get and make sure that the content that you're making is right on target
26:27
Angie
100%. And I find too, sometimes you have to watch because when you use a lot of the tools, you kind of start walking down a tunnel when you're doing your keyword research. And you kind of forget about all of these little incidental things that sort of align with that. Whereas if you go to your actual audience and the people that you're, you know, hoping to communicate with or sell to or have visit your site. You sometimes get like these really nice keyword clusters that you wouldn't have not like necessarily found even in like very good keyword tools.
26:59
Mordy
I always say this, like keyword research tools are great to get started. But you at some point really actually need to have some sort of inkling about what you're talking about, or what's going on in that vertical, some way, somehow, in some shape or form.
27:15
Angie
100%, and the site I've looked at actually is a really good example. But before I get into that, I will let you just like, you know, share your links and resources.
27:27
Crystal
Yes.
Mordy
I don’t think I have any links or resources for that one. Do I?
Crsytal
I have some.
Mordy
Oh, you have them. See, Crystal always has my back.
27:37
Crystal
We do our best. So yeah, so I will share these to everyone afterwards. But yeah, we have a few different resources which are available. So these are the ones that are useful for new domains. We talked about a few different things around like adding links. And then we also have sort of internal linking strategies, how to do on-page SEO. So Mordy talked about a lot of things about like H1s and things like that. So we have an article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which talks about how to do on-page SEO. And it explains all of that. We also have stuff about content strategy. So we talked about, you know, thinking about your ideas, and so making sure that they make sense, your content strategy can help you be more solid on that. And thinking about building brand authority is also something that's worth considering. And thinking and that builds into this sort of, you know, do you need to declare your MBA on your recipe blog? Maybe not. You know, unless you maybe, you're writing, maybe you’re a business chef, maybe you're a chef for business people that go to work, potentially. But yeah, so we will be sending these links as well. And before we get, we'll share some links from Angie after she shares her site audit as well.
28:45
Angie
All right, let's see if I can share my screen. Huh, excellent. So does that work for everybody?
Crystal
Yes.
Mordy
Yep.
Angie
Excellent. So I took a bit of more of an established website. And if we have a look in here, you can see that it's, you know, doing pretty good. It's got a fair number, it's ranking for a fair number of keywords here, you can see there's four point two thousand. So it's a bit more established than the other ones. And of course, it's in the financial space, they offer small business loans, and they seem to actually be targeting people who are typically like not your typical, you know, bank type client. So I had a look through their site operators and had a look to see what was indexed and I noticed that what is indexed, what Semrush is seeing and what Bing [is] seeing are quite different. So that was kind of one the first quick little things I thought would be worth having a look at.
Overall, though, I have to say that, you know, like the on-page SEO was generally pretty solid. The, if you can see here, the page titles and things were all pretty good. When I did a search for their name, when I did a brand search, I really liked that things like Trustpilot, and stuff were showing up. Because, like Mordy had mentioned with the diet website, financial is very much your money or your life content. So things like trust, and you know, showing that you are who you are, and that you're good to work with—super, super important. Authority and experience were absolutely huge.
One thing I did notice, when I went running through the website was backlinks. Um, and when I went through their backlinks, I noticed that they had some really, really nice links. But it's probably worth spending some time for them to do a bit more back, a bit of link building. And I will tell you why. One of the reasons for that is one of the good ways to build some links, particularly to these types of sites, is through things like you know, videos and stuff. They've got a ton of customers, if we go to their Instagram site, they have a ton of like, really nice, quick testimonials. But we don't actually know anything about these people and that's kind of a shame. I realized that things like, you know, keeping people, keeping their identities and stuff safe is really important. But I think there's always nice ways to get around it. One of the really good examples of how to tell personal stories without, you know, outing a person is Humans of New York. I'm not sure if people have seen that. But years ago, it was really, really big. And when they started particularly, they were really good at showing pictures and telling stories without actually getting into the identity of the person. So it was about, it focused on their story and kind of, you know, their issue, right.
The other thing I noticed when I was on the site has to deal a lot with the content. So you can tell that a lot of this content has been written to help customers and also to help kind of rank in the right places. And that is fantastic. But here's one of the things I noticed. One of these, where is it here? Is it this one? One of these talks about great business ideas for women or for women led businesses or something to that effect, great business ideas for women. They're the ultimate guide to business ideas for women. And here's the thing that sticks out to me. If I'm looking for a business loan, I already have an idea of what I'm doing as a business. So this might not quite be what you want to like, this might not be quite attracting the traffic that's going to qualify you right. It might be generating tons of traffic, not necessarily people who are quite there yet, but it is really good for that, you know if they're just getting started.
But when I looked through the keywords that they have optimized for, I noticed that a lot of the keywords were very much kind of around the basic sort of, you know, women-owned business grants, those types of things, right. So one of the side suggestions I actually have is that when you are doing your content research, and also, when you're looking at doing your keyword research, if you expand that out a little bit, and spend a little time doing, you know, some competitive analysis, and also looking at the people who are not currently coming to the site. Why are they not coming? Look for keywords that might attract those people that might align a little better with what they're doing, right? These people are not in like, anybody who's got a business idea or doesn't have a business idea yet is probably not close enough to even be thinking about a loan.
Another thing I was thinking about was what other types of things do people need to know when they are getting a business loan? Right. So I need to know am I ready for a business loan? In fact, that might actually be one of the main pages you want to add in here somewhere, particularly in sections like this. The other thing I noticed on the blog in the content is when we look through the content, we do find some, this one is an internal link, no, we do find some internal links. But the internal links are not necessarily going where you would expect them to go. So I would say a) not enough of them and b) they don't necessarily go where you would expect them to go. The example I was looking at earlier had, you know it links back to the page, for example. So I would think about when you're setting up your internal linking, Mordy actually shared some really good tips on that. But when you're thinking about your internal linking, think about the journey very holistically. If I'm landing on, you know, alternative business loans and financing, what kind of problems am I experiencing? I'm betting that's going to be something like say, scaling up, for example. I have a proven idea, and I'm having issues scaling up. So you know, if you have other posts that are along that line, that follow that journey really nicely, it’s well worth having a look at.
The other thing that, these are not necessarily SEO, but they were definitely things that I would look at, um, we have a really nice header image. But I'm wondering if that's almost self selecting against the keywords and the content, the market, that all of that other stuff seems to be targeting. So I would definitely be looking at testing this nice big key image here, as well as things like this, right? Yes, that's absolutely important. But it might be worth almost testing, particularly as you get into things like content and customer journeys.
Another thing, when I looked at the blog, we have like no way to kind of filter and kind of go through things. So from a usability standpoint, it might be worth considering having something there that kind of divides it, at least by audience, right? You might even want to consider having like a specific women business section that's written by women and tells those, you know, the story of successful women who have maybe used One Park at one point or another.
The other thing is we have in some of these women based, I'm just going to use women as an example, because it was really prominent when I went through the content. But when you go through some of this women based content, I would seriously consider testing some of these call-to-actions and some of these buttons. I think that they would, I think that different audiences are going to see that differently. So you know, the chances of, you know, wanting to get funding now. Yeah, that's absolutely what they want and like what they're going to want, but women tend to be a lot more risk adverse. So they're more likely to look for information first, right? So you might want to test different things like that.
38:26
Angie
Also alternative media. So when I went through Semrush, there were some really, really nice SERP features. So they're really getting into a lot of the different SERP features. But I'd love to see them start working on a bit more of that and working on some, you know, different videos and images. Again, make use of this really nice social, there's a fairly good number of followers there. But when we look at the posts, we see that they're not getting a whole ton of engagement. So I would love to see, you know, something really unified between the YouTube that they're doing with the you know, the various stories and things that they have with their website and their Instagram. So yeah, that was kind of what I noticed as I was going through.
39:30
Crystal
I think that's some great insights on a competitive niche. I think one of the things that a lot of people forget is that with SEO, you can test things. And you mentioned testing a few times. And I think that sometimes people treat websites like their print, like you know, you print a book and then it's done. But with a website, you can publish it. Then you can watch it for a little while. And then you can see how people respond and then you can re-edit it, resubmit it, republish it, you can go, oh, no, actually maybe not green, maybe blue, or maybe maybe not this H1, maybe a different H1, that sort of thing.
40:08
Angie
Yeah, 100%. And I mean, the other thing is, I noticed, I don't know about other SEOs. But I know like, for me, if I'm working on a website, I kind of start testing and I kind of start getting sort of tunnel vision. So I'll start working on one thing, and I'll work on that for months. And then all of a sudden, I test something and it's like, oh, wait a minute, I bet you it's caused by this other thing, right? You know, or I will focus on a specific, you know, ranking factor. For example, let's say I'll focus on, you know, title tags, for example, on a website. But when you're testing title tags, sometimes you pick up on, you know, an accidental phrasing that works better, or, you know, a different strategy that then leads you to another, you know, another thing that, you know, might pay off more, might have bigger bang for your buck, for example.
41:00
Crystal
Hmm. And it's not always clear sometimes which thing is the, you know, what caused the result?
Mordy
Roll the dice and get it.
Crystal
Yeah, exactly. So I think that it can sometimes be important to sort of test and maybe test again. So test. If you have one website, then it's kind of tricky to test it on lots of different things. But, for instance, you can test audience response to a piece of copy across maybe your website, maybe across your social, we think we mentioned that before, but you can also test it in different sections as well. So yeah, testing is a great thing to get in the habit of doing.
41:39
Mordy
Especially when you are trying to target more than one audience or to segments of an audience because you don't know what does resonate, what doesn't resonate, how Google is going to understand you as you're trying to deal with trying, to navigate multiple audiences all at once, and what's going to stick and not going to stick. And I think a lot of businesses and websites fall into that category of there's multiple audiences or maybe a secondary audience that you need to consider. That makes it a little bit more complicated to go about how do I structure the website? How do I create content? How do I make changes and all that kind of stuff?
42:09
Angie
Yeah, yeah. 100%. And again, like the value of your competitors, I cannot stress the importance of doing competitor research, see what they're doing, find out what's working, find out what's not working, find out what their customers are complaining about, because their customer complaints are your absolute goldmine, like, absolutely rank yourself for that stuff. Absolutely, rank yourself for that stuff. Because if I'm with your competitor, and I have like a massive complaint, I'm likely searching for how to fix that complaint, or, you know, whatever that happens to be, offer them an answer.
42:46
Crystal
Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that it's sometimes things that people overlook, so that, you know, maybe they don't want to face the ugly truth. So it could be a good opportunity for you. And I think also, sometimes people forget if you're going, so if you are a new domain, if you're going into a new space, you can also look at your potential competitors. So like maybe you haven't launched your website yet, you can look at the kinds of things that people, the kinds of pain points that people who are looking for that kind of product are experiencing. You can look at the pain points from people who are in that vertical and what they're experiencing in order to get a good idea of what works and what works best there. How are we doing on the questions, the chat and the questions?
43:31
Mordy
We have questions.
Crystal
Very lively.
Mordy
Let’s share the resources.
43:36
Crystal
I’ll share the resources, just a second.
43:42
Mordy
I’ve got your back this time.
Angie
We get along so well.
43:48
Crystal
Yeah, just going to share these resources. So as I discussed, we are going to be sharing this content with you after the webinar. So these were the ones from Mordy and after the webinar, we are going to be sharing this deck, which includes all of these links. So we have E-E-A-T article, which is from the [Wix] SEO Learning Hub. But we also have some great content from SEJ.
Angie you'll be very pleased to see in the chat people have been bigging up SEJ the whole time. They have such great resources. They're really great. So yeah, it says, we've got the SEO Site Audit Workbook, which is really good if people are getting used to doing a site audit, which is sort of going through and kicking the tires, really on your website, whether you've just got a new website or whether it was working before. Also ranking factors for 2023, which are always good fun to figure out what is considered a ranking factor and what's not and how that all works. Competitive Analysis Guide, which as Angie was talking about competitor analysis is something that's really, really important, because no one's only going to look at your website, they're going to look at other websites too. It's important to know what they're looking at. And also how to research your audience. Understanding your audience is super important. So that's a great resource as well. And with that, I think we're gonna go over to questions Mordy. Have you got a few questions?
45:05
Mordy
I have questions. There's many, many questions,
Crystal
Many questions.
Mordy
I’ll try to get to as many as I possibly can. First of all, thank you both Crystal and Angie, that was amazing. Angie, thank you so much for that. Where to start with the questions. So one question wasn’t in the Q&A, but I was scouring the chat also. And I wanted to bring it up, Google algorithm update, someone was surprised we didn't talk about them. How can we not talk about them? What is, this audit was about just you know, getting started and getting some some momentum going and some wins. But yes, Google does update its algorithm. We're technically in the middle of an official algorithm update, the October 2023 Core algorithm update, which followed the October Spam algorithm update which followed the September 2023 Helpful Content update, which was preceded by the August 2023 Core update. There's been a lot of algorithm updates lately is what I'm trying to say. I know what you’re talking about, there's been a lot of updates. And I think the tips that we're all offering are trying to get you to a point where, there's, no website is safe from the algorithm, you're going to see rank movement, rank fluctuations, it is the norm. I was recently looking at a whole heap of Semrush data about this. Just rank in general has gotten a little bit less consistent as a whole. So it's normal to see that you're ranking number five, or four, three, or two or one. And then one day, you jumped down one ranking position, you're making number one to ranking number five, and number seven, then you jump back up again, there's all sorts of shifts. The tips that we're offering you while I can't guarantee you are future proofing your website, as you know, in a guarantee, are generally the kind of tips and creating the kind of content that Google is preferring, which means that when an algorithm update does come around, we would hope that following these sorts of tips and really mindset about how to look at content, and how to look at your website, and how to focus your website identity and targeting your audience and quality content would see you being positively impacted by an algorithm update.
47:12
Angie
Yeah, and it's not just that, like, I know, a lot of times, SEOs will, or, you know, website owners will, you know, look at their analytics, and they'll be like, oh, my goodness, it must have been an update, because all of a sudden, my traffic dropped, or, you know, the opposite is true, where they'll, you know, they'll update and they'll do a lot of SEO work. And they'll get very frustrated, because they don't see those rankings change, right. Within. So part of that is just being patient because things do like you said, things do fluctuate all the time. But it's not just that. It may not actually be an update, or it may not actually be you, it could be shifts within that whole industry or within that whole, you know, type of keyword or within that whole portion of the index within Google, right, because Google tinkers with things and has different priorities than what we do as business owners and what we do as site owners, right. So I wouldn't panic either is I guess what I'm saying.
48:08
Crystal
Yeah, so I have an article about how to diagnose the Google algorithm update change and essentially, like, it’s not one thing like, it might not be an algorithm update. It could be that the SERP changed, like there's some parts of the SERP that have a 3D layer on them and they've just added it, like literally. And so sometimes they add different parts to the SERP and that might be the reason why it was affected. Sometimes it's something like, they've literally changed around the SERPs. People who remember COVID will remember that, like, they just stopped ranking certain businesses for certain things like you couldn't rank for like facemask, for instance, unless you were like the WHO or you know, the CDC or that sort, of thing. Sometimes they sort of will just manage a SERP. There's lots of reasons why it can happen. So I have an article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which talks about that. But I think, as Mordy was saying, you know, it is the case that you kind of have to keep your nose clean, and following some of the best practices and following some of the good content guidelines will help see you through that.
Additionally, you'll notice that we all sort of looked at a few different channels for different websites. One of the things that can be useful for algorithm challenges if you you're in a website, if you're in a vertical that is vulnerable to algorithm updates, or where you've seen a few, it's useful to have a foothold in a couple of different channels. I used to work with a client who was in YMYL, for instance, and we always had some paid running because Google tinkers a lot with the YMYL thing. So they used to rank for a really important, they had a test that was a medical test. And Google just changed around the SERP. It wasn't anything to do with anything they did. They haven't done anything wrong. But they changed the SERP so that you couldn’t rank for that. So we had some paid running and you could run paid ads for it, but you couldn't run, but you couldn't do organic. So if you have a few things going on in your social, you have a little bit going on in your paid, you have a little bit, those sorts of things, you can be a little bit more resilient during algorithm updates.
50:17
Angie
So literally, sorry, Mordy.
50:20
Mordy
Oh no, go ahead.
50:20
Angie
I was just gonna say I cannot tell you the horror stories I have of companies that have put all of their eggs in one basket. And then all of a sudden that company changes the way that they do business or, you know, Google changed the way it ranks something. And they absolutely lose everything, like I have absolutely horrid, like, they just got rid of FAQ, for example. Right. There was how to FAQ. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, how many people spent 100s and 1000s of dollars, building all of that stuff. And now all of a sudden, none of that. I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean that Google's not still using that, but it's not showing up anymore.
51:01
Mordy
And by the way, to get to that point, not putting your eggs in one basket, I've been like analyzing this stuff for like the better part of like, eight, nine years, like really diving into the algorithm. There are simply keywords. And I've seen this literally 1000 times over where the rankings are just not stable for whatever particular reason whether Google has a hard time understanding the content, or the intent around that keyword, whatever it is. Certain keywords are relatively stable with some movement, and certain keywords are just off the wall bananas, you will never no matter what you do, be able to rank consistently because Google themselves was having a hard time with that keyword. And you probably want to diversify, where you're trying to get traffic from if that's the case with that keyword. Let's get to some other questions really quick. So somebody wanted to ask about why Crystal, you said that the line links for internal links are better than a button?
51:53
Crystal
Okay, so Google perceives line links differently from buttons when they're crawling them. And so it's easiest for them to crawl the line links. And it's really easy for you to add them. So if you have an important piece of content, I would highly recommend that you also add a line link even if you have a button to make sure that people can, Google can crawl it in the most effective manner. Sometimes a button is to do a thing, a link is to go to a thing. So if you want someone to do something like to open a form, or to open a window or something like that, use a button. If you want to send someone to from one page to another use a link. And the line links are the best way to do that. From navigational point of view, things like related posts and like things like that, that have sort of those kinds of buttons from a navigational point of view, that's great. But don't rely solely on those. They'll get crawled, of course, but they don't get crawled in the same way. So add a line link, line links are your friends, add them lots, super easy. That could it'll take you 10 minutes to learn it. And you can and it will improve the crawlability of your website immensely.
53:01
Angie
I can't give away too many details, because I don't want to get into trouble. But I can tell you that from testing, I can tell you that there are a lot of audiences who will click and buy through a like a line link long before they'll ever click on a button. And I can't give you the space. But I can tell you that it bit, spaces that tend to be a little bit you know, they have trust issues. From an audience perspective, the buttons themselves, research is showing that they're a little more suspect, they might have a little like, your audience will have a little less trust in a button than they will in a link and I'm not 100% sure why. But that's what I can tell you like, from some research, I may or may not be involved in.
53:55
Crystal
That’s very hush-hush Angie
Mordy
It sounds quite intriguing. One thing I want to get to, a bunch of people have asked how do I do SEO inside of Wix, how do I implement? Is there a guide? I'm going to now literally right now, throw a link into the chat to our Wix SEO Guide. It's massive. It's like 90 pages. So look for the topic that you're looking for. It really goes through everything that we have going on inside of Wix, we're about to just update it again. We update it once a quarter. So expect some new things to be in there relatively soon. But it will help you walk through how to say update your title tag inside of Wix. So please have a look. If you have questions. I'm out there on Twitter and LinkedIn. Just ask me I will be happy to answer whatever I can. Okay, on to, and Angie, this one is for you. Finding user pain points, analyzing competitors, how do you go about finding user pain points?
54:53
Angie
Um, so I have a bit of a unique way, I think, of researching my users. So you have to keep in mind when you're looking through your client content, so like emails and things like that, or you're looking at your social specifically, you're already looking at information from people who have already converted. So that doesn't tell me a whole lot. That essentially tells me how my marketing is doing. So I don't do a whole lot of that at the beginning. When I'm looking for optimizing for user journeys and stuff, I want to identify examples, crowds, people, users, whatever, that kind of fit my idea of who it is that I should be converting, and I am not. Ads, paid ads is a really good way to figure that out. When I have that, I go through that language and I'm looking at what are they sharing, what's the language that they're using? What are the issues that are having, that they're having, what are the other things related to what I offer, that they're searching and tinkering with? The language that they use when they're talking in general to when they're talking directly to you and they’re a customer is going to be very, very different. And that difference is your sweet spot, right. Because that difference is what you haven't been meeting, that's the needs you haven't been meeting yet. So I spend a lot of time kind of digging through a lot of content, particularly social, at least up until recently has been fantastic. I will essentially crawl a ton of that.
For people who don't have those kinds of technical skills, or you know, they're not quite there yet. Just go through and just have a look to see, when you go through a forum, if you go through a social network or something, what are people talking about? What are the issues that they're facing? Right. Um, you know, for the cake industry, for example, you know, a really big thing is, you know, what are they getting versus, you know, what are they paying for? What are their, what is their dream wedding? How does that fit into things, right? So you have to just kind of think very, very holistically. If you are like really, really new and really, really tiny, just simply have really nice open conversations with people that you know, right? If I'm, if I want to start a baking website, I will literally kind of like, watch the local bakery to see who comes out. And I'll just say, hey, look, can I ask you a couple of questions? You know, and just be really open and honest. And nine times out of 10, they will answer you, right. Just keep in mind that what users say they want and what they actually want are not always the same thing. Don't fall into that trap. It's a good starting point. But always be checking to make sure that you're not misunderstanding that.
58:01
Mordy
I want to, I know we're out of time, but just want to say that very last point. I just saw yesterday a social media post where someone referenced an experiment that Sony did. Remember, the old Walkman, they had the sport one, the yellow one, and the traditional black one. And they asked the focus group, which one do you like better? And they all said the yellow one. And then when they left, Sony said, hey, you, thank you for your feedback, take a Walkman with you. And they all took the black one. And Sony was like, ah, so you said the other one, but you didn't take it?
58:36
Angie
Oh, it's good research like that. It's so much good research like that. They did a test where they actually they give you a choice of two items. And they tell you to pick one and then they then they offer it to half of the group. They said look, in a week, we're going to offer you the chance to exchange and if you allow people the chance to exchange that item, they are actually less happy with the item that they purchased initially. It's fantastic.
59:00
Mordy
Wow, that's amazing. We should totally dive into this but we’re already over.
Crystal
We’re way over time.
Mordy
Angie, thank you so much for that.
Crystal
Thank you.
59:10
Mordy
Thank you to SEJ for sending you over and partnering with us and sharing you with us.
59:15
Angie
Thank you so much for having me. I love this. I'm like a big Mordy fan and a big Crystal fan and a huge Wix fan. So it's an absolute honor and a thrill to be here.
59:26
Crystal
Oh, you can come back. Thank you so much. I'm just going to wind things up. And just to remind everyone, yes, this will be, this is recorded, you will get a link, you will get the deck with all of the other links that we've shared. We will also email it to you and it will be on YouTube so you will have all of the things that you need to get going with your quick wins. Thank you so much to Angie, to Mordy, thank you to everyone. Bye.
59:52
Mordy
Bye, everybody.
