May 2, 2023
Is your website content helping or hurting your SEO? Join industry experts for a real-time review of a business website and see how the right content optimizations can help you outrank your competitors in search.
In this webinar, we cover:
How to evaluate your website content step-by-step
Examples of what good on-page SEO looks like
Best practices for optimizing your SEO content
Meet your hosts:
Vahan Petrosyan Director of Technology, Search Engine Journal
As Director of Technology at Search Engine Journal (SEJ), Vahan is responsible for overseeing the organization’s entire IT infrastructure. He leads all technical aspects of major initiatives including SEO, programmatic display advertising, engineering solutions, and analytics.
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.
Twitter | LinkedIn
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
Transcript: Content review by Wix and SEJ
Crystal Carter 0:00
Starting in just a few minutes, we're going to get going with our webinar. I'll be doing a live SEO audit content review with Wix and with SEJ. So we're joined by myself, my co-host, extraordinaire, Mr. Mordy Oberstein, and also by Vahan Petrosyan from SEJ. Thank you so much for joining us today, Vahan.
Vahan Petrosyan 0:27
Thank you Mordy and Crystal. Thank you for having me at this amazing event.
Crystal Carter 0:31
Thank you. It sounds fantastic and SEJ if you're not familiar with SEJ, which I hope that you are SEJ is Search Engine Journal, it is one of the premier destinations for search engine news and search engine knowledge. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what you do there quickly?
Vahan Petrosyan 0:49
Yes, of course Search Engine Journal is a publication which provides news about SEO, PPC, and all kinds of marketing and first source for the news and marketing altogether, at least for me. And yeah, for those who are hearing about Search Engine Journal for the first time, make sure to check out our website at searchenginejournal.com
Crystal Carter 1:18
Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for that. Okay, so this webinar, just so that, you know, everyone in the chat, yes, the webinar is being recorded. So if anyone else asks that later on, yes, it has been recorded. In fact, the YouTube link will be sent to you via email right after this webinar, so that you have access to that. And yes, thank you, Vahan Petroysan, indeed. So also, yes it will be sent to you, it will also be posted on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at the same URL that you registered for this session at. So you can find it on WixSEO/learn. And also you can ask questions in the Q&A panel, you're all very familiar with the Q&A panel, because you've been telling us all where you're logging in from. So that's great. And do stay tuned for future webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. We do them every month, we've got another one coming up soon with Google Search Console after this. And that's what we're doing there. So with regards to the agenda we're going to do introductions.
Mordy Oberstein 2:23
The newsletter!
Crystal Carter 2:25
I forgot to say!
Mordy Oberstein 2:27
We have a brand new, almost brand new, the second month, a monthly SEO newsletter called Searchlight, and over at the Wix SEO Learning Hub, so wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, you can subscribe to SEO tips, curated articles, and all sorts of updates on what's happening in the wide world of SEO. Okay, sorry, Crystal.
Crystal Carter 2:48
Okay, thank you, thank you. Okay, so after that fantastic plug. With regards to the agenda, we're gonna do introductions, and I'm gonna pass it over to Mordy Oberstein to do all that lovely stuff, then we're gonna get into this website and the whole live site audit. So we're going to talk about a few core pages that will apply to most things. So we're going to talk about the homepage, which applies to everybody. We're going to talk about the FAQ page, which is a page that a lot of people have, but we're going to be looking at it from the perspective of an FAQ page, but also as a static page. And we're also going to have a few notes on the blog. And then we're going to go to the Q&A. So we're going to try to answer your Q&A questions in the Q&A tool at the bottom of the screen as we go along. And then if we see some trends on the questions, we'll answer those at the end. So with that, I'm going to stop my share. And I'm going to pass it over to the extraordinary, the incredible, the fantastic, the wonderful, the amazing, the incredibly stupendous Mordy Oberstein.
Mordy Oberstein 3:42
You are you are returning the favor from our podcasts and the
Crystal Carter 3:50
but I think I repeated myself, which you never do.
Mordy Oberstein 3:52
No, I do. I did. Okay, so before we dive into this website, which is a fabulous website, and we're going to share some lessons around content optimization, from an SEO point of view. I just wanted to give an enormous shout out to Dynamic Wave Consulting. They're a fantastic design firm based out of Philadelphia. They do all sorts of social media marketing, some SEO, marketing, digital marketing and general business development. They've done an amazing job with this website. They're an award winning design agency. So definitely do check them out. They're obviously a Wix Partner. I cannot thank them enough for sharing this website with us. It's a really fantastic website. They've done an amazing job on it. And now let's see what we can learn from the website.
So the website we're looking at today. It's a local HVAC business based out of New York. And what we're going to do is take a look starting off with the homepage, and I guess I'll kick it off a little bit. The homepage does really well. First up, the site's really well designed, the information is really clear. It's really logical, the information is well written. There's all sorts of social proof throughout the website. I love the fact that it's integrated with the Google Map. This is really, really well done. What I would say, just one thing that's really interesting that people don't often realize, is how interesting Google can be. So we like to think that Google is super advanced, and they are super advanced. But sometimes, Google has what I call gaps, unexpected gaps that you wouldn't think should be there. And one of them, I think, might come up with this website. If you look at the websites, or rather their Google Business Profile? It says Manhattan HVAC experts. Awesome. It has the location and the name in there. They have reviews in there. It's a really well optimized panel. I love the fact that there are Google posts in there, this panel really appeals to me. Yeah. But if you look at the page, it's like in New York City, Manhattan, New York. So I think Google gets that. But if you scroll down, we often don't think this specific about Google. Here, it talks about Brooklyn, New York, and Brooklyn, New York and New York, New York, they're not exactly the same.
For example, if we look at Semrush, which is an SEO tool we have an integration with inside of Wix, and we look for air conditioning repair in Brooklyn, there's a monthly search volume in the US of 170 searches, meaning give or take. It's a very, very, very rough estimate. 170 people look for this term air conditioning repair on Google every month, in Brooklyn, rather. If you look for air conditioning repair in New York, or New York City, that number jumps up to 210. So New York City is a more popular term. So it is theoretically possible that Google might be a little bit confused, does it service Brooklyn, does it service Manhattan, the map seems to talk about Manhattan. So even though you would not think this would be the case, because Google's Well, smart, being super explicit and super consistent in the service areas that you service is really helpful. And to that, by the way, and the last point I'll make before I turn it over to Crystal is, I like to think of a website, the homepage is who you are, what you do. And I think there's room for even going even deeper than the page already does. And it does, the Why Choose Us section is very nice. But sometimes we don't think in terms of SEO content. On the homepage, it might very well be on other pages on this website, going into what exactly are the services? Who is the audience? Or who is the customer that we target? For example, I used to be a CEO of a property manager company in New York City. So if we're targeting, let's say, commercial real estate companies, I might want to talk about all the various city agencies that I work with and how we handle violations and codes and license permits. If I'm targeting, let's say, residential, I want to talk about what services we exactly offer and where we exactly offer them. So don't be afraid on your homepage, to be explicit about who you are, where you service, in this particular case, what services in specific you offer and where you offer them. Even though you might think, well, I already have on the other pages, Google knows. But sometimes we don't. We underestimate the absolute supremacy of the homepage, which is the most important page on the site. Okay, my spiel on the homepage is done.
Crystal Carter 8:32
Now, just to top up on that, I think there's a couple of things. So two things for folks who are listening. One, we have a webinar all about homepage SEO and you can hear Mordy wax political about how fantastic the homepage is, you can also hear me go into a lot of very technical details about how you can implement some of those things on your homepage. And there's also another page about location landing pages and the different ways that you can implement locations. For your point about the Brooklyn thing and the New York thing, one thing that might be nice is having an area served part on the homepage at the bottom that's in Brooklyn, New York. Yonkers, New York, I don't know, the Bronx, like whatever whatever it may be. My New York geography fell apart very quickly there but you can break them down into smaller things. I think from my end, one of the things that I always get, one of the things people always ask me at SEO sessions, what's your biggest SEO tip? And my first biggest SEO tip, and it sounds super basic, because it is super basic. And yet I see a lot of people do this in this sort of different way. So I always think about the H1 on your homepage and each H1 on your homepage, I think should be something that works really well. Now, if I look at this page, you think that's the H1 on the homepage, it's not actually the H1 on the homepage. So this is a tool that we're using. This is a free SEO tool called SEO PRO Extension. It's a great tool and you can see that residential and commercial is actually an H3. And also you can see that the H1 is actually way down on the page as Contact Us. And then there's another one that's that's Desi Does Your Air. This is a pretty simple fix. And after the webinar, you'll receive a a list of links for how you can do this.
Essentially, you want to think about the priority of the text on your website. Google has a tool called SEO PRO extension. I'll link that to you in the email as well. But yeah, Google kind of has a TLDR approach to some of their content. So if you're to think about it, somebody asked me about H1s, they were like, should you have one H1, or two H1s or three H1s. And I say think about it like Beyonce, there's one Beyonce, there are other members of Destiny's Child, but there's only one Beyonce, right? So your H1 is the Beyonce of your page, and it should be the center stage. And that should essentially be what the page is about. So that applies to your homepage. and that applies to lots of pages as well. And it's a really good way to make sure that you've got good critical information front and center when Google crawls your page, and also try to make it higher up the page to where it says residential and commercial, that should probably be the H1. And make sure that has a keyword for you. So for instance, if they're optimizing for HVAC, you probably want to say, residential and commercial HVAC.
You could put New York City in there if you wanted to.
Speaker 1 11:36
Yeah, that sort of thing. That's what you want to do with your H1.
Mordy Oberstein 11:41
And by the way, from a design point of view, the H1, Google doesn't care what it looks like. Where it says talk to an expert and the phone number, and you really want to make that the biggest thing from a design point of view, Google doesn't care.
It's all HTML code. So the H1 is smaller than whatever else you wanted. So you can feel free to design it however you want it.
Crystal Carter 12:04
So that tool says New York City HVAC professionals, if you wanted to make a super quick SEO optimization, you could literally just make that the H1.
Mordy Oberstein 12:15
Turning over to Vahan.
Vahan Petrosyan 12:17
Yeah, thank you. As Mordy mentioned, it's a nice and professionally designed website. The title tag targets the main keyword HVAC professionals, and they have a clear call to action on the page to capture the leads. I have checked also, there is an organization schema markup on the page, which will help Google better understand what is the business, where it's located. And generally including markup on the pages is a best practice I can advise. But I would like to mention a couple of improvements to the homepage and first the title tag. Could you please mouse over the title tag? And yeah, the title tag has a company name in it and title tag is a critical component of every website on page optimization. So it helps search engines understand what your page is about. And it does display the title tag in the search results. So the current title tag contains the company name, it may not be the most effective way to use the limited space available for the title tag because as you know, it has certain character limit on the search result pages. And I suggest instead of having the company name, add the relevant keywords to the title tags such as heating and cooling repair system and it will read like HVAC professionals heating and cooling repairs service in New York City. But as it will help you to target secondary longtail keywords related specifically to this business type.
Second, the popup. When I land on a page, I see a popup and it has a great design. What I would suggest is to test the different variations of popup and see how it helps you to convert more leads, like you can change the colors, the type of pop up. Also I would suggest to turn off the popup and see if does help to bring more leads because you have the same lead capture form on the homepage as on the popup, and sometimes users may get frustrated when they're reading experiences is blocked. So that is something I would advise to test and turn off the pop up to see if it helps to improve conversion rates. And third, I would highly recommend to use heatmap analytics. Understanding how your visitors interact with your website is critical for identifying areas for improvement. Heatmap analytics, like Microsoft Clarity, which is a free tool, can provide valuable insights into how visitors are navigating your site, where they are clicking and how they are engaging with your content. This information can help you identify opportunities to improve your site's usability, streamline your navigation and optimize your call to actions. So consider implementing a heatmap analytics tool and implementation is as easy as copy pasting a small JavaScript code into a TMS, which I'm sure allows you to do that.
Crystal Carter 16:15
I was gonna say I think testing is really important. So with regards to the title tags, you can test your title tags if you change anything. If you want to experiment in the Wix SEO Setup Checklists, we have options where you can experiment with different keywords and research different keywords. When you're trying to decide what to put in your title tag, and testing CRO or how users are clicking on your site, is also really useful as well. So yeah, testing and monitoring how people are responding to different elements on your site is a great recommendation.
Mordy Oberstein 16:52
Yep. And just in case, you're looking at how to do this inside of Wix on here, I pulled up a blog post on a test website that I have, you go to the Seo Panel, you can change the title tag here. There's actually a Semrush integration, which should be here. You can use that as well, to do some keyword research in the Editor. So if you go into the Page Settings, you open up the Seo Panel and you can change your title tag here. By the way, before I move on to the FAQ page, looking at the meta description that the agency wrote, it's fabulous. Adding things like family owned and operated, these are things that Google can show in the search results. And these are things that instil confidence in the user, when they're trying to make a click and maybe it's not an actual SEO ranking factor kind of thing, but a user seeing those kind of little tidbits of information in the meta description can really help create a click, so really job well done with the meta description.
Crystal Carter 17:54
I agree I think that's throughout the homepage like that big smiling faces, you know, this is our team. This is who we are. We want an award like we're here for you, we'll help you sort out your air conditioning in the depths of New York summer. Yeah, I'm here for that.
Mordy Oberstein 18:08
I really like that and felt instilled with confidence looking at the page.
Crystal Carter 18:12
Yeah, it's really great.
Mordy Oberstein 18:13
Moving to the FAQ page, I love FAQs. I love this FAQ page. If you look, there's a bunch of really, really great information. What stood out to me, and this is part of the Google algorithmic equation is that you can tell they have firsthand experience and expertise in the topic area, it really shines through. I'm not going to read through all the content now. But if you would like to, I think it's an exemplary way of writing FAQ content, you really get a very, very strong sense that they're experts, that they care and they have first hand experience. So job well done in the actual content itself.
From an SEO point of view, just a really quick win. So frequently asked questions, you know, if you wanted to add on the focus keyword, frequently asked questions about HVAC or heating and air conditioning systems. I think that would be a really quick win or something related to that focus area.
Crystal Carter 19:15
A nice sub heading as well.
Mordy Oberstein 19:17
Yes. And you can absolutely, absolutely add a heading. And a little bit of body text, like here's some questions you might be wondering about your heating and air conditioning system if you live in New York. So again, you're just trying to give Google a little bit more context to chew on. Again, we don't usually think this way about Google because they can make self-driving cars that can understand if a squirrel walked in front of it. But sometimes it's a bot and you have to treat the bot like a bot. Just one other quick point. So there's a page on design and installation, which again offers absolutely amazing information. If you go through it. It's really well designed. It really shows the expertise. It really shows all about what the business does. I love the image of the plans and the diagram. And one thing, though, is that all this is an image. And unfortunately, sometimes Google doesn't understand the content in the image itself. So one easy way is to keep the actual design but when we talk about who we are all this content here, just lay it over in a text box, as opposed to having it in the image itself. It's just a quick win, because this is great content that should definitely help with the ranking of the site.
Crystal Carter 20:37
Yeah I agree that the FAQ content here is fantastic. I think it's really good. The first thing I see when I look at this is links, or the lack of links. So I think that adding links to your website, and again, we have some great content on the Wix SEO Hub, we have another webinar about internal linking. And he talks about lots of data that they found from internal linking. But internal links, particularly line links, are a really good way to help Google crawl your site. So basically, the way Google crawls your site is links first. So they bounce from one link, and then they go to the site, they'll find another link, then they'll find another link, then they'll find another link. So if this page is getting a lot of traffic, and FAQ pages have a high potential to do so then this is a great place to put keywords and put links to keywords. So for instance, if you have something like how do I get an HVAC quote? Well, you can get a quote, and then you link to your page for getting a quote on that link. And that would add more keyword value to that to the page that is going to and it would also help users be more helpful to users and also helps Google crawl.
We'll send more information about links and using internal links and about that webinar that I've mentioned there. But links again, a really big win for both for users and for bots, and will help your help more content on your page be surfaced more highly. The other thing to think about, so this page, in terms of crawl depth, this is one stage. And so this means that when Google crawls it, they'll crawl the top page and then they'll crawl this one, this is sort of the next layer on your lovely content cake. And so it means that when you're adding links here, you can add links to things that are further down your content hierarchy, and it will help surface those things. So internal links is a big one here, if you've got a page that doesn't have internal links, add internal links to it, especially if it's a page that's this high priority.
Mordy Oberstein 22:40
Low hanging fruit. And by the way, this is one add on, you can absolutely go crazy with the FAQs here. I think there's so much content, you can talk about when do I call you if I have a problem? What kind of problems? I like to think of an FAQ as a way of really being explicit about what you do. What services do I do? What do you fix? What do you specialize in? What licenses do you have? Really building that trust and again being really explicit with the search engine about who you are and what you do, and FAQs are actually a great way to do that. Anyway, Vahan. Dear sir. What's your take?
Vahan Petrosyan 23:19
I'm impressed that they have an FAQ page. And yes, it's really a great way to increase conversion rates on the website, because it's one thing to bring the traffic and another what to do with the traffic, right. And I see again, the prominent call to action at the end of the FAQ to capture the leads. Great, great job. And I have few recommendations, which can probably help to enhance the FAQ page even more. I would recommend that….seeing a long Q&A screen.....let people click on small icons and expand to answer the question. Because users usually have shorter attention spans and want to find information quickly. That format allows users to quickly scan for the questions and find the information they need without having to read through the long paragraphs of text. By using the code and style format, you can improve the user experience, and of course reduce the bounce rate. Consider adding FAQ schema markup to the FAQ page and the schema markup schema can help make your website be more visible to users in the search page. It may enable rich results that show questions answered directly in the search results, which will help to capture users attention. And one way to do that is to use ChatGPT to generate the schema markup. And you can use this functionality to add that schema to the page. But make sure that you validate that schema markup through one of the online validators available for free. And Search Engine Journal, we have a great article published by Mordy, how to add a schema on a Wix website. That is an article I would advise you to check out.
Crystal opened the FAQ page, and I noticed there is also translation available on the upper right corner, right? Can you click on this? Yes, Spanish flag. Yeah. So this is something I would like to recommend, not to publish pages which are kind of under construction, because I see that when you switch to that Spanish version, the text is not translated to Spanish, which means this page is the same as the FAQ page, which will cause a duplicate content issue for Google. Make sure to fully translate the page and if it isn't ready not to publish. And the same also applies for the navigation and all other sections, which are in Spanish. So it's all totally okay to not index these pages, so Google doesn't index them and you can hide them from the the public until they are ready.
Crystal Carter 26:53
This is a common thing that I've seen where folks are moving through some of it, and maybe you might try to implement something, and maybe you don't have time to finish or whatever. This is something that can happen. So it's important to check those pages. With regards to the translation, Wix has a great tool that allows you to translate your pages, but you should also make sure that if you're not ready, if you haven't translated all of them, you go through and you can make some visible or you can sort of hide these from search engines, or you can can block them from visibility. So don't let search engines index this page. You can also take them out of the menu. So there's lots of things that you can do. We interviewed Elena Phyllis recently on international SEO and one of the things that she was saying, it's a little bit of a spoiler. I don't know if I'm spilling the beans here.
Mordy Oberstein 27:50
Oh, no, no spill the beans.
Crystal Carter 27:52
One of the things she said is that if you're planning to do international SEO, even one page of high quality, in the new language, will be of value to users. So as Vahan said you want to avoid having lots of pages that might not be done. If you can only manage one good page, do one good page. And then you can expand it later.
Mordy Oberstein 28:15
Yeah, and just really, really quick. So Vahan mentioned creating structured data markup, there's a great free tool called the Schema Markup Generator from Rank Ranger, you select the kind of markup you want to create. So here, it's FAQ markup, you add your questions, the answers, you copy it, and then you go into whatever page you want in Wix, and you list the name of the markup, and you just paste it in. And that's it. We'll also validate the markup for you to make sure that it's good and ready to go. So definitely, by the way, just so you know, in many cases, Wix automatically creates markup for you. So if you look here, oops, I'm on the wrong page. If you go to the homepage.
Vahan Petrosyan 28:55
Just a side note that schema markup itself is not a ranking factor. It just aims to help Google understand your content better.
Mordy Oberstein 29:04
So in this particular case, we see that the local business structured markup is automatically added to the page. And that's because the team did a great job of adding the address to the bottom of the page here. And once we see that, we automatically add a local business markup to the page. Okay, on to the blog which is my favorite. So first off, kudos for having a blog.
Crystal Carter 29:30
Yes. Yes
Mordy Oberstein 29:32
Absolutely. Kudos for having a blog. Many sites don't take advantage of it.
Crystal Carter 29:36
And we see when we look at the performance of websites overall, sites with blogs tend to perform better.
Mordy Oberstein 29:44
You're giving Google some context, some meat that shows some semantic information. You're also giving yourself more ranking opportunities and showing up your expertise. In this case, the content very much does show off the website's expertise and the business expertise. Again, it's clearly written by somebody who has information about the topic, the topics are on target. Sometimes that's not the case with blogs, they're a little bit all over the place. But in this case, the content is very much on target and relevant to the audience. One real quick thing that I think you could do here, again, there's space here, or you can set up the page where you can add an H1 to the page. So you know, HVAC blog, again, being very, very simple about it, you can be a little bit more targeted with it. It just gives a little bit of context to Google just having that H1 there, this is a blog about HVAC tips, or HVAC how-tos, whatever it may be. And then of course, underneath that H1, you can have a little bit of body text, a couple of lines: This is a blog where you can learn all about how to maintain your HVAC system, I'm making that up, whatever it may be. So just really, you know, feel comfortable. Having just one or two lines of content can really help Google and make all the difference.
Crystal Carter 31:13
That's huge and you can also again, add those internal links into some of because blogs tend to be more of a sort of informational pages, you can add a link to more of the transactional pages as well, like this is a blog about about how you can or can get HVAC services, and then you can link to your HVAC services, for instance, and move things forward.
Mordy Oberstein 31:35
Really interesting point, and I don't know the answer. In this case, it might be absolutely the correct thing to do. So HVAC, if you're not from the property management industry, it might be a term that the average person may or may not know, I do not know, I have no idea if your target audience is, let's say your average homeowner, maybe breaking down the terms, rather than HVAC, air conditioning and heating systems. I don't know if that's exactly accurate. I know there's also venting involved with the V. So I don't know if it's accurate or not. But again, if it's a term that may or may not be readily understood by the audience. If this was a professional property management company, that's your target audience, then HVAC is definitely fine. In this particular case HVAC could be fine. It's nothing to do with this particular website. But something for any website to think about is that you are the expert, you may be using terms that the average person may or may not know about, we see this all the time in SEO, I can throw a bunch of SEO terms and to me, it's like yeah, absolutely, you know, normal jargon. But for most people, when I talk to my wife about it, it sounds like I'm from outer space.
Crystal Carter 32:48
My husband goes "internet good?" And I go "yes, internet good."
Mordy Oberstein 32:52
You're doing your computer thing, right? So it's one thing to consider. Pause, check yourself. Is that the right terminology? Is it too much jargon for the average user or the average person who we're targeting with our content? In this case, again, I do not know. But it's a general point that I wanted to bring up.
Crystal Carter 33:15
Yeah, that's a good general point. I think one of the things I like about their blogs, I get how you were saying about how they're sharing genuine expertise. So I think, and that ultimate guide, the first thing they did was say what HVAC is, which is useful, because honestly I would not know, I did not know before I found out about this website. But one of the other things that I think is great is, I had a look on their website. And again, they're really good with their transparency. They're like, this is our address. This is where we work. This is what we look like, this is what we do. Like, you know, we're all right, that sort of thing. On their Instagram, they've got some great photos of some of their installations. If you see Mordy, if you scroll all the way down, I think you can get to their Instagram. Yeah, if you click on that one for me, they've got some great photos of like, check out this HVAC unit, look at this apartment. I think that that stuff's really useful. Those are the pictures that I want to see. If I want to see if this is a thing for me. I also love those trainers, their sneakers, like I love that.
But I think that there's an opportunity to include some of that stuff in the blog. So I think including some of these real life pictures would be really good. And you can literally just take them off of Instagram and pop them onto the blog. I think that helps Google to understand that you have an experience and those pictures will be unique to you because you're the only person who installed an HVAC unit on that particular building. So that's useful. You can also add information about tags and captions that say, you know, this HVAC unit that we installed in the Bronx, I had an apartment a duplex like and that's really great. Additionally, there's an opportunity to add in some quotes so when you go on to the homepage, you've got, you know, big smiling faces of their team who are really enthusiastic about what they do, they've got the shoes to prove it. So it'd be great to have some quotes from them or even from some of their customers. Let's say they've got one that's like, how long should an HVAC system last. They can have another quote that says, "Yeah, I installed a unit and it lasted this long, and it was really great." Or you know, we generally see that the units can last this long or that long. And it's really good for adding in the experience. So Google has experience, expertise, authority and trust. And the experience point is something that is absolutely unique to your team. And it's an easy, really good way to add unique content to your blogs.
Mordy Oberstein 35:49
Yeah, by the way, to your point about the images, if you include the images in the post, you can actually rank in image search. So just another one of the ranking opportunities.
Crystal Carter 35:56
Right, and Wix has a tool where you can add an image to your website, it will automatically generate some tags via vision AI, which is Google's image recognition software. So they will add information for you as well. So it's something that's really useful, and especially if they already have so many great images on their Instagram.
Mordy Oberstein 36:18
Amazing, Vahan. What say you?
Vahan Petrosyan 36:21
So many great points you brought up. And, of course, I want to mention that having a blog is a critical component in SEO. And if you are serious about your business, you should fully explore how you can optimize your website for different types of keywords and increase your search visibility. And to the point, adding images, I would advise on top of that to also record the videos of their repairing and embedding on the page. And using video object schema again. And the more unique content you have, which belongs only to you and is not found elsewhere, the higher your content will be valued by Google.
I have a couple of recommendations I would like to make regarding the blog article pages. Crystal, can you please open a blog post? Yeah, and as you may know, Google recently has introduced the double E-E update to their search rater guidelines. It means they also take into account expertise by others. And could you please open another page if possible. Regarding E-E-A-T, I would highly recommend to complete the other pages by adding social profile links, adding the author's LinkedIn, Twitter, social pages, as well as adding a short biography of the author to send Google signals about expertise and experience in the field of the topic of the blog article. This will help Google better understand that the author behind the article is a really experienced person, and it's a highly available content. Second, I would advise to shorten titles I mean, SEO titles, as well as URLs. And look titles can be often cut off in the search result as you know, which means users who search and see your blog post may not be able to see the full title and not fully understand what the article is about, so I would advise to shorten it and make it easier for users to understand. And third, I would recommend to add breadcrumbs to blog posts. Break bread crumbs can be an excellent way to help users navigate through your site and find related content. They also provide a clear hierarchy for search engines making it easier for them to understand the structure of your content. Adding breadcrumbs to blog posts that fall under the main category can help users navigate back to the main category page as well as provide context for the content they are currently viewing. This can improve the overall user experience and help keep users engaged. And I'm sure Wix has functionality for adding breadcrumbs.
Mordy Oberstein 40:03
Yes, I actually have it in my blog.
Crystal Carter 40:06
Yeah there's a couple of ways that you can do that. Breadcrumbs are great for allowing you to add in breadcrumb schema as well and also to add in more internal links. We're about to get to the chat but someone's asking about breadcrumbs. I've got a few people asking me—it's not from Hansel and Gretel, which didn't work out well for them. A breadcrumb is sort of a trail. So for instance, if you're on a blog, or if you are on iOS.
Mordy Oberstein 40:38
Designers avert your eyes.
Crystal Carter 40:42
Or if you are in something that is like a product thing, it might be that you have something that goes from the homepage to the product category to the product name. And that's a breadcrumb. So they're back there, you've got that functionality.
Mordy Oberstein 40:59
I was just playing around to see how to do it on the platform, precisely. Go back to my homepage. Please avert your eyes, I apologize, I'm so embarrassed.
Crystal Carter 41:10
So there's a few different ways that you can do that. We will link you to the knowledge base article that will show you how to create a breadcrumb in the email chat. And I think we've got a lot of questions. We've had a lot of people very interested. So I think we will be moving on to the Q&A portion of the session. So yes, thank you to everyone for joining us, having lots of questions and being very active today. And thank you everyone for your great insights. And for talking lots about the--- you're pronouncing it double E-A-T.
And I think Sean Price is also wondering, wondering what was the heatmap tool that you mentioned? That was Microsoft Clarity. And then also, I think other ones that people use historically are Hotjar, and other things like that. Mordy have you got the document with the questions?
Mordy Oberstein 42:19
I do. So someone asked me a great question about the tools, what tools were used to analyze the headers on the page. The tools we use to analyze the title tags. If you hover over a tab in Chrome, a little pop up will show up. And that's the title tag. That's a title that Google's looking at. So the tools really quickly there is the Chrome extension from Marketing Syrup called SEO Pro extension. And that's where we looked at the title tag and the headers and the status of the structured data markup. There was also a Semrush extension, that's what I used for the keyword research where there's actually an integration in Wix in the Seo Panel, and in the main SEO Setup Checklist, where you can access Semrush keyword research. It'll tell you data around how often people are searching for a given term. And that's where we say, hey, people are looking for New York City HVAC, our heating and air conditioning repair, more often than Brooklyn. Which I take personally because I was born in Brooklyn.
The other tool that I showed you was from Rank Ranger, it was their free schema markup generator where they walk you through creating the code, you don't have to know how to write code and you just click Copy and Paste and paste it into Wix. So that was the third tool that we used, and I will try to send out the links for all of them so you have them. Okay, one question was about using the same city throughout the homepage. Let's say I service Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, how do I go about being consistent about telling Google where I service? I'm assuming outside of the service area, your listing and Google Business Profile, but just with the copy on the page? How do I show consistency?
Crystal Carter 44:22
So in my experience of working on this, it's important to understand the kinds of keywords that people are using to find you. So in a place like Brooklyn, or Queens or Staten Island or in a big, big city like New York, where it takes a very long time to move five miles. Being neighborhood specific is really important. In a place that's a bigger spread, then you might not need to be so neighborhood specific. In a smaller town like Buffalo, New York you can say we serve Buffalo, New York, right? It's a smaller town, it's probably not so not so important to be that specific in a neighborhood in Buffalo, New York unless it's a walking distance service. But, for instance, I have done a lot of work in the West Country of England, which is also referred to as Devonshire, which is also called the southwest of England, which is also called the West of England. And there's lots of different ways that people talk about that place. So you need to think about if you're in Holland, there's Holland, there's the Netherlands, that sort of thing. So, be aware of the words that people are using, and try to optimize for them.
So think about where most of your customers go, where most of your customers come from, and that should be your big headline. And then maybe in the paragraph about it, let's say you're doing HVAC for the Bronx, right? We say HVAC suppliers in the Bronx, because most of your customers come from the Bronx, right? We are the best HVAC suppliers in the Bronx. And we serve lots of people from around New York as well, in these places, these places and these places in the paragraph. But your priority should be your main customer base. And in Wix, you can actually see where a lot of your traffic is coming from geographically in your Wix Analytics, and that's definitely worth thinking about when you're looking at your location optimizations.
Mordy Oberstein 46:29
Yeah, just really being consistent, not saying in one place, we service here and then another place, there. I think that's what confuses the search engines primarily. Of course, you can have different pages addressing the unique needs of HVAC in Queens versus Brooklyn. Maybe there are different regulations in New Jersey versus New York, that might be a good way to differentiate.
Crystal Carter 46:57
Right. But the people searching in New Jersey are probably likely to get New York information. So yeah, you'd like the New York search results. So that's something to think about.
Mordy Oberstein 47:08
Someone asked about addressing alt text, maybe you could address this. So first up, maybe let's explain what alt text is, why it's important, and why it matters.
Vahan Petrosyan 47:23
The alt text? So first of all, it's helpful for users with disabilities. Alt text helps text readers read that page and understand images, as well as it helps Google also understand what is on the image. So it's important for sending Google signal words about the image, also helping users with accessibility issues to read the content. If you don't want certain images to be read by so called screen readers you can just leave alt text empty and they will just ignore that as a part of the webpage. Those are applied maybe for some kind of icons which are not relevant to the content.
Mordy Oberstein 48:26
Yeah if you take a piece of content, copy and paste it and throw it into a TTS reader, you'll see that there's alt text there, it won't show the image, obviously, it'll just show what the image was described as. And it's a great way of helping people with impairments. And it does help. It's not why you should have it there, but it does help from an SEO point of view. It helps Google understand what that image might be about because again, Google doesn't look at what exactly is in your image and doesn't fully understand what's in the text. You need to tell it. What's in the image and alt texts is one way.
Crystal Carter 49:06
Yeah, so Google reads images in a different way from the way that it reads text. So you need to think about how you prioritize that.
Mordy Oberstein 49:13
Let's talk about light boxes. To complicate a question about do we use light boxes, can Google understand the text in the light box and so forth? So first of all, I want to mention there's something. In 2016 or 2017, Google introduced something called the Intrusive Interstitial Update, interstitial being the fancy word for pop up. And there was supposed to be intrusive interstitial Armageddon, where Google was going to penalize all the websites with intrusive pop ups, which never really happened. However, it is officially a ranking signal if the pop up is intrusive, meaning you know those ones where you can't really find the x. Not in this case, this was not intrusive, I was clearly able to click out of it, I was clearly able to find the x. But it's something to be careful about, if you're trying to, for lack of a better way of explaining it, trick people into using the forms because they can't get out. Unless they use the form. Google could, theoretically, demote the rankings of the web page in the website. So be careful with interstitials and pop ups in terms of the content. Crystal, can Google pick up the content inside of a lightbox?
Crystal Carter 50:32
It will depend on how it's implemented. So I think it's worth thinking about. Always with popups, it's worth thinking about where the value is for the user, where the value is for the business. And anytime you add something to your website there's a bit of give and take with what you're doing, particularly if it's a visual element. So I think you should make sure that you think about what works best for you, and just test it and make sure that it's all set up properly.
Mordy Oberstein 51:09
You were talking about conversions and the light box might be counterintuitive, and it's worth experimenting to see what actually works or doesn't work. I was wondering if maybe you could elaborate a little bit about that, because it is a great, great topic.
Vahan Petrosyan 51:22
Yeah, sure and that is where a heat map can help you. If you implement the heat map you will see how basically users interact with the pop up. Do they just instantly clear and hit the back button in the browser and go back to the search results. Analyze if it really does help or negatively affects your visitors' user experience. Does it reduce conversion rates? So if you want to pop up which is not intrusive, you may consider a pop up which is not fully blocking your screen. So we like to mention that cookie constant pop ups are never gonna harm your rankings because Google's pretty smart and can figure out that it's a cookie consent pop up and never penalizes for that.
Mordy Oberstein 52:16
Yes, which is so funny, because we said before, sometimes Google is incredibly smart. And that's one of those areas where Google is incredibly smart.
Crystal Carter 52:22
And can I just jump in? There's a lot of people asking questions in the chat, we have the Q&A as well. On the chat, lots of people are asking what is a heat map? What does a heat map do? What's a heat map? How do you map the heat? What is the heat map? I thought we were talking about air conditioners? What is a heat map? Now Vahan, you talked a bit about heat maps, do you want to give us a quick summary of what a heat map is and why they're useful for SEO.
Vahan Petrosyan 52:49
Of course, a heat map is visualizing how users interact with your website, they're basically color based information on the web pages they visit. The part they click most is highlighted in red. And you actually see that when people browse the website, they click on certain places. If you see a certain part of your web page has a high activity, users click and interact, consider putting your call to actions there, that may help drive more leads, because it's basically the part of the page which attracts users most right? Yeah, I think there is a lot of information available on the web on heat maps, and I highly recommend to check it out.
Crystal Carter 53:43
Yeah, they're a useful bit of kit. No you don't download the heat map, you would add a little bit of script into your Wix website, if you go to developer tools and the scripts area, there's an area where you can manage your scripts, and you would add that onto your site. And then you go to an actual tool that you've used, and they'll save all the data and give you lots of information and give you screenshots of little sort of blobs of where everybody's clicking, and where everybody's looking and that sort of thing.
Mordy Oberstein 54:13
So people have been asking about using what tools do I use? How do I know whether or not a page is performing well, if I need to do optimization, and so forth, and I'm going to go to show you something inside of Wix using my own websites, my own data, embarrassing myself. And I'll show you so if you connect to Google Search Console via Wix, you can do that with your SEO Setup Checklist. And in one click in the SEO Home inside of your dashboard, you will have automatic Google Search Console insights. Google Search Console is a tool that does many things. And we should have a webinar about this next month with Google about this. We'll get more information from them directly. So make sure that you come back for that one. But just a really quick overview of Search Console, one of the things that it does is isolate your performance, help you understand your performance on Google, in terms of impressions, which is how often your URL has appeared on the Google results. So somebody searches, your URL shows up, they scroll down, it brings up more URLs, the URL shows up, that's an impression, and actual clicks. And you can actually see here, like, this page that I did a podcast episode about doing SEO in China, which is actually a topic, believe it or not, saw an increase of 64 impressions, so great, I guess. So look at clicks, on this post, on that post, and that page saw an increase in clicks and saw a decrease in clicks. I can also look at actual queries. I saw an increase in impressions for the term SEO, I saw an increase in clicks, I didn't see any increase in clicks, I haven't posted anything in a while. So you'll be able to see an increase or decrease. And there's also a fuller set of analytics inside of the reports inside of your Wix Analytics. So check that out, you can get all sorts of information, all about how your website is performing. Now that I'm done embarrassing myself with my data. I do think it's time for us to say goodbye.
Crystal Carter 56:18
Thank you all so much for joining us and for being SEO enthusiasts. It has been fantastic. I would like to tell Simon Cox that Yes, I have seen what you have posted and and thank you very much for keeping us amused. So yeah, great. Thank you. Thank you so much to Vahan for joining us from SEJ. It was an absolute pleasure. Go check out Searchenginejournal.com. They're fantastic.
Mordy Oberstein 56:44
Yes. And don't forget to join us next month for our webinar around Google Search Console performance reports with Daniel Weisberg over at Google Search Console. Thank you so much Vahan.
Crystal Carter 56:56
Thank you, Vahan.
Mordy Oberstein 56:56
Thank you SEJ. Bye, everybody.