2018·07·11 · 42:13
Joost de Valk: Technical SEO to grow your WordPress business
This talk is aimed at WordPress developers who build sites for clients. My argument is that a badly SEO’d project will never get you a satisfied customer, because nobody visiting the site means nobody making more money to spend on improvements. I walk through the questions developers need to ask at every phase of a project, from proposal through launch, and explain why handling redirects, URL structures, and crawl considerations upfront is much cheaper than fixing them after the site is live. Knowing this material also helps you land the job in the first place.
0:10 [Applause] so good afternoon around it's probably been a long day for most of you we're going to talk about technical SEO and I'm gonna try and keep it as non-technical as I can the funny thing about technical SEO is that a lot of developers fing to SEO stupid or SEO is hard or SEO is something that they really shouldn't be thinking about all
0:42 that much and SEO goals for projects are often very ill-defined or not defined at all every time some major brand relaunches their website everyone in the SEO community cringes because they always forget even the most simple basics of things and I think it's stupid because if you're a web developer or a company owner you can make so much money by just asking the right questions
1:14 upfront and by going into a project knowing what you have to do to maintain the rankings of a website or problem or hopefully even make them better so you have to realize that a badly as he owed project will never ever get you a satisfied customer if you deliver a website and nobody ever visits that website that customer is not making more money to spend on you making that
1:45 website better it's as simple as that I was actually very happy to hear Matt say earlier that we have to think of people as they type something into Google what what will happen when they get to a website yeah well there's a plug-in for that so I want to give you a couple of reasons not to listen because this is what usually web developers do they say this is marketing it's not development they say things like that's not what my
2:16 customer asked me to do this will make us more expensive this will make us too expensive and well some of that might be true it might make you more expensive which means that it makes you more money so there's a plus side to that it also makes your customer feel like you are truly on top of what you're doing and you very often hear like yeah but we need to listen to the customer the problem is that usually the customer hasn't thoughts about most of this
2:51 enough you need to help them you all are the web natives here you're here at WordCamp your customers probably are not the people who you build sites for are probably not here and if you are lucky you still ask all these questions so there's a lot of questions that I'm going to tell you to ask and tell and explain to you why you should be asking these questions and then you'll at the end come up with like yeah there's a lot of things that we know about but that we
3:23 cannot do well it's perfectly fine to say that but it's a lot easier when you do it up front and say okay so we know that this is something that actually should be done but we don't have a budget for it or we cannot do it or whatever then when you go halfway through the project where you released a new website and suddenly someone goes hey I'm looking up at old URLs in Google and I'm not getting to the good page on the website and it's like yeah we didn't do the redirects we talked about that remember it's here you said that would
3:54 cost us five K and I said and and you said that was too expensive so we didn't do it we can still do it now will still cost you five K something like that so we're going to go through two five phases of building a website and the SEO issues that are attached to that what's important to note is that even though these are five phases in development it's probably best if you ask all these questions up front first of all we start
4:25 with analysis simple stuff what the success looked like and I know I signed sound like a boring business consultant as I say that but what the success looked like is probably the single most important question you can answer you can get answers from for any customer you ever work for and then what the success look like is not beautiful or it has a shiny slider or it has this color and our logo
4:56 no its metrics visitors conversions sales whatever determine those metrics and then also determine how people are coming to your customers website right now if they already have one and I assume by now that most people will already have our website so how are you coming to the site and what are you coming to do and are you replicating all of those possibilities into the new site and if not why not
5:27 now that's mostly the boring part but it is good to ask those questions then you get to the design phase which is something that can either take two days or two years or anything in-between of course but usually people start right off with like okay so we want it to look like this that's not how this works SEO starts we're thinking about what type of content will I need to put on this site to be found for the keywords
6:00 that I want to be found full and how do i structure all of that into one site structure I'm going to assume that all of you were in murica's talk here earlier if not it'll be on WordCamp TV later on and there's a lot of content that we've written about how to optimize your site structure it is really something that you should be thinking about upfront the amounts of sites that we've gone into and have to fix later on because nobody thought about hey we need to add this we need to add that and our
6:32 menus that looks very pretty and small in the beginning suddenly turn into be moths with ten or twelve menu items because yeah we needed to put this in and this in and this in that doesn't work now I should go through that there's also things that you need to think about when you're structuring that thing because that menu or twelve menu items that doesn't work so well on mobile and mobile used to be something that you could consider and over the last year or
7:04 so we've switched from mobile is something you could consider to a desktop website is something you could consider google has announced something called mobile first indexing and they've been announcing that for about two years wherein they look at a website as though it's presented on a mobile phone when they index your site so when they grab the data from those pages they look at the mobile version of your site they announced that and they've started
7:36 rolling it out so currently about 1% of the sites that we monitor is in the mobile index and all of the sites that are already in the mobile index were responsive to begin with so they worked on mobile but they do look differently on mobile than they do in the desktop it's not something to be afraid of because we've not seen any ranking changes or anything that makes me feel really bad about it but not having a mobile website is not gonna last you anymore and related to that there is
8:08 something else that's very important at speed how fast should this website be how much money are we willing to invest into making this the fastest website in our area and yes speed is something that you can differentiate yourself with from your competition a faster website performs better for users it does better in search as well and that and the importance of that is only getting
8:41 bigger so much bigger that Google is here with an entire booth with a team that those of you who are also in the SEO community will recognize because everyone in the SEO community thinks of that team is the amp team the funny thing is you know what they call themselves here they call themselves the developer relations and WordPress team because that is the same thing their WordPress to is there am team and vice versa how did
9:16 look at the web is about openness an amp is part of how they perceived the open web can work further if you get a chance to talk to Paul Burke house he's here he's one of the Googlers he has an awesome website Paul Vikas calm which is a very good example of what amp can look like that entire site is only amp there is no normal HTML version of that site he turned he coined the term for that
9:50 which is canonical amp and that's what they're pushing towards they're pushing towards all of us building our sites in amp HTML not in normal HTML now I used to be very against all of this I have to say and the amp HTML spec is by far the pity sometimes that it's not a w3c spec and that it's not as open as some of the other ones but at the same time the specs that are open like that the see is a specs and all the things
10:22 that we know we can do with all of that took years to come into somewhat of a fruition I got my first tips with WordPress back in 2006 when I started a website called css3 info I was doing a thing called css3 previews in which I showed people what sees us free would look like and how that will work it took eight years for mainstream browsers to
10:55 go from having that spec out there to actually implementing that and beyond allowing that to happen it took less than six months for a large portion of the web to adopt amp and build pages in amp HTML this is truly a very very fast effort in terms of how web standards evolved so it's something that you really should be looking at and discussing with your clients because they will be asking you about pages sooner or later it's better if you
11:26 ask them hey do you know what this is this is how it works we can do this and this and this with it then you need to think about International especially here in Europe because as painful as it is to say this is usually something that comes up in Europe and that they forget about in the u.s. if WordPress have been built in Europe WordPress would have had multilingual baked-in for him to start unfortunately it does not so something you need to think about and something
11:57 you need to work on but it also means that you need to think about how to tie languages and things on sites together if you have an English site to French site and a German site how are you gonna make sure that all of the important content isn't all three of them and are you aware that the content needs to be ranking in keywords that people dare actually use not the ones you translated through google translate because that's not how international SEO works so talk about that with your clients and then
12:30 think about things like H hreflang now this is about the most complicated thing that we've ever created in the SEO world SEO s go mad over it it's almost as hard as CSS not much harder but it is something that a lot of SEO s make a lot of mistakes with it would probably bet and be better left in the hands of web developers because they can actually read and follow instructions so please
13:01 you guys do it and don't ask SEO stood it because most SEO is I've seen do it they break it now as you have all these types of contents and all these other things on a website there's something else that you need to think about Google is pushing along with amp a system called schema.org which pushes metadata it's basically telling Google what is on a page the funny thing that most people don't realize is that
13:32 every amp page has a block in the source code that is like a full J's json-ld block of code which has everything around about that page in a very easily machine readable state what you can do with schema.org is almost limitless especially because it's an extensible thing but if you go to schema.org and you look at like what these schemas are that's basically its economy for the entire world it goes from this is a local business local business
14:05 hairdresser or something like then you can specify very precisely what is on a page and by doing that you're helping Google and other search engines being just announced even better support for it you're helping them understand your site better there's also a schema now for breadcrumbs and actually this morning I got permission from Google I haven't even told my team this yet I got permission from Google to put the breadcrumb schema that we can generate
14:38 in US SEO onto every page regardless of whether there's actually breadcrumbs on that page which means that we can show Google the structure of your website without even having to breadcrumbs now I still think having two breadcrumbs is a good idea but showing Google the structure for your site in a structured way like that will allow them to better understand the structure of your website far more easily then there's accessibility and I can't stress this enough accessibility and SEO go
15:12 hand-in-hand think of Google as a blind person and most of what you will do will be right also you as a community have a responsibility to build stuff that people can use so it is okay for you to say this is the bare minimum of accessibility level that we will deliver it is truly okay to say no we cannot do that like that because nobody who's slightly who has some form of trouble
15:44 with using that web page cannot use it of course sometimes that means is you have to make some fallbacks for things and it is not as easy for someone who is using an assistive device to do that thing as it is for someone who does not use that assistive device that's fine but have some basic level of accessibility and when doing that you'll find that Google actually uses most of that as well now in all of this it's important that you need to allow for
16:18 growth not just in menus but in how you think about all these things and how you build all this that's why WordPress is so awesome because you can always throw in an extra plug in and do something extra if you're not using WordPress it becomes a lot harder now during the development phase there's two things that I think you really should be thinking about first of all if you add plugins to add functionality that's awesome but think about what they do to your website think about the SEO impact in the speed impact of those plugins and some plugins
16:50 are better than others in terms of how they work for the user but some plugins are also better than others in how they work for your SEO in how they add CSS and JavaScript and all these things to the front-end that you don't really need but that's slow the side down this is a continuous battle and then there's the thing that I think actually is probably the most important thing that you need to remember today if you only want to remember one thing that is if you're
17:22 going from website a to website B and the URLs change and you do not make redirects you have made a mess I'll tell you a nice example we have a bank in the Netherlands who used to rank number two for the word loan which is something that's worth quite a bit of money they did a redesign and they forgot to redirect the page they had for the word loan to the new page they had for the
17:53 word loan they lost that ranking and they never recovered it because they still today have not put that redirect in place and I see all of you go like that but to be honest this happens on a daily basis with the biggest brands in the world so please talk to your customer about hey we need to do redirects these are the old URLs this will be the new ones if we have a list here we can make an excel file and then you know what there's a plugin that can do redirects where you
18:26 can import CSV files it's a little very useful okay and then you go to the later phase you've developed that thing you're you need to test that website and I would urge you if you're building a slightly larger website to automate that testing process because if you can automate that testing process you can run it again when you do a small update
18:58 so if you update with WordPress or a plugin and you can rerun your acceptance testing because you've automated it you can save yourself a lot of time and a lot of embarrassment now automated acceptance testing is not something that we've done a whole lot of in the WordPress world we're now working on it I ghost and the words having some very awesome results will definitely share about that but it is something that you should really be thinking about how can I test these things without having to
19:31 test it manually all the time and then everyone's happy websites launched you're you're all going and then you tell absolutely nobody or you don't of course you need to go out there and promote that new website you can be proud of what you built right if you if you're not willing to tweet about or Facebook about a new website that you've launched then look deeply at why am I not willing to do that for my customer and maybe next time don't take that
20:04 project so help them because the funny thing is that getting links and getting a bit of promotion for a website only just a few links who already helps so much in getting that new website doing well a few tweets a link from your from your website as a developer can help your customer rank like that if it's especially if it's a smaller business now the opposite of that the link in the footer back to your own website is not
20:35 something I'm the biggest fan off because it looks weird for everyone it's a bit like yeah we've built this and I've built this house I'm gonna keep this poster up up front in front of the house forever and ever and ever that doesn't work but you can make deals about that and if you give them a discount and they'd and you'd do something about that that's okay but please make sure it should discuss this upfront with your client now we've launched that website and then we go
21:06 into maintenance mode and that's always boring in the part where everyone makes mistakes Google search console still doesn't have enough users and it will never have enough users until every website on the planet that wants to be in Google is in Google search console so if you have a website you added to Google search console and you discuss with your customer who will look at those emails and who will auction them
21:39 and Google sends out a lot of emails so be ready for that especially when you do amp they will tell you like hey you're you've got social sharing buttons on the normal version of this page but you don't have them on the app version of this page emails like that now I can tell you that some of them you can absolutely ignore if you want to but someone needs to look at those because there are also messages where it says hey in the last few days we've suddenly seen a spike of 404s on your website we've seen a spike of errors look at
22:12 that go into that fix that that's not something that can wait for two weeks because if it waits for two weeks and your customer loses all its rankings then there's this thing called security that we talk a lot about in the WordPress world except in contributor days because yesterday the security table was awfully empty but it's really important a hacked website is absolutely
22:43 the worst thing that can happen to you in terms of SEO trust me we've seen enough we've stopped doing our site reviews but when we were still doing our site reviews about one in a hundred sometimes two in a hundred in bad times of those people requesting reviews were coming to us and they were saying yeah we've suddenly lost all our rankings and then we had to look at the website for about two minutes and tell them yeah so here's a link to sue curry get your get your hack cleaned up you've been
23:15 hacked then resubmit the site to Google and wait for a bit usually takes a month two months sometimes sometimes it goes faster but then you'll be back but that's all we did at that point they know we didn't Church those customers because we're not like that but this happens a lot more than you think it really really is pretty common for people to say I've got an SEO problem and then you look at the siding
23:46 you're like yeah you've been hacked so once you've done all of this you got to go back into analysis because well you've launched that site and you're maintaining it and you're doing all of that well but things can be done better and I'm always appalled by how bad a lot of development agencies follow up after they've delivered a site because that's when you can want to start making real money you can start saying hey we've built this for you now we see disk going well but this could be slightly better
24:18 let's do that as with a lot of these things it's a process and as with any good process talk it wouldn't be but this is a continuous cycle it's also infinite which my designer did very well
24:49 I think I really want to urge each and every one of you to think about these things and use them in your sales process because I think everyone who does this as a development agency or as a single developer can make so much more money and lead to so much happier clients by doing this right and yes that means a lot we need a lot less SEO in the world but I can tell you that these conferences are a lot more fun than the
25:20 average SEO conference so that's a good thing there's a couple people here that know Jonna on our team Rhys there I mean this is different right it's people like each other here so more web developers that do things well less SEO is a good thing for the planet so
25:55 I swear every time I hear this man speak I come away completely enthused by this stuff and yet every time between those talks I kind of fall into the same habits that you just described so it's good to top the fuel level up every now and again we will have questions I imagine who's got a question I've got one right over there white t-shirt I did that decide to that corner again we need to get these throwing cubes thank you
26:26 for a great talk when doing the widow which you talked about I'm gonna remember that always often we get into the discussion of the pages that disappeared should that go to the four four Oh should they go to fun page because the client always wants to the fun page and we often says fawful well 404 is never the right solution because if you decide to delete it on purpose and it should be a so called 410 which
26:57 is a HTTP status code for this content has been deleted and then Google will take it out of the search results and will not and will not come back as much so that means that the link leaves the search results a lot faster and by doing that people will not have the incredibly annoying experience of clicking on a link and in google on reaching a 404 because that is a very bad experience now if you have multiple pages that disappear and you want to redirect them to the home page to me that is a weird
27:28 thing that usually means that you've not thought enough about okay what content did we have and where should it go now so I would urge you to put more thought into it and make sure that the pages do not disappear I can honestly tell you that in an SEO project I've never ever seen a site gets smaller so one-page websites do not exists for SEO s these are not a thing and almost every website
28:00 I've worked on professionally has gone from like 10,000 to thousand pages more likely than from a hundred thousand back to ten so think about that more and if you have to do a redirect a redirect to the home page for a large number of pages is usually a pretty bad idea so please don't do it redirect to a patroness elite that's at least topically relate it to what the page was on okay thank you thank you
28:31 Thanks when upfront here you can see better than I Calvin faster faster hello horses my name thing thanks for the talk and it's the time where you can stop the redirect half a year or anything you can recommend yes like there's something I can recommend it you never and you cannot gonna like
29:02 it never why is that then because even after four years Google still comes back Google and every search engine in the world has a very hard time really for getting URLs I wish it were different and I think we'll need to get to a future where it is slightly different but we call it a permalink in WordPress for a reason the only thing annoying about that is that what you can change your permalinks so but a permalink is a
29:33 permalink it is something that is permanently a URL a URL in the HTTP standard is not something that can go away yes but if we tell Google the this link is for the future the other link doesn't change they anything in the index it should it doesn't enough so there's a everyone knows that our everyone most developers know a 301 or 302 so for you to is temporary for you
30:05 one is permanent you've also got 307 which is a better sort of temporary redirect they've got free o8 which is go there and never come back here I wish and take it up with him at their booth there's a question just here he's standing up already hi my name is Mira thanks to Talk your story about the bank and the loan waiver in this I'm taking a dangle from another perspective that if you know if
30:36 the bank didn't do anything about it then they probably wasn't any real value to that second-ranking otherwise people would have made some action happening I only comment on that I was at that Bank three months later we didn't have the authority to change it at that point it was costing them a lot of money but as banks go some of these processes are it's sometimes more expensive to put in a redirect than you'd think yeah and but more expensive than the
31:09 value of the ranking apparently I mean this this happens and I a there's a another good friend of mine who works at a grocery store in the Netherlands it's blue everyone who's Dutch now knows what I'm talking about they have wrong Canonical's and some pages fixing that will make them more money but it's the cost to fix it is too high sewed and their budget won't cover that so no it's not happening stuff like that happens all the time it
31:41 is very frustrating I'll be fair this even happens on wordpress.org where we have things that we need to fix and we [Laughter] this might be a slight plant and you mentioned the importance of analysis so you can go back and make business cases for doing more exciting stuff etc would you say that the same kind of thinking
32:13 and principles as you've discussed apply to analytic setups in the same way they do to our CEO yes I they apply to pretty much everything which is why it's this life like this are both very beautiful and very bullshitty this this applies to your content this applies to your SEO this applies to your analytics there's a place to life that's about as deep as all make it today [Laughter]
32:44 over this way please this is andrea from word lift i just would like you to bring up a topic that you raised on twitter that i found this really interesting about fake traffic and how much SEO tools and crawlers are generated traffic that is actually not driven by humans but by machines and also i would like to know a few CDs as a track for the industry that is built on organic traffic that machines are taking overs
33:16 you know humans so let me reiterate what I said on Twitter which is what you're referring to so Jono and I were looking at the logs for Yoast calm the crawl logs so Google comes by and crawls your site and and indexes all those pages now Google does that uses a lot of bandwidth on your site but they sent you visitors in return so there's ROI on them coming to do that to your site and that's all good for use calm I think it's currently between thirty and forty percent of all our
33:48 traffic is crawlers and only a small portion of that is Google most of the that is crawlers like by dou Y and acts being and well then there's the even worse group of things that's link research tools so what they do is they crawl the web to mimic how Google indexes the web so that SEO s can look at that and then do better SEO ostensibly that's the thought I think
34:19 it's rather horrible that we allowed that to exist in the way it exists today the web has always been like everyone can access any page for free and can do all that but that is now leading to us where we have seven servers running us comm 40% of traffic is literally servers that are running to serve specific BOTS I know from my time when I was at the Guardian that we have specific servers for bing like literal entire servers
34:51 that were just there because Bing was scraping the site and being wasn't sending any traffic or very little I mean the ROI was definitely negative so I think that is something that we need to get better at and we need to figure out a way to do and I'm worse in a smarter way now there is something called common crawl that crawls the web and that everybody can access that data I wish they could would all just get together and say okay common crawls aren't gonna do all the crawling to
35:22 everyone and then all these tools can then use the common crawl database to build everything on top of that I think that would be better and that is a very open source way of thinking thinking so it's not a surprise that I would think like that but it's it's a tough thing to think about and I why I'm not done with my thinking about this yet but I've definitely suggested like well we could just block them in WordPress if we block in where if we as WordPress community decide to block some of those crawlers
35:55 we block literally 30% of the web for them so we make their database useless so we forced them into common crawl it's something to think about it's not something that we really necessarily need to do now [Laughter] so right is so if you install your Ciccio we do an indexation check to check whether your site is indexable that is absolutely a crawler that does that same thing there's an ROI there in
36:28 terms of it grabs your homepage to see whether your indexable did that's something that you get back for most of these crawlers you get nothing back the web as a whole gets not much back and there are a lot of trees and the electricity wasted to do all that I think that's something that we well we could probably do that better than we're currently doing I confess I've never heard of common crow until you tweeted about it who is it who's doing it so it's it's a group of acts Googlers funnily enough that started it and
37:02 there's a relatively cool group of people attached to it so if even Danny Sullivan who's the current search liaison for Google is on their board so there is some some good connections there to people to have actual crawl infrastructure to do things nicely so I think I could actually be something real and and we should probably support it so let's good to me we've got time for one or two more questions hello we have before my question I have two comments regarding deactivating the tree 301
37:37 redirects and don't forget that besides search engines we may have backlinks or so so sure so it's important to keep them forever because they don't hurt it's just there if they are not used it's okay well they don't hurt if you only have a few of them if you if you keep redesigning your website it becomes very annoying so don't do that so regarding the the redirects and missing the rewrites when when you you make a new website so I just want to comment that we have seen two of the
38:08 major newspapers in Portugal making that mistake and they just broke all of their history from one day to it through to the other so and my question is regarding HRF flanks so do you think it's okay so if you have a shop will commerce shop that you you have entry languages but it's not really specific for the country do you think it's okay to only keep the the language part of the the code and not the language bless region that is how a true
38:39 flying works so you can set either a language or a language plus region and if you just have free languages and just setting three languages is fine okay because I see a lot of mistakes things oh yeah there's a lot of mistakes in how people deal with that it's it's a bit of a weird spec but it's not as bad as some people make it out to be but ya know just the language is fine and would probably solve a lot of things for a lot of people okay we have a question
39:10 where's it gonna stop there and then one in the middle and I think that would be all hi Kenneth mark we build a lot of sites which multilingual ecommerce sites and many of them has a Canadian site and Australian site a English site a lot of English yes sites how should we proceed with the yeah yeah so you can fix that
39:43 with a duplicate no it it would be a duplicate but it's not necessarily problematic but wit H are fine you can actually fix that so you can say this is the en gb version this de na u version etc just like the Germans can do de de and de was a CH and and at eighty I Austria is always like that should be au but it's not so if we do that that would that would be yeah but you need to do that on a page level so not unlike the
40:15 home page but on a page-by-page basis which is what makes it so annoying okay thank you if anybody's watching the live stream from Australia I'm sure he apologizes for one more here and then we're done question about the red directions what is the better choice if I want to remove or some pages I want to remove some page from my website for example I used to have service but I no longer have it is
40:46 this a good thing to just remove those pages and forget them or is it a better option to redirect them to another page if then if you don't have any related surfaces anymore then I would remove them instead of four tens we said that they disappear from the search results if you have related services I would probably keep a page explaining as you don't do that particular service anymore but that you have these other services so give people another option if you can
41:17 especially if it's a service that you've been advertising and people have been linking to it's a bit of a shame to let them go yeah so if you can redirect them somewhere useful then either like by writing a bit of text and telling them like okay so this is the service we used to have but we we don't do that anymore but we do have this it's a bit more work but if that leads to a couple more customers that's usually worth it so I that's what I would probably recommend in most cases thank you and folks that's
41:48 what we're gonna leave it if anyone has any further questions on any of this stuff you may be able to find some people from the Yoast team I'm sure they'll be very very good to help will you give it up please one last time four years you