2018·01·03 · 28:40
SEO Secrets with Joost de Valk - WP Elevation WordPress Business Podcast - Episode 126
I talk through how Yoast SEO went from a hobby project to a company of nearly 120 people and 6.5 million installs. I describe what changed when the plugin crossed a million users and my wife made clear we needed to actually build a business around it. I cover what Yoast SEO does, what has changed in recent versions, and the SEO fundamentals that still matter regardless of how the plugin handles the technical side. This is a practical conversation for WordPress consultants who want to use the plugin more effectively for their clients.
0:00 [Music] can i clarify it is yost to speak and not used or juice it's yes yes yes doctor me awesome I have not been leading all my clients and colleagues astray for the last three years hello and welcome to another episode of the W feet elevation podcast my name is cath Hughes and I am a coach here at WP elevation I also run a wordpress design
0:31 and development agency here in Sydney Australia so I'm really excited to announce that our featured guest this week on the podcast is yes debulk a man the mayor behind the cartoon character the heads up one of one of if not the best free wordpress SEO plugin otherwise known as Yoast SEO and in this episode Yost is going to walk us through getting the most out of his plugin what's changed what's new in content and SEO components and what we can be taking advantage of that you may not know about listen in and be sure to download the
1:02 checklist checklist at the end to make sure that you apply what you learn in this episode stay with us this is the WP elevation podcast helping WordPress consultants elevate [Music] hey this episode of the WP elevation podcast is brought to you by WP elevation well more specifically it's brought to you by a bunch of our happy customers see frankly I feel a little bit awkward telling you how great WP elevation is because you probably not
1:33 going to believe me because WP elevation is my baby it's something that we started over three years ago of course now we're a team of coaches and mentors and we have hundreds and by the time you're listening to there's probably thousands of members all over the world but it still really is something that I'm very passionate about and and of course if you join WP elevation we make revenue and we make profit so it's a little bit awkward if I tell you how great it is because you probably think I'm just trying to sell you on it and partially I am because I know how beneficial the program is so what I'd love to do instead is just introduce you
2:05 to some of our customers so if you go to WP elevation comm slash the podcast all on word you'll be able to hear some of those stories from our customers and hear for yourself how WP elevation has impacted their business and change their lives I hope you enjoy that I hope you check it out at some point right now let's get back to the podcast hello I am cashews from WP elevation and I am very pleased and extremely nerdily excited to have with me ghosts of all okay the man behind the coveted Yoast SEO plugin Yoast welcome to the show
2:37 thank you can i driving can i clarify it is Yoast to speak and not used or juice after me awesome I have not been leading all my clients and colleagues astray for the last three years for those of you don't know tell us a little bit about who you are what your background is how you found Jones self installed and four million-plus WordPress installations around the world so it's actually six
3:09 and a half million yeah it's weird it's growing fast so I'm I grew up as a nerd let's start there and then I went into marketing at one point and at a certain point in my career that now just over ten years ago I went into a trade called SEO and that was sort of the the combination of the two where I could do marketing all day but still be
3:41 developing in and playing with that and I built the plugin or I actually have built several SEO plug-ins for WordPress and at some point and decided to combine them all together and we're talking about five years ago now and I released him as one plug-in cook WordPress SEO that plugin got quite big and as at some point I had a million users and my wife said to me maybe you should start making
4:12 some money off this and I said well you might be right and we started hiring people growing the company etc now we're a six and a half million and Yoast is a 50 people company and yeah it's it's insane it's the power of press that is incredible isn't it and I like to think so that most people wouldn't have to get to a million installs before they start thinking that you could probably make a little bit of
4:44 money it's like a high benchmark and I wanted to keep the hobby I was I was a consultant for some of the biggest brands in the world so I was consulting for the Guardian which you know in Australia - and I was consulting for eBay and like so I was working on the bigger sites and I had good fun doing that and I wasn't making bad money so it was just a hobby on the side but when the hobby on the sides is there becomes that big yeah at some point you just have to switch so you haven't had bad inning so far and I have to ask you so
5:17 have you spoken to Google lately the reason for this my son legitimately thinks that Google's was a lady who knows everything and gone oh no no you could give us the latest yeah well we regularly speak to Google to both ladies and men at Google to clarify our tell'em I think my my last call with Google was about two weeks ago but we have I think at least weekly interactions with some of the people on the search consulting
5:51 and search quality teams to see like how can we help people better yeah and you're not making this stuff up then this is like qualified Google excellent disqualify Google it's like real people yeah yeah absolutely yeah brilliant so you know just given what we said about Google being that it is the real thing and they you actually have contact with them I wanted to ask some specific questions about your plugin and some SEO scenarios that we could probably help our audience and perhaps educate a little bit further down those lines
6:25 demystify flight firstly video SEO it's become big we've noticed it and personally we just in plugged the WP elevation website into the Google your video SEO plugin and just switching it on and suddenly we've got you know our video is turning up in search results with a nice little video previews which is awesome do you want to talk us through what's happening with video SEO it's it was a lot happening at the same
6:59 time it's it's also the standards have been around for a while so for a while you could get video snippets for every site on the planet and if you install our plugin we'd add some metadata to your site around every video we re index your site you've probably done gone through that process reenacting and then it figures out which posts have videos and it adds metadata to those videos so that Google can read that Google's forever playing with when they show snippets for sites and when
7:30 they don't so when you get a video snippet in the search results you get this video screen shot before your entire search result which is highly enticing it's basically like an entire ad and not too many sides get those anymore at the same time what you do see is a lot more people switching to video search in google so in the top bar you see click on videos because they're looking for videos on specific topics that's
8:03 working really well and that well that part of the plugin is is I think very valuable at the same time one of the most valuable features of the plug-in in my opinion is the fact that it actually gives metadata to Facebook and Twitter as well so that they show up there right yeah I saw this so I noticed that we could also choose whether or not we play the video in Facebook or whether we whether we can like take it back to the
8:34 source of the video which is a great angle as well yeah it really depends on your type of audience but for some videos you want people to see the video and for some video do you want them to be on your site when they see the video because there's stuff around it that you want to see yes I potentially you could be maximizing the share ability of the video that you're putting on yeah yeah and it allows for more interaction there to be honest it really depends on what you want to reach so long we do a lot of
9:08 videos against and when we do them we we tend to upload them to Facebook specifically because that works even better and we mostly want people to see the video that doesn't necessarily always mean that that's what you want so it our video SEO and allows you to take them back to your site or not depending on what you prefer it's a really powerful tool and I can see both sides whether you want it to be shared interests and shared or whether use something you're actually producing something you want people to go back to your website in our case like our
9:41 podcast we want people to go back to the website and actually download the podcast and download and actually take advantage of the extra links and things that we're putting around that so brilliant plug-in though and and well worth checking out for all those who are listening if you haven't already so the next following on from that the question I want to ask was about some of the other tools in your product suite and they could be actually helping your audience because we talk about always being you know wanting to use the free tools but
10:12 gosh for a couple of bucks you can really power punch your website particularly and it is yeah so we have a couple of things that I think are very very cool I personally think that local SEO is still undervalued so for everyone who does a local type site our local SEO plugin is probably one of the best things you can apply it helps you put up metadata so Google better understands your connection to Google to your local business page and it helps you put up
10:44 opening hours and stuff like that it helps you put up a map so people can find you if you have multiple locations it even has a store locator building so you can it can work in the where's my newer shop that sort of thing so I think that's a really cool plugin we've got a new sessio plugin which really only matters if you're a new site which I'm guessing is not most of your audience but if you're a new site you should really check that out and then you've got our WooCommerce plugin which is basically an add-on to make sure that
11:15 we'll Commerce and us SEO work together slightly better and we're looking at what we're doing with that to be honest where you're rebuilding Yoast calm right now to be on WooCommerce so we're learning a lot about wool commerce in the process which is one of the the goals of why we're rebuilding it on WooCommerce and because we're seeing that a large majority of our users does actually use WooCommerce and well not majority but a large percentage of our users uses WooCommerce and we want to
11:46 learn that platform better so we're looking at how are we going to integrate these even more it and it might end up with that plugin being merged into our premium plugin to combine the two even more because to be honest if you have our WooCommerce plugin which you don't have our premium plug-in then I don't think you you have to full power that you need to properly maintain a site I was gonna ask what is the with the premium plugin which is the add-on sort
12:18 of the add-on to the free version what is it the main claim to fame on that one so that the biggest feature that it has is a couple of things but what I always think is a good first thing to look is the redirection functionality in there the u.s. SEO has a connection to Google search console in which you can see all the errors that Google sees on your site if you have premium you can actually redirect those errors away you can fix all sorts of issues on your site and with that really really increase your
12:54 SEO performance it has more than that we have an internal linking tool that is really cool which indexes all your posts and then suggests other links based on what you're writing about that you can link to within your site which really yeah - I thought I'm not chewing soon along with the local as well because it's something that I'm passionate about getting right so I'm trying to yeah it's awesome
13:25 so we did a release yesterday in which we allow you to mark articles on your site as cornerstone content which is a topic that we talked about a lot look what are the articles on your site that you really want people to to focus on and when you mark something as cornerstone content our internal linking tool will more often recommend that post to link to so that you can actually link better towards your cornerstone content and you can really improve the internal linking structure of your site as you go
13:57 along we have a lot more coming up in that area because we're really focusing on how can we help you build a better site not just to help you write better posts that sounds amazing actually while we're on that I'll move on to the next question because it kind of ties in but we talked before about optimizing one page for one keyword and that seems to have been the big Porsche it's just like get people to understand
14:28 you know one page one keyword but I did see in the premium version we do have some options for potentially optimizing for one or like multiple keywords is this something we should be really trying to do should we just be sticking to those similar words and phrases and and just boosting that and making that stronger so it depends a bit but very often you'll have two topics that are very closely tied together and if you are writing a really long article it might actually make sense to optimize
15:02 for more keywords so if if you have a cornerstone content article that talked touches on two keywords that are close that are closely together topic wise but are separate yeah you could offer I said an article for both keywords and they probably still ranked for both so you can go up to five within yes SEO premium I would not suggest having five separate keywords altogether but you can do five synonyms and make sure to optimize for the synonyms just as well as for the for the most important phrase yes that's
15:33 good to me cuz that avoids having to do sort of you know duplicate content to try and get the other way that people say those things like I I talked to clients and I've got and Google's pretty good at this already so like I've got clients who who pitch themselves to nonprofits but they're also known as not-for-profit and not profit and sort of is what which you could really deal with like most you worried she could make sure that you catch all those without making it too annoying and in English Google will always almost always
16:06 know that it's the same thing yep we're Dutch in Dutch that's not always the case and there's a lot of languages where Google is not just not that good yet yes sir that's what that's where you can really improve and get better awesome well I will add that down because I think that's good advice so my fourth question I'm showing this which is great my clients and many of my colleagues got
16:37 overwhelmed by the idea of optimizing all the things and I kind of when I'm so I do a little bit of DIY coaching and I also and I have a few of my star students who have followed everything that I've ever said and have these amazingly well optimized websites and but then I've got other customers who come to me with a website that's already got you know three hundred pages and they want to know where they start and they they do want to do iy or they want me to offer them you
17:08 know a service where it's cats you know where do we so what what do we do do we try and hit everything or do we pick our top content and really you know as you call it a cornerstone content do we hit that and try and do our best for that content see how it goes tweak that get that swimming along nicely and then maybe go back and rework some of the other stuff so what I would do is is rework through three four cornerstone articles like the ones that you think are the most important keywords and the things that you really really care about the most
17:41 optimize dose make them really really good um and then link and to go through the other posts not necessarily always completely rewriting them but make sure that they all link back to your cornerstone articles are interactive it will actually make that very easy for you but that that is you really need to figure out like okay which should be linked to what and internally linked make sure that Google understands which are the most important pictures I start by linking your less than important
18:12 content back to those main articles you're telling Google and people who search Google which are the most relevant and enticing pieces of content on your website I didn't know that I love that advice though I have a few people I'm gonna ring tomorrow implement that immediately so my final question and this is this this could go either way so I'm just getting a an average picture about this as I talk to my favorite SEO people when it comes to offer yeseo was a service we all kind of
18:44 agreed you need to be transparent about what that looks like and what that is like that's a no-brainer but what do you think there's the bare minimum that WordPress web devs should be doing I asked this in the context that I did have a chat with my friend and colleague Australian SEO copyright okay tuned on my last episode and we talked about this in depth that was our whole subject is what people should be doing but sometimes it's not just enough to turn on a plug-in I think I'd love your opinion on this now turning on a plug-in
19:17 is necessary is the is the bare necessities yeah I always kiddingly tell people that and as he o stands for seriously effortful optimization because good SEO takes a lot of time only effort fool oh I like that I'm running that down that's our top two right so what I think a web dev should do depending on how much how close he is
19:48 to the client and a web dev shoot at the bare minimum deliver a website that is fast and user friendly and and and has a site structure that is somewhat meaningful and with that I mean you probably if you start a topic as a website about a new topic her for a new company you could start with some keyword research like okay what what are the things that we want to rank for at some point and then you create a site structure of okay how are we gonna put
20:19 this into a site and if no one has thought about that before the website has been designed that you're going about the design process the wrong way around so that's what what the agencies should start with like okay so what's your site structure going to look like and then that should be clearly visible and usable and people should be able to get to the important pages fairly quickly so and an aside should be quick and it should be it should be working
20:52 along the latest standards and from there on it really depends on how much of a service the developer wants to give if he's not an SEO I would prefer people stay out of us here yeah career isn't a um yeah and at the same time we we are looking at how could we empower more development agencies to deliver SEO services to their clients aren't necessarily knowing everything but yeah I do really think that is it is a bit of
21:23 a career it is something that you need to dive into and that you can't really just say that hey this is holidays it's very important I mean if you give your customers a site then you want them to be successful with it and if they are not gonna be successful because you didn't do any fill up the SEO sorry oh you didn't tell them that they should be doing that then they're not gonna be happy with it and they might not come back so yeah there's a for what I think it's very
21:54 important for the government agencies to realize that what there's what the site needs to do so we're gonna be transparent know what we can I can't do and step back wet and just empower your clients with the knowledge of what they need to do next yeah awesome so I'm just going to recap what we've gone through because that is brilliant and we're on time too so so video SEO the plugin is
22:28 brilliant and it's giving it's basically giving some metadata not just to Google but to also to Facebook and Twitter so that that information can then be used to whether we share it throughout our social media or whether we choose to take the user back to oh the audience back to our original content source and you know allow them to absorb that so I think that's a really awesome awesome tip and a reason to install it and
23:00 following up from that we talked about some of the other cool tools that you had including your news plugin but particularly you Alessio plug-in and the WooCommerce which is I watch the space kind of thing going on at this moment I'm very curious to find out what you guys come up with they're following on from that we talked about just making sure that if we are doing large content pieces that we are linking back to those content pieces and
23:33 ensuring that we're using the full gamut of synonyms and multiple keywords to make sure that anyone looking for that content is going to find it no matter how they think that they need to search it and again just with the the with the volume of content pick your battles work really hard on the content that is best quality on your site and then link everything back to that so that Google will find it related to your other content and offer it as the best quality when you've done your hard work and back
24:07 to that seriously effortful optimization as a as a service that web devs really should be obviously just delivering a website that is fast you know user friendly and has a meaningful site structure but step back when they get to the limit of their services and give their clients a chance to engage someone who is a proper search engine optimizer when it comes to content if that is not currently in their skill set or in their
24:39 outsourcing teams a skill set Yoast how you feel we've got to the end of it awesome thank you so much for spending some time with me on the WP elevation podcast when Troy said that um when he put in the you know after he met you it had worked and the last word came that you guys caught up at after consumed because he had a photo the next thing I saw an asana in our team communication channel in asana was cash and Yoast and I was like no really is this like you
25:10 sure I was so nerdy so I've been an honor to meet you what's on the roadmap for you guys this year beyond we miss excitement's ah things well actually one of the things that we are working very hard on right now is something that we've been solely lacking is user accounts on years that come so we'll actually right now when you buy something you'll get an email with the download etcetera but you're electing a whole lot of things there so we're basically building our own back-end a
25:41 bit better um but with that we're also switching to WooCommerce which is giving us a whole lot of WooCommerce info and there's a lot more coming on the cornerstone content side wide SEO time aspect of our plugin because we we've always been very good at helping you optimize see in individual posts and we think it's now time to take the next step and help you optimize your internal link structure and help you optimize how you how you optimize a site as a whole I think
26:12 that's fabulous and I I'm gonna have to put a shout out to Troy gain - are you listening are you listening in terms of our epic posts that you've been writing and you've been getting us all to ride listening you know Scott something coming for us I yeah I love that and it's really good to hear that you guys are still pushing forward and seeing what else can be done because awesome ever I mean there's just short of 50 people here in it right now it'll probably be over us from now so
26:43 it's we're going very very fast have you got your kids in they all have I love Noi's t-shirts they do have those t-shirts I've got four kids so but video the eldest is 10 and he's slowly getting into what what of what we're doing and he understands it but yeah hey Bill take some time it'll take some time I um I have to tell my son about the UM the Akismet spam robot and I've got some you know some some swag from the word camps
27:24 we'll get you covered it's oh my god that would be amazing alright nerd cred X you always thank you again where's the best place that our audience and your audience can get hold of some of these products and services you're talking about so Twitter Yoast y ou ast Yoast comm Facebook why o waste he is well we are basically everywhere where you are and if we're not Telus then we'll make sure we get there no worries
27:56 all right thank you so much so everybody I hope that you have enjoyed that episode of the podcast as much as I did you can see I'm still smiling and excited please remember to visit WP elevation comm to download the the checklist for this episode and leave us some feedback in the comments if you love what we're doing here at WP elevation and the podcast please subscribe and give us some ratings in iTunes so we can tell everybody else about it and you can do that by just checking out WP elevation complet slash iTunes thanks for tuning in and we look forward to your company on the next
28:27 episode of the WP elevation podcast and [Music]