SEO feeling like a maze?
Jason Barnard’s block-based strategy could be the shortcut you need.
With Peter Mead as your Semrush guide, learn how making things simple for Google pays off for your WordPress site – short, mid and long term.
Full Transcript of the How Gutenberg Blocks are Fundamental to Your WordPress SEO Webinar
Jason Barnard: Hello, we’re a little bit late, I think. Are we starting?
Peter Mead: Hmm, what’s the weather like, Jason?
Jason Barnard: The weather here is dark. It’s in Paris, it’s seven o’clock in the morning, it’s dark, and I’ve got all the lights on to make this kind of look like it isn’t quite as dark as it really is outside. As you can hear, my voice is a little bit deep because it’s very early in the morning.
Peter Mead: Yes, well, I’m so glad you joined us. I’d just like to say welcome to everybody who’s joining us, and welcome to the Australian Search Marketing Academy. Well, I’ve been really looking forward to this webinar with Jason and to get his brilliant insights into how Gutenberg blocks are fundamental to your WordPress SEO. But firstly, let me quickly mention, in Australia we have some exciting events coming up, and the event in particular I’d like to speak about is the Australian Search Awards on November 12 at Sydney Opera House. If you’re in search marketing in Australia, this is the premier event, the awards where everyone who has performed well will be awarded—hopefully, if they come along. It’ll be terrific. SEMrushawards.com.au.
So let me introduce Jason. With over two decades of experience, beginning in 1998, Jason is a well-known and well-respected digital marketing consultant, speaker, author, and the host of SEO is A Podcast. He has now become a full-time, 100% digital nomad, speaking at conferences around the world and interviewing industry experts—all the more for our benefit.
Jason Barnard: Jason is one of a kind in the industry, and we’re so happy to have him on the webinar with us. So, welcome Jason! What is hot in SEO for you right now? What’s going on?
Jason Barnard: Thank you, Peter. Entities is what’s hot—knowing what entities are, building Google’s understanding through entities and relationships through entities. That’s really hot. But hotter today is blocks. I was actually—I’m going to say something naughty—I was at a TYPO3 event last week in Holland, and TYPO3 apparently have always used blocks. So for them, when I mentioned blocks, they said, “This is really obvious, this is something we’ve been doing since the beginning,” whereas WordPress is now coming into blocks. So this presentation of blocks, for anybody who knows TYPO3, is going to be old hat, and for anybody who’s in WordPress, probably relatively new hat.
Peter Mead: Hmm, well that’s interesting, isn’t it? So the world is catching up—or what is it, 35 percent of the internet using WordPress? So 35 percent of the internet is catching up on Gutenberg or blocks. But I mean, Gutenberg’s the thing that makes blocks happen, right?
Jason Barnard: Yeah, exactly. Thirty-six percent use WordPress, Gutenberg is their standard in WordPress, and 14 percent of the web actually uses Yoast. I’m going to mention Yoast later on because they’re really helping with this idea of blocks—they’re really building on this idea of blocks, so they’re building blocks, as it were.
Peter Mead: Okay, so why should we care? If we’re search marketers, we’re SEOs, all we care about is traffic and getting conversions and increasing website visibility in Google. So why should we care? What have you got for us to help us understand all of this, Jason?
Jason Barnard: Well, I’ve got an expert-like explanation—sorry—of what Google’s problem is. In fact, I’ll show that first—what Google’s aim is, what Google’s problem is, and how we can help Google. And obviously, the helping Google part is all about blocks, and the idea of blocks is fundamental to the way we’re moving forward. So anybody who’s kind of thinking, “Oh, Gutenberg, I don’t really like it, maybe I can ignore it,” you’re making a big mistake. You can’t ignore it, and you won’t be able to ignore it for very long. Blocks are the fundamental—if I may say—building blocks of the web today. We need—I’ve made that joke twice already, I’ll make it a third time until you laugh, Peter.
Peter Mead: I’ll snicker, but I’ll laugh in a minute, I might have to laugh so you might stop saying it.
Jason Barnard: Exactly, yeah. That’s kind of like on the podcast, I punish people until they laugh at my jokes. So, yeah, anyway. What I’m going to present is this idea—what Google’s—I mean, understanding its aim is fundamental towards doing our job, and as you rightly said, attracting that traffic that’s going to get us the sales. If we understand Google’s problem, we have some empathy for it—obviously, we don’t have much empathy for Google—but if you have empathy for somebody or something, you can better understand what it is you need to do to make them happy. And in this case, we want to make Google happy so it will send us traffic. And I think we often forget that when Google sends us traffic, it’s sending us its clients—the people it sends over to us are not our clients, they’re Google’s clients, and Google is trying to satisfy them. So Google needs empathy for its clients, we need—beauty, simple—empathy, sorry, for Google. Once we have that, we can obviously then have empathy for the people it sends to us, who are going to be our clients. So that initial question is understanding Google’s problem, and then once we’ve understood that, we can help it to solve its problems. And I call that digesting and delivering. It’s very logical—it does, it sounds quite complicated, but actually, once I’ve gone through this presentation, you will say, “Oh, that sounds very logical,” and it’s incredibly simple.
Peter Mead: Hmm, okay, I like the simple part of it. Well, it costs a problem—the problem that we—the problem we often have when it comes to anything SEO-related is, no matter how much, how simple you make it, there seems to be still work involved, right?
Jason Barnard: Yeah, this is going to take a bit of work. I think it does take quite a lot of work, but Gutenberg actually lifts a lot of the load from us, and I think we should be grateful to Gutenberg for that. And I was talking to John Mueller, who, when I presented this idea to him, said that—I said, “Well, that’s incredibly simple, isn’t it?” and he said, “Yeah, it’s simple, but it isn’t easy.” So I think we need to bear that in mind—that however simple, as you rightly say, it’s never easy, it always requires work. Thankfully, Gutenberg relieves us of some of that work.
Peter Mead: Okay, well, it sounds good, I like that. So you want me to start off? I can tell you what Google’s aim is, if we go—
Jason Barnard: Okay, yes, please, Jason. What is Google’s aim?
Jason Barnard: Brilliant stuff. Google’s aim in the Hummingbird world is to answer the user’s question or solve their problem quickly, optimally. I think we can—I like the idea of answer engines, that’s why I called my podcast “SEO Is A,” which I sang very loud just then. But in fact, it’s solutions to problems—there are answers in the questions, which is basically a solution, solution to a problem. Its aim is to bring that solution as quickly and as optimally as possible to its users. So the user asks a question, Google gives an answer that is qualitative.
So what’s Google’s problem in trying to do that—bring the answer to the question of its users? Its problem is understanding, evaluating credibility, and what I would call deliverability—delivering the results to the user in a format that is relevant to the user in their context in which they find themselves.
So the first thing you need to do is understand the available solutions. The World Wide Web is the biggest ever database, and it contains a phenomenal amount of knowledge. And the problem that Google is going to have over time is not collecting the data, the HTML, or the content, because that’s really easy—it’s got a robot, goes around, it’s been doing that since 1998, so it just collects the idea. Now, Google then sticks it in a database. Its problem is extracting, understanding. And one would imagine, when we read a page, we find this very easy—we look at this, for example, we can see that Leonardo da Vinci is related to Italy, he’s related to Michelangelo and the Mona Lisa, he painted the Mona Lisa, he comes from Italy, he lived in Italy. We find that very easy to understand. Google doesn’t—not because it’s stupid, but because, excuse me, it’s really tough, because the web is an incredibly disorganized mess.
I skimmed through three slides there because I was leading up to this disorganized mess. My robot there looks terribly unhappy, and I like that, but nobody ever sees that it’s got a frowny face that I drew on specially for today. And I think we came to see the web as kind of organized, but it isn’t—we misinterpret how we’re presenting the information because we see it clearly, because the designers are terribly clever. We see the information, we can analyze it and digest it very easily, and we forget that behind, Google needs to read the HTML to be able to understand it, and we as human beings tend to be terribly disorganized.
Second question, second problem that Google has is delivering the solution. Delivering blue links was really easy—I mean, if you think about it, all this thing is putting out the meta title, the meta description, and putting it on the page. We click on it, we go to the page, and then the user deals with what’s in the page. We land on the page, we read it, and we can find the content we’re interested in. Sorry, Simon—Peter, from your point of view, with WordPress, for the last twenty years we’ve been saying, “Okay, here we go, blue link, click on the link, come on to my site, get the content, everybody’s happy, Google sends traffic, and the users are getting the answer.” Would you agree with that?
Peter Mead: Oh wow, blue links, the days of ten blue links.
Jason Barnard: So now we’re dealing with SERP features, exotic, all kinds of rich kind of search results.
Peter Mead: Yeah, it’s—
Jason Barnard: And isn’t that brilliant? I mean, actually, as users of Google, this makes us happy. It makes us unhappy because Google isn’t sending the clicks anymore. Here’s a very nice example with William Shatner—he’s got his Twitter box, he’s got his knowledge panel, he’s got a top story down there, and we also have videos, we have images. And Google’s problem is it wants to deliver this multimedia content, because as users of Google, that’s what we want—we want the answer quickly, we want it on the SERP. As site owners, obviously we don’t—we preferred the blue links because it sent traffic. But I think it’s important to remember that we’re not going to change this as site owners. As users, perhaps if we say to ourselves, “As a user, I prefer this,” then maybe we can better work with what Google’s trying to do. And what Google’s going to do, whether we like it or not, we need to adapt to this world.
So we need to help Google. Google wants to deliver the answer on the SERP as quickly as possible, except of course for sales—and I think that’s important, as Google will still send us traffic when it’s time to buy or when it’s time to get longer information, long-form content. So we might be looking more towards a world where Google will give quick answers where the traffic is actually not that useful to us, except perhaps for tagging and tracking people for remarketing. But now that you’re saying, well, if it can give the result on a SERP, it will give the result on a SERP, we need to help it.
General Allison from Yoast talks about blocks. If you want one of the smartest people in SEO—you’ve had him on the show a couple of times, I would think. Everybody’s had John on their show at some point.
Peter Mead: I’ve had him on the podcast.
Jason Barnard: Yeah, no, definitely, we’ve had John. Oh, Allison—terrific wealth of knowledge, powerhouse of information. And absolutely, this whole thing of blocks—I think there was a little bit of debate though, wasn’t there, whether it’s sections or some other—
Peter Mead: Yeah, it’s a few—Dixon Jones, who said section—we’ll come to that debate a little bit later.
Jason Barnard: Okay, preempted that one, did I?
Peter Mead: Yeah, yeah, you did.
Jason Barnard: That’s okay, we’ll get—well, we’ll come to that a little bit later. And Jono said blocks, and I really like that idea because it covers a lot of ground, and we’ll see later on why blocks isn’t the only way to look at it, but blocks is the way. If we look at the web, blocks is a really, really lovely way of seeing the web, understanding that the World Wide Web is a set of blocks, and those blocks are websites. And as you said earlier on, 36 percent of them are WordPress.
This is my beautiful design, graphic design—well, we’ve got TYPO3, in fact, we’ve got two more, we’ve got WordPress, now we’ve got all those other junky sites—and I say junk, you know, in a flippant manner, of people who just code how they feel like coding. The advantage of something like WordPress is it’s standardized, and that’s why Google today are investing in WordPress. If you’ve heard, they’ve invested—I think it was one and a half million dollars to take on some of the best WordPress developers in the world to help push WordPress forward, because that idea of standardization is incredibly important for Google today.
Now, the web is terribly disorganized. When somebody builds their own website, they’ve got their own logic, it’s really difficult for Google to actually get a grip on it, get a handle on it. When it’s standardized, as in WordPress or TYPO3 or Joomla, it’s much, much easier.
So coming back, once we think in blocks, the World Wide Web is full of websites—those websites are blocks. Each and every website is a block—this is our particular block today. And we go in and we’ve got categories—those are blocks as well. So within the website, which is within the World Wide Web, we have blocks, which are categories, and within those categories, you have blocks that are pages. And up until now, Google’s been delivering pages or links to pages.
But when we look inside the page, if anybody knows HTML5, semantic HTML5, those are blocks too. If you look at that, that makes a lot of sense to us as human beings—we have the header, we have the footer, we have the aside, and it makes sense to us visually, we can see that and we can understand it at a glance. Google can’t—it doesn’t see that in the same way we do, it has to analyze it. So semantic HTML5 will divide the page into blocks so that Google understands which is the header, which part is the footer, which part is on the side, which is information that’s related to the main content but isn’t necessary to show or to understand the main content, and then the main content, which is the article.
And with semantic HTML5, that article is identified very clearly to the machine, which makes it easier for it to understand and digest. And within the article, we have other blocks. So here we’re looking at blocks within blocks within blocks within blocks within blocks, if I’ve counted correctly, and I think I did. And those blocks are H2s with subtopics underneath. The iPhone, you’ve got the H1 that gives the main topic, subtopic is an H2 with a paragraph, that’s a block, then another subtopic with a paragraph, that’s a block, and within that we have an H3, sub-subtopic of subtopic 2.
So we have block within block within block within block within block. And if you look at it that way, the web becomes very easy to visualize in our minds as human beings—it’s very logical, which is what you said earlier on—and for a machine, it’s very easy to understand for that machine which part it can use, which part it can extract in order to give it to the user. And we’ll see that in a moment, but in fact, I’ve got two blocks within blocks within blocks within blocks within blocks, but it’s still not over—we can go further with blocks. And as that says, if you know the song, “It ain’t over till it’s over”—
Peter Mead: I like music, I’m a fan of music.
Jason Barnard: Yes, Gutenberg forces us to make those sub-blocks—so as H2s and H3s properly. I think a lot of us, when we’re designing, we’ll look at it, and we’ll do it visually, we’ll choose the H2 and H3 visually instead of semantically. Now, semantically would mean that we have this block within block structure, and semantics are very, very important for Google. And I’ve seen many, many clients where they go straight from H2 to H1—sorry, they go straight from an H1 to an H3 because it looks prettier. And we’re not talking here about design, we’re talking about organization, and if you organize correctly, Google can digest it better.
But here we have solely an H2 with a paragraph, and we can see here a Gutenberg block—that’s me playing the double bass 25 years ago, lovely—and we can see, very enthusiastically, thinking forward to blocks, I guess.
Peter Mead: Yeah, exactly.
Jason Barnard: I was thinking of blocks even when I was playing music on stage. I was funk-punk, and it was deaf. I was actually talking to somebody about music, and there are a lot of people in our industry who have played music or still play music, because music has this idea of linearity, which is organization—the music within bars, beats, and so on and so forth—but also the nonlinear side of being inventive, and I really like that. But that idea of linearity is actually, once again here, blocks within blocks within blocks within blocks. It’s organizing and structuring so that other people can follow, other people can understand, other people can digest very easily.
Now, here we’ve got the H2 with a paragraph, and we can see a paragraph, an unordered list, and a figure. Gutenberg forces us to organize like that—it doesn’t allow us not to organize in blocks. So some people say, “Why don’t we like Gutenberg?” And I think it’s because it forces them to organize themselves, and when we get something that forces us to organize ourselves, we get frustrated because it’s a bit slower, perhaps, but that organization is what’s going to make Google properly understand.
There we have a figure, which is a video—that’s the same, and I’ve embedded a video using Gutenberg. And once again, we’ve got that figure, which is semantic HTML5, which indicates to Google, “This is media, it’s either an image or a video,” and it also has underneath that delightful caption, which is also identified as being associated very closely to the image—although, sorry, in this case, the video—as being the caption that goes with it, which allows Google to understand that those two go together in a block.
Brilliant, right? Quote, Twitter boxes are block quotes, and we’ll see why that could be important later on. Tables—it forces us to do tables correctly, and as you can see there, at a glance, we can see that it’s about the “SEO Is A” podcast, which is me, and three different episodes with three different people—we understand that, Google can digest that very easily, and that’s in a table, it’s tabular data. Google is terribly keen on tabular data.
So here we have all the different blocks that Gutenberg allows us to use. My first reaction to Gutenberg was, “It’s quite limited,” and in fact, it isn’t. When we look at that, that’s what we’ve got today, that’s already quite a lot—there’s in fact more than that, but I couldn’t fit it on the page, there’s much more coming. So Gutenberg gives us enormous possibilities to actually organize our content in blocks and still keep a decent design. And I think we have to remember that—the fact that we’re organizing our content in blocks does not mean that it’s presented in a boring, block-like manner. Designers can work around that, and the design becomes separated from the organization of the content itself. And if we allow ourselves to have that kind of jump of imagination—that design and presentation, organization of the content, sorry, the design and presentation of the content is separate from the organization of the content—we’ll be much happier. This is organization, not design. So when we see a block, we don’t need to think that’s going to look blocky and boring—the designers can make it look really interesting.
The next stage is helping Google to digest. Google needs to digest, and blocks facilitate ingestion—ingestion meaning actually taking the food in—and for Google, that’s understanding, credibility, and deliverability. This is something else I told John Mueller, which is, if we as SEOs just look at that, that’s what Google wants—it wants to understand, it wants to analyze and evaluate, are we credible? If it’s understood that we have the answer or the solution for its user, it then needs to understand, are we the most credible solution? Once it’s decided we’re the most credible solution, it has to decide, are we deliverable in the context the user finds themselves?
Before, with the ten blue links, we were all deliverable in the same manner. We’re not all deliverable in the same manner today because we’ve gone multimedia.
So coming back to this idea of understanding—Google needs to understand that you have the solution in order to present it to its users. The beast—and that’s my nice, pretty little robot beast—wants to understand. I was using the beast before, but I don’t have a drawing of the beast, so I had to use the pretty, cute little robot as my own. The thumbs are up because it had the ring. The robot gathers—Gutenberg helps Google to ingest because it’s organizing things—what I used to call chunks, and that’s the debate that you were talking about, which we’re coming to in a moment. And then Google digests—understands. So we’ve got this thing called GUID, which is an absolute rubbish acronym, but I’m going to use it anyway—gather, ingest, digest. That’s what Google’s looking to do.
Gutenberg helps with ingesting, helps Google to deliver, and that’s—this is the deliverability. But blocks facilitate that delivery. We have understanding, we have credibility, we have deliverability.
What is deliverability? Deliverability is the capacity for Google to be able to give the content to the user in the format that is relevant to their query in their context. And that today is not just blue links—it’s also video, images, it could be the answer box, it could be a table, tabular data. For me, that’s a deliverability factor, because those SERPs are going multimedia.
And we’re back to William Shatner here—I wanted to remind everybody of hell, which the SERPs have become. And the reason they’re not richer today is not because Google doesn’t want them to be, it’s because there isn’t the quality content out there for Google to be able to make those SERPs richer.
So, well, content—and this is a slight aside—we should really be looking at thinking, “What multimedia elements can I give Google that will be relevant to the user in the context of the query they have made?” So we look at content strategy, which is now multimedia and not just writing blog posts.
So Google SERPs are going multimedia, and in order to deliver, it needs blocks. So we’re coming back to the blocks—blocks help understanding, they help the ingestion and the digestion, they also help with the delivery.
Now, I used to say chunks, and the debate you mentioned earlier on—I said chunks, I thought that was great, and then Jono said blocks, and I thought that was better, and then Cindy Krum said Fraggles, and we’ll see what the Fraggle is in a moment. And Dixon Jones, to come back to him, actually told me that Microsoft used the word chunks too, so I wasn’t as stupid as Jono had initially—that’s not fair, he didn’t say that, that’s very unfair—he said blocks is a better term than chunks, and I think he’s right. But Microsoft used chunks, Jono uses blocks, and Cindy Krum uses Fraggles.
And I like Fraggles because it gives you this idea—it’s a fragment with a handle. So it’s a fragment of content with a handle on it, and if you think about an H2 heading, you can see that as a handle with the paragraph being the fragment of content. And I have this image in my mind when Cindy Krum talks about that, of Google reaching into your content—you can actually see my arm reaching into the content like that, grabbing a handle, pulling it out and putting it on the SERP. And if you use that imagery in your mind, Gutenberg makes total sense because it’s creating these fragments with handles, it’s creating fragments, and Cindy Krum would say, to be able to simply pull the content out, put it on the SERP. And that’s what we saw with the William Shatner example earlier on.
And if that image makes so much sense, and it helps me understand why I need to use Gutenberg.
Peter Mead: Okay, can I jump in here and interject with a question from one of our viewers regarding what you’re talking about—the Fraggles and the handles and this kind of thing? This question seems to fit right now, because they’re saying—I’ll just read it out: Hill Web Creations LLC, “Jason, how do you see Gutenberg blocks doing a better job getting featured snippets, FAQ, and Q&A SERP results than the blocks used in HTML5?”
Jason Barnard: Okay, well, Gutenberg blocks will facilitate getting them—they’re not necessary for getting them, but they definitely facilitate. In some cases, for example, we’re talking about FAQ and Q&A, Gutenberg necessarily—we’ll see later on how Yoast is providing the schema markup behind the Gutenberg blocks, which allows you to get the Q&A underneath, or sorry, in the SERPs. So I think the idea that blocks are unnecessary is true, but they definitely facilitate, they definitely allow Google—and looking at the Fraggles page once again—to reach in, pull the container out, and plonk it onto the SERP.
Peter Mead: Okay, it’s really—it’s a big help.
Jason Barnard: Okay, so yeah, our friend, Unique, gets unfortunately displaced by Moz, but it’s one of her articles as the featured snippet because Google is able to reach in and pull that fragment of content—now, the exact fragment of content that matches my query, which isn’t the meta description, it’s within the content itself. And there is a question about that blue link that I find very interesting. I had always thought that Google could just pull out the H2 and put the H2 as that blue link, but in fact Gary Illyes told me that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. So although it’s pulling out a Fraggle, a fragment for the content itself for the answer, it’s still using the meta title for the blue link, and that isn’t likely to change according to Gary Illyes in the near future.
So we still have some limitations, especially in this particular case of the featured snippet, that the blue link is still limited to the meta title. I think that’s important for everyone to remember.
Also, I wanted to say this: how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? I can’t say—can you say? I’ll give you one more shot, I’m sure you can get it.
Peter Mead: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Jason Barnard: Yeah, I set myself a tongue-twister at 7 o’clock in the morning.
Peter Mead: Yeah, that was very sweet, bit of fun.
Jason Barnard: We also have these videos—and we saw the video of me playing the double bass earlier on. In fact, I couldn’t get that to come up as a Fraggle or a fragment or a video within—within the SERP, but I could get Yoast to come up really easily. Yoast SEO, Google is able to show that.
Peter Mead: You’re tall, you’re right there, they’re in the SERP.
Jason Barnard: And if we notice here, people are saying, “Oh, that’s really rotten because then I don’t get the visit.” Yoast hasn’t got the visit here, but it’s definitely got some lovely branding going. So if we use the SERPs to brand ourselves—and I would like to say the website that we have is a representation of our brand that we control—the SERPs are also a representation of our brand that we control partially, and we can control them partially using these blocks. So there you have a lovely video from Yoast, they have multiple videos from Yoast, and you can see Google doesn’t just pull videos from YouTube—we tend to think it does, but here we’ve got a video being pulled directly from Yoast. I also know Anton Shulke from SEMrush—if you type his name, his videos come up and they’re all on Twitter, and so to get videos, get pulled up as well quite easily in these video blocks.
So YouTube is obviously strongest, and it isn’t because it belongs to Google, because from what I understand, the different departments, people don’t even talk to each other, but because YouTube have got an SEO team who are actually quite good. Facebook has the problem—there’s so much content and that Google has trouble crawling it all. LinkedIn has a problem that Google can’t crawl very many pages, it gets blocked because it can’t log in, and Twitter, however, has this direct feed into Google, which means that videos on Twitter are actually pretty easy to get up into these video blocks.
So my two favorite targets for videos would be YouTube and Twitter, and also now that we can see it on your own site, that gives you more control once again, and you can use these Gutenberg blocks—and I would assume Yoast is using those Gutenberg blocks to get up there, and I don’t think Yoast would be getting up there if they weren’t using the Gutenberg blocks.
Peter Mead: Hmm, blocks. Lists—counties in the UK, that’s a really nice example because Google’s able to pull up not only the counties, although it thinks Bristol is a county, which it isn’t, but there you go, with images. And we have images as blocks, allows Google to say, “Okay, this is the image that corresponds,” because it’s got a caption, it corresponds to that particular part of the content. So once again, we’re looking at organizing content in blocks and having Google to mix and match—in this case, between images and unordered lists.
Jason Barnard: Excuse me, this one—pulling out a block of information from Amazon—that isn’t Gutenberg, but I like this example because you’ve got Bose headphones at thirty-three thousand nine hundred dollars.
Peter Mead: Wow, yeah, no question—when did you purchase those headphones?
Jason Barnard: Oh, yeah, okay, like three hundred and thirty-nine dollars, but because Amazon haven’t put the dots between the three, three, nine, and the two zeros, and it was just formatted so the two zeros were small and the three, three, nine was big, Google took it to be all one number. It didn’t see the span as changing the meaning of the text itself. And this is a very good example of design—we had three, three, nine big and the two zeros tiny—design against clarity and understanding, and the design has taken over the clarity and the understanding for Google here, and it’s gone thirty-three thousand nine hundred dollars. That’s a fair price for a pair of Bose headphones.
Peter Mead: So who’s wrong in this case, Jason?
Jason Barnard: You know, Amazon—one hundred percent Amazon. They should have put the dot between the two. Google takes what you give it, and so I’m going to criticize Amazon and say, “You got it wrong.” This is an example of Google tries to interpret, but if you don’t help it—and that’s what we’re talking about, if you remember earlier—if we can’t help it, it’s always going to have trouble. So help it as much as you possibly can—don’t forget the dots in your prices, organize everything in blocks.
And something like this is a really nice block that I worked on for years and years and years—obviously, that’s a Wikipedia block. But if you look at Wikipedia, that’s terribly block-based, always has been, and that’s why Google finds it so easy to digest, and that’s why who my parents are, what the movies are, the albums, the music albums I’ve done, because it’s organized in blocks and in tables. So Wikipedia is a great example—if you want to know kind of how blocks function, look through Wikipedia, you’ll see that everything is in blocks and everything is incredibly well organized.
Peter Mead: Hmm.
Jason Barnard: And then you’ve got images for blocks—once again, Google pulling out these images and putting them into the SERP very easily because they’re organized in blocks, because they have the figure caption, and that’s really the HTML tag around them.
And a quick special mention—I mean, I think we’re all reasonably aware of what schema is, but schema is something I’m really interested in. Once again, Jono Alderson from Yoast—he started talking to Jono about it last November, and he has built the—he’s writing the book of how to write schema. And what’s very interesting about that is Google have invested in WordPress on pretty much every front except schema. Why haven’t they invested in schema? Because Jono and Yoast are doing the schema for them.
So basically, I now tell my clients who don’t use WordPress, “If you want to write schema, install a copy of WordPress, use Yoast schema, and use that as a template for writing your schema,” because whatever happens now is 36 percent of the web is WordPress, and 14 percent of the web is Yoast. Yoast is writing the book, so follow Jono, follow Yoast, use them as your template. And if you’ve got your great big blocks in, so you can actually use them directly through Yoast. At the moment, they’ve only got HowTo and FAQ, but you need to remember as well that other plugins are now hooking into their system to write their schema—for example, recipes. There’s a plugin, a recipe plugin, that’s using Yoast’s structure and using Yoast’s hooks to write their own schema markup.
So all schema markup in WordPress should now be going through the Yoast plugin, in my opinion. Obviously, I’m terribly biased because I think they’re great.
Peter Mead: Hmm.
Jason Barnard: Conclusion—and we’re almost there, we’re almost finished. The conclusion is that for understanding—the understanding part of understanding credibility and deliverability—thinking blocks, you help Google ingest and digest the information that you’re trying to give it, and you help it understand so that it can understand that you have the correct solution. And when you think about the deliverability part of understanding, credibility, and deliverability, think Fraggles, because Google can reach in, grab that handle, put it out, stick it on the SERP. There you go.
Peter Mead: Thank you.
Jason Barnard: Wow, terrific.
Peter Mead: That’s my mind blown.
Jason Barnard: Yeah, well, I got up at 5 o’clock this morning to finish that off. My mind was blown, I had to be honest.
Peter Mead: We have some more questions—I’ve seen a question here from Simon Cox, and I’ll just—perhaps this might go into a bit of a discussion here. So HTML5 allows the use of multiple H1s on a single URL, so how does Gutenberg do this, and how does Google understand multiple H1s in a URL?
Jason Barnard: Well, personally, I wouldn’t use multiple H1s—sorry, Simon—simply because, for simplicity’s sake, especially with Gutenberg or WordPress, the title of the page is the H1. And as far as I’m aware—well, I don’t know, sorry, if Gutenberg allows multiple H1s, I’ve never looked at that, so Simon’s asking a tricky question. But I generally would not do it, because I don’t think it’s helpful to anybody. Using an H1 and then saying, “Okay, everything else is a subtopic.” If you don’t have one overall, overriding topic on your page, perhaps you should be creating a second page. What do you think, Peter?
Peter Mead: Yeah, I’ve always thought along those lines. I mean, I still go back to—I guess we’re in a new world with blocks, with Gutenberg, with HTML5, everything’s new, but you’re still looking at how to organize information and how to retrieve information. And so, to me, I’m still feeling like we’re using a library system here, and so, you know, if we’re organizing, we just really want to have one main heading. I guess, to me, using more than one H1 on the page would be the same thing as giving a chapter of a book two chapter titles—not sure how it would work.
Jason Barnard: No, yeah, I would tend to agree with that. I mean, technically, you can use multiple H1s. In truth, I think it’s confusing for everybody, and if you really want to—I mean, in terms of designing, I think sometimes we’d want to put two very big chunks of text, they want to put the text nice and big—use spans, design CSS for design and not for semantics. Though there is a whole argument about multiple H1s on a page, but for anybody who isn’t incredibly experienced in web development, I would suggest stick to one H1, you’re pretty safe. At least you’re not going to mess it up. So you’ve got one H1, then everything else is H2. If you find yourself thinking, “I’ve got another H1 here,” create a new page. There you go, that’s my advice for the moment.
Peter Mead: Okay, I’ll go with that.
Jason Barnard: Yes, that’s the definitive answer on H1s.
Peter Mead: Oh, no, no, no, I’ll get—
Jason Barnard: Simon Cox and Aaron Bradley—I’m just hoping for a bit of debate here. Simon will certainly type something terribly rude in there, in the chat box, that’s okay, that might spark some interest.
Peter Mead: Yeah, well, thank you for that one, their question, Simon. And so we’ve got another question here, which is again by Hill Web Creations LLC: “Do you think that the video schema contributes to videos showing up, or more the impact from blocks?”
Jason Barnard: Oh, that’s a tricky one. I mean, whether or not schema contributes to being a rich element in the page is a big debate, like the H1. These two—Jeannie and Simon—are asking the tricky questions to try and catch me, so thank you and no thank you. I act that schema markup does contribute. There are certainly some elements that you cannot get without schema markup, so I think we can safely assume that schema markup does contribute. And if you look now, if you know about the European rule for publishers aiming at protecting publishers, saying that Google—Google have introduced in Search Console now an opt-in/opt-out for, “Can they show content from your page in the SERPs?” And that was the European Union trying to protect publishers. And what Google has now said is that if you use schema markup, you’re explicitly telling them they can use that content in their SERPs, which means that Google—and they are saying by default, not for everybody, basically by default, everybody can, if they can use anyone’s content, you get the option to opt into this protection idea. Everybody has this option now within Search Console. If you opt in, you need to mark up the content you want Google to show in the SERPs.
So we’re moving towards a world where Google are saying, “Schema markup explicitly tells me I can use this content in the SERP for my users.” So I would say schema markup, perhaps thanks to this European law, is now becoming the bedrock—as in the Flintstones, bedrock—of what Google can and can’t show in the SERPs, or will and won’t show in the SERPs. We’re not there yet, certainly, but I think if you’re not putting schema markup into your pages, you’re getting left behind.
Peter Mead: Wow, yes, that’s a very daunting prospect for people who are still catching up, I guess. I mean, that sort of—that kind of, maybe I can explore this idea for a little while. I mean, you know, this idea that Gutenberg’s the new world, you know, the new version, HTML5, schema, all this kind of stuff. I mean, if we want traffic to our site, we need to be—we need to be doing lots of work to get all this kind of work done, right? So, so what do you say for maybe a small business or perhaps, you know, a smaller blogging site or even a bricks-and-mortar business who’s trying to compete and just the manpower required? What can we do? What can these businesses do?
Jason Barnard: Well, one thing I think is a real pity is that anybody who can’t just switch to Gutenberg has had their site developed outside the core of WordPress, because all Gutenberg does is replace the traditional text editor. So the idea that Gutenberg is this incredibly complicated beast is, in theory, false. The problem becomes when the developers have made your site have not stuck to the core ideas behind WordPress. So theoretically, you should just be able to swap out the core editor and put in Gutenberg, and the content should still be there. If that isn’t the case, go back to your developer and, unfortunately, get them to import it.
The other thing as well is you’ve got to remember all this data is in a database, as the name implies. So in fact, theoretically, the developer could actually write a script that can just convert all this—you don’t need to do it by hand. So perhaps, as a smaller business, you could find a developer who is capable of doing that, because if you think in terms of blocks, once again, if your post is in the visual text editor and it’s in a kind of messy HTML chunk, then you start to understand why Google’s having so much trouble understanding and extracting this information to digest it correctly.
And it finds it very difficult to do it on a site-by-site basis, but if your developer goes in and sorts it out before Google and sticks it into Gutenberg, it all becomes terribly standardized and you’re helping Google. And unfortunately, if you don’t help Google today, Google will no longer help you.
Peter Mead: Okay, well, that leads me onto another question here from Candice DeVille. Hi, Candice. “What are your thoughts on reengineering an entire site content in Gutenberg, especially if we’re talking hundreds of pages or posts? Where would you draw the line? Maybe some people have thousands of posts. I’m not sure what—you know, do we pay someone? Does someone sit down and spend hours and hours, I guess, going into Gutenberg and doing all the layouts or formatting? What do we do, Jason?”
Jason Barnard: Well, I mean, I switched my site to Gutenberg to see how it would work, and I realized that I hadn’t organized the content as well as I thought I had, so it gave me a bit of a slap in the face and taught me a bit of a lesson, which isn’t a bad thing. I felt a little bit embarrassed, but then I switched to Gutenberg, and I’ve got ten or eleven pages, so it’s not a big, big deal—I did it, you know, in the morning.
You mentioned design—the design is something else. The design is the CSS block, can happen on CSS, and the page can have its CSS. In fact, the design and the organization are two very separate things. All Google, though, is organizing the content—it isn’t to do with the design. So you need to look at your CSS to get the design right, look at Gutenberg to organize your content correctly so that Google can correctly both ingest it and deliver it.
And if you’ve got thousands and thousands of pages, then you need to pay a developer to write a script to do it automatically. So there is that problem as well—even if you get somebody to do it automatically, you still have to go through and check the whole thing. But if you remember TYPO3—sorry to say TYPO3, this is a very rude word in the WordPress community, I know—they’ve always used blocks, always had blocks, present blocks, the future blocks, so you have no choice, sorry.
Peter Mead: Okay, that sounds very zen. There’s only one moment, that’s now—let’s blocks.
Jason Barnard: Exactly. So, I mean, unfortunately—I mean, unfortunately for small businesses, unfortunately for all of us, we have to swallow the pill, bite the bullet, however you want to put it, we have to move forward with this because that’s where the world is going, that’s where WordPress is going. Google is investing in WordPress for a reason, because it’s trying to make its life easier.
Oh, the other thing is Bing have introduced an API that you can actually inject the pages, you can submit your pages so they’re indexed immediately. Google also have the same thing, but that’s coming. And Cindy Krum, our Fraggles friend, as it were, is now obsessed by an API to inject individual chunks, blocks, or Fraggles of content into Google. And if you ever want to do that, you have to organize in blocks or chunks, which means you have to use Gutenberg.
Peter Mead: Okay, so how about if we have previously been pretty good with our HTML layouts before, you know, going back to the old days of the TinyMCE, and if we were using H1, H2s, H3s, ordered lists, numbered lists, captions, titles, all kinds of things—if we were doing all of our HTML the right way, how much easier is this going to be for us switching over to Gutenberg?
Jason Barnard: Oh, yeah, sorry, that list you just gave—ordered lists and—do you have it written in front of you?
Peter Mead: I do remember it, yeah.
Jason Barnard: Well, going back to the old days of using Notepad to build websites—
Peter Mead: Okay, yeah, so you actually remember all this stuff, that’s brilliant. And I think it’s a few—oh, yes, Simon Cox is obsessed by that, and rightly so, but not that—not to offend Simon. I think if you’re already organizing your content well, if you’re already organizing well, the switch should be relatively simple. As I said, I mean, I organized it reasonably well, and my switch was pretty simple, but it did, as I said, give me a slap in the face for some things that I hadn’t done as clearly as I thought I had done it.
So if you’ve organized yourself well, the switch shouldn’t be too difficult, or it should—actually, if you’ve organized yourself perfectly, you should just be able to switch from one to the other and there should be no problems at all, there should be—
Peter Mead: Has big income was around it, but—
Jason Barnard: But, I mean, for me, it’s install their version of your site—a development version, a development platform—and play around with it, see what happens. If it makes it terribly, then you’re going to need to call a developer. If it doesn’t look too bad, you can do it on your own—do it on your own, you’re probably fine. Don’t do any live site—whatever you do, don’t switch from one to the other on the live site.
Peter Mead: Which is why then, of course, because I’m too lazy to install the dev platform and I just wanted to see because I’m 12 years old in my mind—
Jason Barnard: Do what I say, not what I do.
Peter Mead: Exactly, yeah, probably.
Jason Barnard: And that was it—my site, because it’s absolute rubbish, but that’s another problem.
Peter Mead: And somebody’s asking about Divi or Elementor, those blocks—
Jason Barnard: Sorry, yeah, I was going to ask you that one because—
Peter Mead: Yeah, hello, it’s Louis’s—asks that: “How does Gutenberg handle page builders like Divi or Elementor, but also, you know, Beaver Builder, that kind of thing?” And the question is, it feels like page builders are already building things in blocks—is there anything—
Jason Barnard: I was kind of hoping—
Peter Mead: Yeah, well, it’s a very fair question because I don’t know the answer. I was hoping you would have the answer, which is why I was going to ask the question before you asked.
Jason Barnard: Well, I don’t know, I think Elementor is quite fun to play with, and Divi—I mean, it looks and feels like blocks, and I guess makes it easier for us to build a page, but I’ve traditionally kind of avoided most of those page builders because I’m too stuck on the idea of controlling the HTML myself.
Peter Mead: So that’s because you use Notepad to write your sites, though, isn’t it?
Jason Barnard: Yeah, well, I mean, I don’t know Divi or Elementor in particular, but these page builders, if they are to survive in a Gutenberg world, are going to have to conform. So I would suggest that well-maintained systems like that are going to be safe over time because they’re going to have to adapt.
Peter Mead: Hmm.
Jason Barnard: So I wouldn’t say dump Divi or Elementor—I think you can safely stay with them because they’re going to go that way as well. But I mean, you can always also—
Peter Mead: Sorry, no, I was just going to add a little bit on there because I was talking last week with a guy named Ricky Blacker from WP Engine here in Australia and talking about StudioPress, and I was asking him about this, and in particular with a page builder and how does it work, how well is it going to handle it. And so I have it on good authority from Ricky Blacker that Elementor with StudioPress handles Gutenberg quite well, so that’s the word.
Jason Barnard: Let’s see what an email said.
Peter Mead: I have another question—did you actually know that and you were playing me for a fool?
Jason Barnard: No, I just have a slow recall and I just remember it was towards the end of what you were saying.
Peter Mead: Okay, so you’re the elephant of the WordPress world.
Jason Barnard: Yeah, well, okay, slow to remember but never really forgets, that kind of thing.
Peter Mead: Exactly.
Jason Barnard: Yeah, I like elephants, by the way, it wasn’t an insult. I do apologize if you took it the wrong way.
Peter Mead: Not at all, I do like elephants. But I’m not sure I got the elephant in the room, which is that we’re coming towards the end of the webinar.
Jason Barnard: That was a brilliant segue.
Peter Mead: Mmm, you like that one?
Jason Barnard: Yeah, I love that, that’s it, it seemed to work, seemed to roll along, didn’t it?
Peter Mead: Any last words? What about a takeaway for us? What’s the takeaway that everyone can go away and implement today?
Jason Barnard: Well, for me, the takeaway is, since I started thinking in blocks and since I started looking at the fact that Google is moving towards being a multimedia—or providing multimedia results—I mean, I look at Google now as this machine-driven version of Yahoo. I mean, Yahoo’s first page is human-rated and it’s the same for everybody with some personalization, but it’s human-curated, and Google is becoming that kind of Yahoo but machine-generated, machine-curated on a query-by-query basis, and that blows my mind. So we’re moving towards that, and blocks allow it to do that.
And I’ve got an article on Search Engine Journal which talks about how the search and the ranking algorithm functions, and I call it Darwinism in search. And these rich elements, these blocks, are coming in, and each time—on a video, for example, video block—it comes in, it kills off a blue link. So we have this Darwinism where the blue links are disappearing, and if you’re relying on that page-level indexation and that page-level blue link ranking, you’re going to die. So you have to think in blocks, you have to think in multimedia, you have to make your content varied, and you have to make sure that it’s deliverable—i.e., that it’s the most relevant format for the user in the context they find themselves, whether it be video, image, blue link, featured snippet, carousel, list, table—so I’m trying to get this list that you got earlier on.
So think about your content in blocks. If you don’t think in blocks, if you’re still thinking in blue links, you’re going to die out just like the blue links are about to die out.
Peter Mead: Okay, so it’s evolve or die.
Jason Barnard: Brilliant—Darwinism in search, yes.
Peter Mead: Great. It’s been a load of fun and, yeah, very entertaining but very informational.
Jason Barnard: Oh, yeah, it’s the future of search, and I still love what you came up with, the thing, the “SEO is AEO,” and—
Peter Mead: Can I sing it to say goodbye?
Jason Barnard: Well, you certainly can, I’d love you to sing it and take us out, and we’ll say goodbye after that. Thank you so much, Jason.
Jason Barnard: Thank you very much, Peter, that was absolutely glorious. Even though it’s seven o’clock in the morning, I’m feeling quite chirpy and cheerful—SEO is AEO!
Peter Mead: Thank you, Peter Mead and everyone else.
Jason Barnard: Thanks, everyone, see you later.
Peter Mead shares over 20 years experience in Digital and as an expert SEO Consultant. Peter draws further knowledge and experience from his involvement as a SEMrush Webinar host and a co-organizer of Melbourne SEO Meetup. Writing articles based on his hands-on analytical and strategic experience. Peter is passionate about contributing to client success and the improvement of the broader SEO community.
Peter can be found on some of these sites:
Hosting the SEMrush Australian Search Marketing Academy Webinar: https://www.semrush.com/user/145846945/
WordPress SEO Consultant: Peter Mead iT https://petermead.com/
Co-Organiser: Melbourne SEO Meetup https://www.meetup.com/Melbourne-SEO/
More information About Peter Mead