Webinar: Australian Search Marketing Academy (ASMA) – Optimizing WordPress for Bloggers

Ever wondered how the pros make WordPress blogs soar?

Join Peter Mead as he welcomes Casey Market, the Media Wyse founder and SEO powerhouse—who’s helped shape some of the web’s most successful blogs.

Casey’s knack for uncovering Google’s hidden rules and helping bloggers bounce back from penalties is legendary.

Peter is thrilled to put your toughest questions to Casey, sharing the insights our blogging community craves.

Don’t miss your chance to be part of this lively, practical session designed for anyone wanting to take their WordPress blog further.

Full Transcript of the Optimizing WordPress for Bloggers Webinar

Peter Mead:
On it. Yeah, here we are. Welcome to Australian Search Marketing Academy for the Australian search marketing community. I’m Peter Mead, and today we’re talking about optimizing WordPress for bloggers. We have a very special guest, Casey Markee, who has helped many of the world’s top WordPress sites. We’ve been communicating a little bit here and talking about the fact that kangaroos sometimes do jump down the Main Street.

Peter Mead:
But which Casey was quite interested in. Casey?

Casey Markee:
Yes, in San Diego, that is correct. America’s greatest city, as they call it. Supposedly a very, very nice, beautiful day here, a little over 70 degrees. We do not have any kangaroos or foxes jumping down the streets. I was fascinated when I was looking up a little bit about Melbourne. Again, I have not had the honour of visiting Australia at all, and I was just shocked when I found that you guys are known as the Fox capital of the world and apparently have all these foxes that just run around everywhere.

Casey Markee:
And I’m thinking, hmm, very interesting. We don’t have that. We have coyotes occasionally, and they are not as much fun. So very interesting to read about that. Absolutely differences there with what’s hot in SEO, obviously the other side of the world.

Peter Mead:
So, Casey, thanks again for joining us. I usually start these webinars by asking our guests a very quick question: what’s hot in SEO right now? What’s going on? What’s happening?

Casey Markee:
Well, I tell you what, there’s been a lot of volatility in the search engine rankings, especially over the last several months. That, of course, started back in March when we had the core update on March the 11th. It accelerated even more back in June when Google ran the core algorithm, possibly with other changes, that was on June the 3rd. We’ve heard a lot about that. I know that others on your calls have talked about that.

Casey Markee:
But what many people might not be aware of is that there was yet another update, and this seems to be a significant one that happened on or about June the 27th, so late last week. On the positive, it seems that a lot of people, especially a lot of bloggers specifically, were positively impacted by this. So if you’re on the call and you’re thinking, hmm, you know, things seem now I seem to have a pretty good weekend, go back, take a look at June the 27th, run an analysis, and see if you notice any uptick.

Casey Markee:
And, of course, unfortunately as well, there has to be some losers as well, so see if you notice any down ticks as well, and we’ll see what we can see. There’s not much to say about that, so I’m not gonna rattle you with any findings because that would be there’s nothing to say. I am collecting some data, so if you were positively impacted by that, good for you, and we’ll see what we see. But, you know, like I tell bloggers all the time, SEO is a marathon, not a race, not a sprint. We sometimes these algorithm updates benefit you, and many times, unfortunately, they hurt you. So it’s a zero-sum game. We just hope that we can stay ahead of all the changes positively long-term.

Peter Mead:
Absolutely.

Casey Markee:
The sprint, this whole idea of trying to get fast results, I see that a lot, and we see people really getting hurt, I mean, going backwards by, and it’s sort of taking shortcuts or maybe taking a few risks, I guess.

Peter Mead:
Sure, sure.

Casey Markee:
Which, which, you know, I saw a lot of that from the June 3 update. Yes, seen quite a bit of, there’s still people reeling from that one.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, you know, I would add on that is that if you’re on the call and you’ve suffered fallout from these updates—and I know that they exist and I know many of you, I can recognize some of the names—you probably did suffer fallout from the March update and unfortunately maybe you didn’t get any recovery from the June update. It can be discouraging. Totally get it.

Peter Mead:
One of the things that you really want to ask yourself though is, am I going to continue to read all this information or am I going to go ahead and seek out the help from a possible professional who can do a competent site audit on your site to maybe diagnose and provide you a list of priority items?

Peter Mead:
One of the things that I really want to emphasize is that we don’t know what we don’t know. Trust me, my wife tells me it all the time. Very, very common. It’s a stenciled glass and the marquee household. You need to work with professionals. There are a lot of top bloggers who were negatively impacted by the June update, negatively impacted initially in March, did not receive any recovery in June. Now they’re finally realizing this is my livelihood. I need to seek out professionals.

Peter Mead:
And so myself, Allen Bly Weiss, I know Peter yourself, others have been slammed with requests for help, professional help, out of the assistance from these sites who were negatively impacted. And I urge you on the call, if you can do that, seek out a second pair of eyes, have ones have someone who can go in, crawl your site, you can look at the topical clusters, who can look and see, okay, well, it’s clear to me that Google’s having a hard time algorithmically scoring your content based upon usability barriers here, here, and here, and oh, by the way, you’re showing 20 ads on this recipe page. Maybe we want to dial that back a little bit so it’s not—it’s okay to ask for help. This is your livelihood. This is a business.

Peter Mead:
Just as I tell everyone to invest in the best hosting they can, just as I tell everyone that they should try to sign up for a block support plan because WordPress is not optimized out of the box, which I always think is pretty money when we will say that. We want to have you give you the best chance of recovering from issues like this, and that involves you putting out a lifeline and having someone help you. It’s okay. We can only do so much on these seminars.

Casey Markee:
Absolutely.

Peter Mead:
Casey?

Casey Markee:
Can I just also add to that and say it’s also important for people to be considerate about who they ask for help because we’ve seen it time and time again where perhaps, you know, whether it be a blogger or someone who needs that help and they reach out for help and then perhaps they don’t make the best choice of who it is that helps them and doing all kinds of things like recently we’ve seen a lot of—I think there’s been a lot going on with the June 3 update where it comes to there are a lot—they’re a lot better at picking out those really poor link signals, especially things like, you know, from PBNs, you know, the private blog network links, things like that that are linking from irrelevant PBNs back to the home page of the website where in the past they may have gotten away with it. You know, they’ve obviously engaged professionals do this kind of work.

Casey Markee:
I would say please, please, please think carefully about who you get to help because we do see a lot of that work, which can also cause problems.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, yeah, I can’t stress that enough. So I guess that brings up a good point, like in Peter, I’m sure you have some great thoughts on this. How do you determine who is confident and who is not? I mean, there is a lot of—there’s one of the criticisms of SEO in general is that there’s no standards division. You have to basically rely on recommendations or referrals or, you know, you have to vet that professional.

Peter Mead:
Now, there are a lot of people in our niche who, you know, maybe they do podcasts, maybe they publish a book, maybe they publish an article, maybe they offer a course. They couldn’t find a bad link from a hole in the wall. It’s just that that’s just not their forte. They’re great at talking about SEO, but they might not necessarily know how to honour the site effectively. So I always look on referrals.

Peter Mead:
You know, when we talk about word of mouth, and very fortunate, I never advertise. I don’t advertise. If someone is interested in an audit, it’s a 100% referral business from one, someone who’s had an existing audit, or referral from someone in the niche who’s like, hey, you know, I know Casey Markee, he does a lot of work with food, lifestyle, and do-it-yourself bloggers. He might be someone that can assist you.

Peter Mead:
But if you’re, you know, asking yourself, where just help exist, you know, go on some of these forums, ask for referrals, and then those people accordingly pop their names into Google, see if they can back up what they’re saying, if they’re published somewhere, if they, you know, go to their Facebook page, where they’re gonna have dozens if not hundreds of feedbacks and referrals there. Look at their lands and report.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, and I know you’ve seen that ourselves. I mean, one of the things that you and I have done historically is correct the mistakes of other SEOs. That’s a very common issue that we run into, and unfortunately, it’s a bad issue, and we continue to hope that it’ll improve, and unfortunately, it never does. So now you are getting referrals.

Peter Mead:
Also some of the user groups, maybe some of the local SEO meetups around, figure out that sort of thing. But referrals and also, you know, check your own background checks on those people, but referral from a trusted source is always good.

Casey Markee:
Oh, shall we jump into some of these questions?

Peter Mead:
But that saluted had some good ones. I mean, what’s about it? You know, can I perhaps I’ll go through the first one here?

Casey Markee:
Okay.

Peter Mead:
See, we got one from Megan, and Megan, that’s Matt Creations Hub, I think she’s from. So I would love to know, best hosting for an Aussie blog, still wanting speed and responsiveness for my Aussie audience but also international as well. So yes, hosting, right? It’s a huge deal for making your site run faster but performance and also reliability. And yeah, I mean, do you work with some Aussie blogs, Casey? What would you say about the quality of hosting for Aussie as well as international?

Casey Markee:
Well, you know, I’ve heard very good things about Kinsta, and I’m gonna go ahead and paste over the link here. Kinsta is a pretty nice, it’s based in Sydney, I believe. It uses Google Cloud, very similar to the makeup that WP Engine uses. But here’s the good news: it’s one-third the cost of WP Engine, so pretty nice. They, you know, it’s I definitely recommend it. Anything that’s in the class, I’m all for. I think traditional, you know, regular servers in a server room are kind of, you know, meaning the end of their usefulness in many ways. That’s what I would look at first as Kinsta.

Casey Markee:
So if you’re familiar, if you’re looking, if you’re in Australia specifically and you want something that actually has global appeal, quality CDN options as well, so we can keep those copies all around the world, do be a good recommendation.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, so that’s pretty good. I mean, I would also throw my hat in the ring and say WP Engine as well.

Casey Markee:
I mean, yeah, yeah, WP as well.

Peter Mead:
WP Engine, known, you know, WP Engine’s well known. They just bought—who do they just buy, Peter? They just bought Flywheel, is that right?

Casey Markee:
Or no, was it no? I don’t like Flywheel.

Peter Mead:
No, no, what is it? Fly something, Fly like totally—name is. Anyway, WP Engine is great. I tell you what though, horrible pricing. I just, for the average bloggers out there, don’t recommend it because you can buy something that’s cloud-based as well. Heck, you could even go AWS with the Amazon and pay in many cases two-thirds of what you would be paying for the same setup on WP Engine.

Casey Markee:
So unless you’re a blogger with five hundred or a million sessions a month, but most of you want to call it probably or not, go with the better performance and see what you can do. So hopefully that’ll help y’all.

Peter Mead:
WP Engine, thank you for our attendees who said that Flywheel was just purchased by WP Engine. So for those of you who are using Flywheel, congratulations, your hosting will probably go up about 150 percent. So great, great job.

Peter Mead:
We’ve got a question here from Emily, StamenBike.com, and so she’s saying I’d like to know…

Casey Markee:
Recipe blog?

Peter Mead:
What’s the best practice SEO is for titling recipe blog where I’m giving two different methods for the cooking recipe, sir? Looks like…

Casey Markee:
Yeah, so there’s a long question here. I’ll just keep doing. Many contain recipes which detail both a regular cooking…

Peter Mead:
Okay, so it looks like she’s getting a problem here. Don’t want to end up with duplicate content and are saying I don’t want to be restricted to just steam oven searches as it’s a really niche market with a low traffic volume, but it is my specialty area.

Peter Mead:
She’s wondering, saying, I wonder if I’m doing a disservice to my post by attempting to rank for general traffic as well as my own tiny niche. Should she just stick to her niche and do over the one time?

Casey Markee:
Oh, well, that’s a good question. Let’s unpack that a little bit. So in her case here, she’s talking about she has a recipe that she has two preparation methods: it’s through oven, regular oven cooking, and an adapted steam oven cooking method as well.

Casey Markee:
I would look specifically at which of those methods is more common, and then I would go ahead and focus the recipe on that. But I would also go ahead and have a section in the post where, by the way, there is an alternative method by which we can prepare this, and we can go ahead and put both of those preparation methods in the recipe card. Not a problem at all. Matter of fact, we do, we see that all the time.

Casey Markee:
There’s many cases where someone might have a rotisserie and the other method for a various recipe. We can easily accommodate both of those methods within the recipe card. People tend to worry about cannibalization. I certainly wouldn’t. I tell you what I wouldn’t do, which is what I wouldn’t have a whole post devoted to each cooking method because you’re going to run into internal cannibalization issues. There’s just not enough unique content there to make that worthwhile.

Casey Markee:
So yeah, definitely one longer, one lot, one long exhaustive post that uses both of those methods definitely the way to go.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, okay, that’s great. I think that’s good advice. Thank you for that.

Peter Mead:
So here we have Tonya Boylan. So I’ve got one here. Here’s a question from Tonya: How many variations of the keyword or a keyword phrase should we be using in one post? How can you increase the number of keywords that you rank for within a single post?

Peter Mead:
He’s got an example, i.e., can you spread keywords throughout the text of the post, or do you have to use them in H2 headers for them to be able to rank? And what’s the most glaring—obviously, that’s two questions in one. Our first matter, do they—what do you think?

Casey Markee:
Has you mean do they need—if I think it sounds to me like maybe getting too hung up on these keywords so far as wanting to put them into H2 headers and things. Obviously, your primary, you know, your primary topic will be important to make sure that that is focused. But variations of the keyword, in my experience, it should be naturally written into the post in a way that makes sense when people read it.

Casey Markee:
And you will rank for keywords, sometimes keywords that are not even in the post at all.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, that’s very true. So if you one of the things that I would urge you to—for the person who submitted this questionnaire, for everyone on the call—is to really not worry so much about what keywords you’re going to rank for and try to optimize a post for everything, but just try to optimize for the user.

Peter Mead:
We should have the focus keyword, maybe two focus keywords if we’re using Yoast or if you upgrade to use premium, fantastic way for you to specify multiple focused keywords. Go ahead and delve down into make sure that the post is optimized for one or two keywords at the most.

Peter Mead:
But when you do that, you are literally going to open yourself up to dozens, if not hundreds, of longtail keyword matches. That’s why you can have a super post on your site—we call content unicorns—where, you know, they’re basically, they rank for basically everything you possibly think of, and you had no idea that this keyword was even in the content. Maybe it isn’t even in the content. Maybe it’s from an internal link from another post. Maybe it’s an external link signal by means of anchor text.

Peter Mead:
Don’t get hung up on the number of keywords that the post is ranking for. Focus infinitely. Can I go ahead and optimize this for one or two keywords? And when you do that, you’re gonna find that through what’s called keyword stemming, you’re gonna do extremely well. The keyword, the longtail keywords are going to click in. You can then go into Search Console, pull up that post, click on the keywords tab, and you can see right away a whole list of keywords that Google is autopopulating for that post.

Peter Mead:
And then, you know, maybe you can see a couple keywords on there that have some volume but you’re not generating a lot of traffic. Well, then we can go back to the post with that data now that we have and maybe we can go ahead and look at optimizing the content a little bit more around some of the other keyword phrases that Google is now showing you as algorithmically scoring on but you’re not competitive for.

Peter Mead:
So I would reverse your model. Let’s go ahead and focus in on a couple keywords, then go back in a couple months, take a look at what you’re ranking for, and then see if we could go ahead and dial it in for a little bit more success.

Casey Markee:
Yeah, absolutely. The opportunities will come if you…

Peter Mead:
Yeah, yeah, you can see this. But Jimmies, go have a look in your Google search console data and see which keywords are coming in and then have a look where they fit, you know, topically where they fit, and then start building them in.

Peter Mead:
So there’s another part of that question here which there’s the big question everyone has to know: what’s the most glaring SEO error in Google’s eyes? Shall we hit on that one?

Casey Markee:
Okay, sure. Now, so I don’t know what the most glaring SEO issue in Google’s eyes is because Google will tell you that, you know, everything’s an issue for them—page speed, whatever. But Google will probably tell you it’s page speed because their goal is a bottom-line seamless loading internet. That’s what their biggest issue is: is page speed.

Casey Markee:
And so if you’re running ads, and you’re, if you’re, you know, Google would like every page on the internet to load less than two seconds, basically impossible if you’re running any sort of ads. But we can certainly get that under maybe seven or eight seconds if you optimize accordingly.

Casey Markee:
So if you’re on the call and you’re asking what should we hone on to fix on a site first, I would definitely choose page speed because page speed involves so many linked variables. It’s user experience, it’s page design, it’s how many elements you are stuffing or stifling the page with.

Casey Markee:
If you can run your page through PageSpeed Insights and get somewhere—don’t even worry about the score, worry about the metrics. If you’ve got a first contentful paint metric under 2.4 seconds, that’s when I’m looking at faster the better. I’m looking at a speed index of less than 6 or 7 seconds at the most, and I’m looking for a time to interactive of on a WordPress site probably seven, eight seconds.

Casey Markee:
And frankly, if you’re not running ads, it should be much faster than that at a minimum. So if you’re running it, if you’re putting a post through a site and I’m looking at PageSpeed Insights and I’m getting a 35, 40, 50, 60-plus second time to interactive, don’t expect it to be competitive. Don’t it ask yourself because if that’s—if think about that.

Casey Markee:
And one of the ways I say it, Peter, is like think about the time to interact. That’s like how many seconds it takes to fully load the page. Imagine just cutting them. Yeah, imagine just cutting them in half. Imagine now I look at we got twice as many people able to access that content in one minute.

Casey Markee:
I mean, imagine taking a 40-second-plus load time and knocking it down to 10 seconds. Wow. You’ve literally increased the chances of users interacting with your content by a factor of three.

Casey Markee:
So when we talk about making your content more attractive and we talked about glaring SEO errors, I have literally dozens and dozens of examples where we have done nothing but improve the page speed on the clients finding the traffic is kind of noticeably so.

Casey Markee:
We want to really make it easy for Google to crawl and algorithmically score our content, and if they’re timing out, they’re not able to do that effectively.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, absolutely. I would add a little bit on to that about the B. Be careful because a lot of people, they have their responsive version of the theme, and if you’re going to use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, you’ll see the difference between the mobile and the desktop.

Peter Mead:
And I guess sometimes it’s not so easy to diagnose what is actually happening on that responsive version of the theme that’s making it run that much slower. So again, it’s a chance there to dive in or even to get a professional to help diagnose what is actually going on.

Peter Mead:
It’s very often that it runs slower on mobile than it does on a desktop, and that’s very true. I mean, we can talk very quickly about stacks. I mean, if you—we always have these questions about, oh my God, you know, I’m on WordPress and I’m just slow. Well, you’re either slow, you’re usually slow because of a lack of optimization.

Peter Mead:
You know, for gardening a WordPress site, one of the very first things we’re going to be looking at is your bottom line hosting. Do I have a very fast or a responsive? Do I have enough resources to handle not only my resources but also projected traffic? Very simple.

Peter Mead:
Having a tier one server—if you’re on the call and you’re hosting with Bluehost, Hostgator, or some of these other lower tier hosting services, they’re known for their micro outages, literally hundreds and hundreds of micro outages every month.

Peter Mead:
And what’s a micro outage? Well, your site might only be down for ten or fifteen seconds, but it’s happening over and over again, or maybe a couple seconds, and that’s going to hurt your attractiveness when we talk about Google algorithmic considerations.

Peter Mead:
So when we’re looking at diagnosing a site and we’re thinking, okay, how can we work on this page speed? Invest in quality hosting, invest in quality caching plugins. You know, whether I personally like WP Rocket, but there are plenty other great options. I’m sure Peter can recommend some.

Peter Mead:
Invest in bulk image optimization. You know, hey, you know, if you’re familiar with Google pushing the new alternative image formats, WebP is one of them. WB P. It’s funny because a lot of people are like, oh, I don’t want to do that because, you know, Safari doesn’t support that format.

Peter Mead:
Guys, you know how many people use Safari? Almost no one. Yes, seriously. If you were if your concern is that, oh my God, my Safari users aren’t going to be happy because I’m now converting all my images to next-gen, don’t lose any sleep over it.

Peter Mead:
I mean, I’m serious. If I’m able to convert all the images to WebP and all of a sudden the page goes from 11 seconds to 6, you know what? I’m gonna be okay with a little bit of dissatisfaction from Safari until they catch up, and they will catch up. They’re basically the only browser out there that doesn’t support these new next-gen images, and they’ll eventually get around to it.

Peter Mead:
So the quality image optimization, you know, invest in a quality caching plugin. You really need to do that’s where it starts.

Casey Markee:
Nice.

Peter Mead:
Let’s go to Maria. So Maria is the Let the Baking Begin blog, and so how do you figure out your kind of keyword search volume you should be aiming for when trying to optimize a post? It’s a little bit similar to the previous question, a little bit of a different thing that how do you figure out your ranking and what kind of keyword search volume? Obviously, there’s some tools, there’s lots of different tools around. What are your recommendations there, Casey? What should we be doing to figure this out?

Casey Markee:
Well, you know, there’s a lot of rank checkers out there, but I always tell people to start with what they have access to for free, and that’s everyone on the call and that Search Engine Console.

Casey Markee:
So you have the ability to go into Search Console and to see where you’re ranking competitively for a lot of keywords. Now, a lot of people are confused by these average rankings, but there’s information on there. You just have to search for it so you can understand how to read that data.

Casey Markee:
As a matter of fact, gosh, Peter, you know, I’m trying to think of his name—you’re Glenn Gabe, Glenn Gabe. You know him pretty well. He’s got a fantastic guide published in Search Engine Land about, you know, I think it was early last year about how to read the certain metrics, the search ranking positions in Search Console. That should be a must-read for everyone on the call. Start there. This is free.

Casey Markee:
And then go ahead and see, okay, Google’s ranking me for this content here. I have a very weak site. Maybe I don’t have more than a couple dozen linking domains or a couple hundred linking domains. If you’re finding that you’re targeting the keyword that has twenty, fifty, a hundred thousand searches a month, probably going to find that you’re running into competitive headaches because there’s a lot of bigger sites above you that are targeting that keyword phrase.

Casey Markee:
You might not have the earned authority yet or even the strength to rank competitively for that. Contrary to popular belief, someone with ten ranking domains is gonna have a hard time ranking for, you know, banana cream pie right out of the gate. It’s not gonna work. There’s too much competition for that, and you have to earn that competition.

Casey Markee:
So as I tell everyone all the time when we’re doing these audits, you kind of have to find your sweet spot. For most bloggers, that’s two thousand to twelve thousand searches a month initially. And then occasionally, you’ll have a home run where you’ll eventually rank for a piece of, for a keyword or two that’s 30, 40, 50 thousand sessions, and that will help pull, push up your site algorithmically, and you can start to rank a little bit more for other long-tail or other high-volume keyword phrases.

Casey Markee:
So yeah, it’s one of those things where, yeah, lots of, lots of stuff that can be.

Peter Mead:
You go ahead, Peter, you know, say.

Peter Mead:
You could go Google Search Console. Absolutely, everyone who has a blog, who has WordPress, they should be familiarizing themselves with Google Search Console and really learning how that, how to read the data and how it works. But if they’re—I mean, you can go further than that because then if you have an account, let’s say you have an SEMrush account, obviously, where you know we’re talking about SEMrush, but there’s other tools as well that do this.

Peter Mead:
But they will help you to get an understanding of your competitiveness, like who is your competitor and who else is actually ranking. I mean, you can do this too by just going straight to Google, right? So absolutely dropping that keyword in and finding out, you know, who is actually dominating the space for those keywords.

Peter Mead:
A tool like SEMrush, you know, is probably going to shortcut that process. Yeah, so I would say there’s lots of ways of doing it, but there’s probably—I think the real kind of thing that I would say you spend the time understanding the keywords, who is your competitors, you know, the big banner on the hill, you know, you’re not going to knock them off straightaway if you’re just beginning, but you have to start somewhere, and so you still need to keep working in your niche and keep working hard.

Peter Mead:
Alright, moving on here. So we’ve got a—what’s our next question there? We’re going to hear from Joanne Williams, and this is Homemade Gutenberg Food Junkie. Please explain the benefits of using a Gutenberg. I’ve just started using it this month. I like it actually and think it may improve SEO. For example, the image links are now correct according to my SEMrush 10 editor, so that was not the case in the classic editor. Other benefits are not saying question mark. What do you think?

Casey Markee:
Gutenberg obviously this is radical change for WordPress, right? Different, and, you know, we’re now working in blocks, content blocks, the whole DOM model, document object model. There’s some technical things that have really changed fundamentally with this. What do you see so far as bloggers are concerned, Casey? What would you say that is a benefit of them using the Gutenberg?

Casey Markee:
Well, I tell you, it’s been changes. Art changes art. It’s like me trying to have more than one salad a week, very, very tough for me to do, especially, and I tend to load that salad up with a lot of bacon bits.

Casey Markee:
So moving to Gutenberg was tough, and it’s one of those things where a lot of bloggers are still using the classic editor, and hey, I’m one of them. I’m not a fan, honestly. A boom block of the block set expected stuff. It’s tough to change. Will I eventually switch over? Yes.

Casey Markee:
And I can tell you that I know I have to know the editor because I have dozens and dozens of clients who have made the move. So positives of Gutenberg: it’s easier to use blocks to add schema. That’s a big deal.

Casey Markee:
So right now you have blocks that are built specifically around various schemas, which are extremely—which have taken off in 2019, the two most prominent being how-to and FAQ schema, which Google is now supporting fully and pushing radically in the SERPs, both desktop and mobile.

Casey Markee:
So that is very easy to be to use if you’re on using Gutenberg. We can just go ahead and pull in a how-to or FAQ block. It looks like item list schema, super easy to use, fantastic. You also have blocks for basically everything. You’ve got your paragraph, your heading, your subheading, the gallery, a cover image, quotes, columns, lists, videos, you name it, embeds—they’re all with blocks. So it’s very WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get.

Casey Markee:
I am not technically sound, clearly. I’m not a coder. Never had that. Funny story actually, but we won’t get into it today. I took coding in college. It did not end well. Needless to say, my robot basically committed—so he killed himself before he could even complete the assigned trials he was supposed to do in front of the class. Good times.

Casey Markee:
So the block editor again has its benefits. You know, there’s lots that you can do with it. Here are the detriments: it can lead to decreased site performance, substantially decreased site performance because you will have all these blocks, you’ll load in a bunch of blocks that add a bunch of plugins that’ll add 2 to 20 blocks each.

Casey Markee:
And the next thing you know, you’ve got all these blocks that are slowing down performance. You really have to be cautious and very judicious about how you’re going to be using these blocks in the future to keep them out. And remember that when you have each of these blocks, each of the blocks are loading CSS and JavaScript all the time on every page, whether you’re using that block or not, folks. That’s how it works. Your site will slow down considerably.

Casey Markee:
Now, version 2 of the block editor is coming, but I don’t believe it’s going to be released this year, where they’re looking to address a lot of these performance issues. But one of the things you might want to consider is trying to be a little bit proactive on that and consider something like WP Asset CleanUp, which is a fantastic plugin that allows you to defer, and I believe, Peter, correct me if I’m wrong, but it will work on the blocks. It will allow you to defer unused blocks from needlessly loading on a lot of pages.

Casey Markee:
So that might be something that you want to take a look at using specifically. And I’ll go ahead and paste that over, so I’m gonna go ahead and paste over that into the chat. And then, you know, Peter, if you have some thoughts down on that, let me know. But I mean, I’m sure we all know Gutenberg’s the future.

Peter Mead:
Maybe the future doesn’t.

Casey Markee:
Right now it’s the future.

Peter Mead:
That’s right. I mean, these things obviously take time to settle in, but we have—oh wait—we often see changes in WordPress that are not necessarily going to help performance.

Peter Mead:
You know, the—I mean, as you said, each time is a block, there is more CSS, there’s more JavaScript. Lots of themes are doing this as well. Every time you, with your themes, you use the editor, and they’re using these blocks to build things, and it’s loading resources. It’s loading to the load stack. It’s time, and we know that time is money, right? When it comes to how slow your page loads.

Peter Mead:
So Gloria, I’ll just go on here.

Peter Mead:
Okay, sit to the next question. Gloria Dugan, I hope I’ve pronounced that correctly. She’s from Homemade and Yummy, and the question here is: Is there any SEO benefit to backdate a post then republish it at a later date to bring it forward? Does Google find this confusing?

Peter Mead:
Well, we know there’s a bit of a tactic there about refreshing content and changing the publish date.

Casey Markee:
Yeah.

Peter Mead:
So what she’s referring to is the fact that that used to be a very popular way for you to also better optimize for Pinterest. So basically, you can backdate the post, have it go live on Pinterest, but then you could go ahead and not have it show on the homepage until a later date.

Peter Mead:
I’m against it. No SEO benefit, no meanness at all in SEO. And here’s the thing: John Mueller has actually commented on this, and he says he wants to see a date on everything, and that date needs to be valid. So I’m gonna go ahead and paste over a tweet from him on that, and they’re really big about: Google does not like it when you artificially change or update dates for a non-user benefit, and there is no user benefit to that.

Peter Mead:
And I’m going to go ahead and paste over the citation on that. So here’s the thing too: if you do this, folks, you can possibly get penalized because you could lose the date from showing up as a byline completely, and I’ve seen this physically myself, and it’s something that’s been around for about a year and a half. So there’s a couple citations on that you can take a look at, but I just wouldn’t do it. There’s just no reason.

Peter Mead:
It used to be that a lot of bloggers felt that they needed to optimize for Pinterest literally months in advance. So like, it’s July right now, we need to start optimizing for our fall content right now. I don’t believe at all that that is even remotely necessary anymore with how fast Pinterest and how fast everything else has moved.

Peter Mead:
I’ve told bloggers over and over again in my audits that, hey, if you want to optimize for your fall content for Pinterest, hey, go ahead and start in the fall. You’ll be fine. It’s not going to take you months to build traffic for this. There’s way—you know, it’s just not necessary. We don’t need that much lead time anymore.

Peter Mead:
It’s like bloggers who are like, oh my gosh, I have a St. Patrick’s Day recipe. I better start publishing that in February so that it has a chance to rank competitively later this year. We don’t need to do that. Google crawls content in minutes, hours at the most on most sites. Very occasionally, I might see a blog post that takes a couple days. Now, if it’s more than that, I’m always very surprised.

Peter Mead:
So don’t feel the need that you need to pre-burn or preload this content weeks or months later than necessary because Google’s going to find the content, algorithmically score it very quickly, and it’s gonna slowly work its way up, and that’s going to happen in hours and days, not weeks and months.

Casey Markee:
Absolutely.

Peter Mead:
The crawler, I mean, if put it this way, if it’s taking too long for your content to appear, then I would be asking questions about what you can do, I guess, to allow Google to crawl your site better because it really shouldn’t take that long. But of course, I get what you’re saying about the Pinterest. I know the thinking trying to get ahead of the game.

Peter Mead:
Let’s go on because here’s a really interesting one. Of course, schema is such a big deal now. Try to get it right, and it can easily be gotten wrong. So Carlos has got a question here: What is the best way, whether it’s manually or using a plug-in, to manage schema on WordPress and avoid the common technical issues about incomplete organizational schema or the not useful schema code?

Peter Mead:
So that’s the question. So yeah, I know you had some thoughts here, Casey, around the whole schema topic and in particular, you know, what’s happened with Yoast recently, right? Things can go wrong with schema. What are your thoughts here on this one?

Casey Markee:
So let’s talk a little bit about that specifically. So starting with Yoast 11.0, Yoast decided that it was their god-given right to start serving schema to everyone regardless of whether you wanted it or not. So they’re going to take over schema as a mini plugin for most sites.

Casey Markee:
Well, that caused a lot of consternation and John Wright dissent online, especially for anyone who is using a theme that already had schema built in. Genesis is a prime example of that. So you had to come out and install a plugin that basically disabled all the built-in Genesis schema so that you could get all the Yoast embedded schema to work.

Casey Markee:
Now, I can see the logic for that because it might be better to have your plugin take advantage of most schema as opposed to code move into a theme, which in many cases is not updated regularly and can be outdated quite a bit and has poor support in many cases. So I could see why Yoast decided to do that, and this is something that W3T, you know, that they got, you know, buy-in from the consortium. They wanted this to do. This is very good. This is an accepted way to go do this.

Casey Markee:
And so people are like, God darn Yoast, oh, get off my lawn, Yoast. But what happened was that, you know, even though they’re upset with it, Yoast isn’t doing anything that people didn’t see coming.

Casey Markee:
So if you’re on the call and you’re upset about this, hey, I get it, but this is again the future, just like the stupid Gutenberg editor now.

Casey Markee:
Because of these, because Yoast has decided to do so much, they’ve had growing pains. So what’s happened is if you didn’t choose the correct type of schema on your blog, you immediately started throwing up errors, and fortunately, they’re mostly easy fixes.

Casey Markee:
So if you’re a blogger and you’re operating under a name, use the name. Go ahead and switch the organization schema. Go ahead and put your site name. Go ahead and load up a 300 by 300 or larger logo, their square logo under knowledge panel so that we can go ahead and eliminate those errors right away.

Casey Markee:
And one of the really interesting things is that every time Yoast does an update, it seems like there’s another little error that you have to patch. And the most recent one involved the name attribute. It happened when you’re nesting article and recipe schema and article and other schemas like us is doing it can result in a lot of errors.

Casey Markee:
And the most recent one was a name-specific error, and it’s funny because that name-specific error was only happening because blogs had disabled their author archives. Very funny. I couldn’t even tell you why that’s happening, but once you enabled the author archives and then no indexed those same archives—in other words, choose no and not show them in search—it immediately cleared the errors.

Casey Markee:
So very funny stuff. So if you’re on the call and you were taking one of your pages and you’re popping them into the structured data tool and you’re seeing some errors and you’re like, man, what is going on? Why do I have this name error? Why do I have those logo errors? This is why.

Casey Markee:
So you can go in, go ahead and correct the organizational schema. Go ahead and go back to your author archives, click enable, and no index, and it’ll clear those errors pretty quickly.

Peter Mead:
Well, that’s a great bit of advice there for a quick fix. So we’ll keep trying to move through these questions.

Peter Mead:
I mean, so far, just going back to, so far as plugins, I mean, this taxol plugins stack, you know, you just, you can just Google for them. I mean, are they any better than others? I just, I just, you know, I think it’s not a Raziel progress.

Casey Markee:
Yeah, yeah, that’s a preference thing.

Peter Mead:
Let’s go Cory Wolf. So Cory will, he runs the Adelaide Digital Marketing Meetup group, and so Cory has a question here. This is about the, are LSI keywords still important for SEO when blogging, and what do you think about TF-IDF? Is it just fancy LSI or something, or should we all be doing, sorry, fancy LSI or something we should all be doing, sir, TF-IDF and LSI?

Casey Markee:
Well, it’s some acronyms there. Let’s go ahead and define those for the rest of you who might not be aware of this. So LSI stands for latent semantic indexing, and it’s basically, in essence, it finds the hidden or latent relationships between words or semantics in order to improve information understanding indexing.

Casey Markee:
So that’s why you have the latent semantic indexing. It’s one of the simplest ways to explain it. The proposition is that for the blogger, regular blogger, you could go ahead and use LSI. You could basically include synonyms for your target keywords within a piece of content, and that will kind of help Google better algorithmically score the content. That’s the simplistic, most simplistic way for me to explain.

Casey Markee:
However, if you talk to people much smarter than me, and there are a lot of them, Bill Slawski is one of them. He will tell you that they don’t use it and they haven’t used it in years. So he has a great resource where he talks about it a little bit, and you know, again, spoiler, he says Google’s not using it, and I tell you he’s very convincing in his argument.

Casey Markee:
So I’m gonna go ahead and paste that over here, and you could take a look at that specifically. But let’s go ahead and move to the second one, which is about the TF-IDF. That’s short for term frequency inverse document frequency, and it basically measures the importance of a keyword phrase by comparing it to the frequency of the term in a large set of documents or what’s called a corpus.

Casey Markee:
Okay, and again, folks, I don’t like to be this technical at all, so I just want you to understand that basically how it’s used, it’s a way to measure the importance of keyword phrases in relation to other phrases on the page in an overall corpus of documents.

Casey Markee:
And this is also one of those things where there is no reliable tool out there that the average SEO can use to do this because even Google says, “Lead is this on such a large level that there’s no way that the average SEO provider or person could even remotely be able to use TF-IDF to understand how we use this at scale.”

Casey Markee:
So one of the things that you kind of want to understand is that this is—I always go back to Google on this. So if you go back to Google, John Mueller, how to hang out on 4/20, and I’m gonna go ahead and paste over the link here. Well worth your time for those of you who aren’t familiar with these terms or want to read a little bit more about it.

Casey Markee:
And here’s what he said. He said this was his general recommendation, which is that my general recommendation here is not to focus on things like artificial metrics. You understand what he says when he says our metrics is something where on the one hand you can’t produce the metric directly, and we can’t overall, for example, use testing to even test the results.

Casey Markee:
It’s not that you can kind of like say, “Well, this is what I need to do,” because you don’t really have that metric overall. In other words, bottom line, he’s basically saying it’s impossible for site owners and SEOs to calculate TF-IDF because it’s based on the statistics of the entire web.

Casey Markee:
Okay, so if your question query is how important are these metrics, I would say that for the average site alone, they’re not important at all, and I’m a big believer in that. So I’m gonna go ahead and paste over that quote, a little bit from Google, and see what you can do. I know that this is a long one, so it might not even paste over.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, terrible. We’ll get into that. So I guess the question is, what should you be focusing on instead? And one of the things that we asked is that it’s basically a lot of people, again, much smarter than me, including Mike King of iPullRank, they put together a guide on an alternate guide to TF-IDF content operator optimization, and I’ll go ahead and paste that over. You can read through this a little bit, but bottom line is that it’s just not really useful for the average site owner.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, go ahead and paste that over here. And then, of course, in my mind, if you’re looking on what we should be concentrating on from a factor standpoint, if you haven’t seen it, Cyrus Shepard had a fantastic post on Google success factors, and it was published on Zippy.com several months ago. It’s a great breakdown of what the important factors are, what the non-important factors are, and what the factors are which are a complete waste of your damn time.

Peter Mead:
And it’s definitely a must-read for anyone on this call, be it you’re a blogger and SEO or the like. I’m gonna go ahead and paste that over. So when we talk about what we should be looking at for keyword research and SEO, I think you’re going to be more inclined to worry about things like topic modeling, what keywords competitive nature, maybe we’re looking at other ways to approach keyword research by using semantic analysis, maybe we’re looking at sentiment analysis because there’s always a different focus on each of the keyword types, whether it’s transactional or behavioral or the like.

Peter Mead:
So on that note, I’ll go ahead and paste over one of a recent presentation by Bill Slawski again. He’s covering this in detail. Great. Thank you for pricing long as links, Casey. They’re very helpful, folks. Can look them up and read some more. Of course, we’d be here until the cows come home or until the foxes come out if we were to go into all those details, right?

Casey Markee:
Exactly. I wish there was a simple answer, and that was it.

Peter Mead:
I am. Hats off to Corey. That’s a very good question, and I wish that, yeah, I could provide a definite, you know, a definite answer to that. But in my experience, focusing on the page level as much as possible is great, but I’ve yet to find a competent tool, and there are several out there, and there are in the article that I’ve linked to, that provides a good job with regards to using those metrics specifically to determine competitive nature of keywords in relation to other keywords.

Peter Mead:
Got another question here from Sally Mills, selling notes from Brisbane, and she organizes the Brisbane IS the OBIS event where they actually—oh, beers are involved.

Casey Markee:
Beers are involved in the airs.

Peter Mead:
Okay, I’m officially your best friend. I’m officially your best friend. So you don’t even need to say anything else. Just go ahead and give her my email address, and she can paste our questions. She want to go straight to my inbox. I’ll cut it, and when you come over to visit at some stage, hopefully.

Casey Markee:
Hopefully.

Peter Mead:
So the question here is from Sally is, you know, of course, the question is with many plugins slowing down the website, it’s hard to do so. Which one is most appropriate to do a change or to hard-code the change? The question here is what is your favorite SEO plugin for WordPress? With the arrival of Rank Math, do you think that this is a competitor to the Yoast plugin? And how do you manage the plugins by default, you know, creating of two URLs, the blog when it’s in two categories, you know, canonical issues, that sort of thing, which you can do is Yoast, yeah, it can help to handle that sort of thing.

Peter Mead:
So I guess maybe we’ll go back to the bulk of the question here about Rank Math. I don’t know what I actually just—I’m sort of a bit of a habit guy. I mean, stick back at winning horse. I mean, Yoast has been in the game for a long time. I’m still using Yoast, and I haven’t tried Rank Math myself, so I’m not sure.

Casey Markee:
I’d tried Rank Math. I have, and I think it’s fine. But there’s also a—you could tend to do too much, and an SEO presser is another one. SEO presser and Rank Math both have suffered from the same issue, which is feature overload. You do not mean as an average blogger to have that many features in a plugin because you are going to have analysis paralysis.

Casey Markee:
And I can tell you that I’ve seen it in practice multiple times from bloggers who’ve come to me and said, all I was using this, and it’s told me to do this, and I did this, and all of a sudden my blog tanked or my posts didn’t rank well, or, oh my gosh, it’s telling me to get to an 88, but then if I do this, I got to 93, but they didn’t really see any difference.

Casey Markee:
Yeah, you know, you need to find a process that works well for you. I’m a big believer in Yoast again. I don’t get paid for that opinion, trust me at all.

Peter Mead:
Yeah.

Casey Markee:
Which I did, and a lot of people were very upset with these recent changes by Yoast, and they’re pushing for things like All-in-One SEO plugin and other things. It’s fine. If you want to use that plugin, great. It’s not going to hurt you, but I’m a big believer in Yoast. It seems to be the better plugin.

Casey Markee:
So when we talk about that, you know, we want something that’s stable, we want something that has good support, you want something that is constantly updated and maintained. I don’t mind saying that that’s yes.

Casey Markee:
And I will tell you that for years I never recommended the premium version of Yoast. I thought waste of time. Totally changed my tune on that about a year ago. Totally changed my tune about a year ago.

Casey Markee:
And the reason I did is because Yoast actually added some functionality that was really pretty damn cool, and one of the functionalities they added was an orphaned content filter.

Casey Markee:
So if you’re on the call and you have not upgraded to the Yoast premium plugin, I love the orphan content filter because I can immediately see at a glance which posts on my site I have not linked to at all. They’re basically content islands. They’re sitting out there lonely. They weren’t asked to dance. Lots of authority there. None of it is being pushed internally through other sites. That alone is fantastic.

Casey Markee:
So just because of that orphan content filter, I tend to recommend Yoast premium, and that doesn’t even count the fact that there’s increased internal linking suggestions now. They’ve got the built-in redirect manager. You’ve got the ability to optimize for multiple keywords. You’ve got the priority support. Yeah, it’s worth it. So it’s premium all the way.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, I’m in the same boat. And I think one thing I will—I mean, some people are happy to switch and change.

Casey Markee:
Yeah.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, I mean, look, the way that I look at that is all I can do is recommend people not to switch and change too much. I think I see this a lot. I think it’s probably one of the big downfalls that people have with WordPress is they’re constantly making changes and trying a new plugin or swapping to a different plugin or changing the URLs, changing up their redirects or the homepage message, or I just think in general only change things once you’ve done the analysis, once you see the data that’s there that tells you you need to make the change. That’s what I would say.

Peter Mead:
But you mentioned there about the orphaned content there with no internal links, and so we could go to the next question from James Norco, who is from Prosperity Media. James is based in Sydney, and his agency won the Agency of the Year award at the Search Marketing Awards last year at the Opera House. So it’s great to hear a question from James.

Peter Mead:
The first part of his question has been answered already because he asked about Yoast or Rank Math. Well, we’ve already kind of answered that. But the second part of his question here leads on from orphaned content. He says for internal links on WordPress sites, do you recommend using an internal link plugin or do it manually? Question mark.

Casey Markee:
Yeah, that’s a good question. And I always, especially with regards to internal linking, I never want to automate that because it can be spammy. And I’ll give you an example: a couple years ago, there was a related links plugin that caused a ridiculous amount of manual action penalties with Google because it was used incorrectly by literally thousands of WordPress users.

Casey Markee:
It would automatically go ahead and find and highlight specific keyword phrases that you specified on the back end, and it went crazy. And the next thing you know, Google’s started to see all these unnatural internal links pushing anchor text rich keywords, and that was a bad thing. And then you generated penalties.

Casey Markee:
So I’m all about the manual part of it. The good thing about Yoast premium is it does come up with a related link suggestion on every post, and you can choose to use those suggestions or choose not to. But whenever we automate something like that, it tends to go awry. So I would be very cautious about that.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, especially because the internal links are still counted as links, and if you’re starting to pump had heaps of internal links with anchor text, you’re asking for some trouble.

Casey Markee:
Right, right, very much so.

Peter Mead:
So let’s go on to LeAnn. And LeAnn has quite a long question here. Let’s see if we can—it’s to do with if I worked at an old post to target new keywords with a lower keyword difficulty.

Peter Mead:
Right, do you think I shouldn’t change the post title? I know that I don’t touch the URL, right? So she does it worked it out that you don’t want to change your URLs on your post, but if I shouldn’t change the post title, then would it be okay to put the new title as an H1 heading on the top of the post? Question mark.

Peter Mead:
I.e., there’s some examples here about changing titles without changing URLs, and then the question really is, you know, how do you get that headline to punch through once you’ve changed it? I guess, and do they need an H1 or not?

Peter Mead:
I wonder whether LeAnn is thinking too much about that to try to target those lower keyword difficulties. I mean, Casey, what’s your thought on this one? Is it getting too far down the rabbit hole trying to go after lower keywords by changing up the H1?

Casey Markee:
Well, the H1 is automatically generated by your page post title, so I want to make sure that you’re not adding extra H1s just for that reason because there’s no real benefit to doing that. I mean, again, you could have six H1s on the page; you’ll still rank just fine because it’s literally such a small value issue. It’s just not semantically correct.

Casey Markee:
That being said, in your example here, I believe you—for those of you can’t see the question like we can—let’s use an example. She has peanut butter and Nutella brownies, and she wants to change it to peanut butter brownie recipe as an example. And of course, the URL is peanut butter Nutella brownies.

Casey Markee:
So here’s the thing to be aware of: the URL is such a deprecated ranking factor, I would never even recommend you change it, period. Even if it was the wrong keyword, we wouldn’t change it, and Google even says the same thing. He says Google would even rather have you gutted the entire post and keep the URL than put up a whole new post and redirect the old post to the new one because you’re just resetting everything.

Casey Markee:
So don’t worry about that. If you wanted to target peanut butter brownie recipe and your URL says peanut butter Nutella brownies, wouldn’t lose any sleep over that. Immediately, your goal is just to go ahead and reoptimize the post around that focus keyword, and you can easily do that.

Casey Markee:
And then one of the things that you didn’t mention at all was how important internal linking is. You’re gonna need to go back into your site and find examples where you’ve been linking to this post, and we need to update those links when possible to reflect these new focus keywords because those internal signals to that post are going to be very, very important.

Casey Markee:
It’s extremely overlooked by the average person when they’re updating and republishing content. So you can do this, okay? Just you have to ask yourself, is it really going to be worth your time, especially if there’s not gonna be a huge increase in those keywords?

Casey Markee:
Because one of the things that no one can see on the call but Peter and I is that you got dates in your URL, lady, and we don’t like dates in our URLs. We don’t do that. So if I was you, I would go ahead and focus on updating your content, updating your URLs to a future-proofed section where there’s no dates. Let’s get that done first, and then you can look it up, do even republishing content that you see anywhere else going forward.

Casey Markee:
But I don’t like dates in URLs. Makes it very hard to update and republish content.

Peter Mead:
Mmm.

Peter Mead:
Okay, we’ve got another one here from the end. We might just take that as read because we’ve already covered off a fair bit of information about keyword and tools like SEMrush and that sort of thing. So obviously, we’re getting close to the one-hour mark, but in traditional Casey Markee style, we’re gonna go over time, and we’re going to forge ahead and keep going through these questions. We’ve got a few more yet, sir.

Casey Markee:
Yeah.

Peter Mead:
So here’s one from Sarah from Wonder Cooks, and Sarah says, what is best practice when updating an old post with new keywords that no longer match the original URL?

Casey Markee:
Actually, that’s a very situation we cover that. So it’s okay. You can change everything, just don’t change the URL if you can help. It’s totally fine. Google John Mueller even came out less than a year ago and says that we would prefer that you get the entire page and put up new content as opposed to putting up a new page that you don’t need. So do that.

Peter Mead:
Let’s try to revitalize the content level possible.

Casey Markee:
Yeah.

Peter Mead:
Well, let’s go to some of the other questions that have been getting asked.

Casey Markee:
Why aye.

Peter Mead:
So that’s really all the questions that were pre-submitted. I do have another question that was submitted to me personally from Ian, not from Minton. Minton mentioned he’s running, he’s actually running the webinar over at the Indian Search Marketing Webinar, and all fantastic.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, so we were chatting. He asked me a lot of questions about, you know, what are the most important topics that people should think about with WordPress SEO, and so he’s going to start following up on some of these topics on his webinar as well.

Peter Mead:
And I guess, you know, off the top of your head, Casey, what would you say would be, you know, top of the list of topics for thinking about WordPress SEO?

Casey Markee:
Yeah, no problem. I’m gonna go ahead and paste over and know to us real quick because we want to make sure that we get Williams question too since I know that we missed one.

Casey Markee:
So when I’m thinking top of mine, when we’re talking top of mine with regards to WordPress, I think I mentioned it before is that it’s very important to have a quality stack in place. That’s tier one hosting, that’s a full bulk image optimization. I like ShortPixel. I think it works great.

Casey Markee:
Making sure that you have a premium caching plugin in place. I like WP Rocket because the built-in lazy loading works great on most issues, and if you have issues on, you know, it’s always fixable.

Casey Markee:
And then of course, making sure that we are having quality security plugins like Security and Fault or Wordfence, and that we have a database optimization plugin, and just making sure that WordPress is set up with best practices. Have a site health plugin installed. You know, I know that they wrap that into the recent—was it 5.5 update? So that helps you a little bit.

Casey Markee:
But when we talk about long-term success forward, there’s little things that go a long way, just making sure that you’re using a quality theme that has some—that’s maintained. One of the things that I always look for is can I optimize category pages? Huge. Completely untapped ability for you to generate an extra several thousand clicks, if not a month, a week for some of these larger sites.

Casey Markee:
Category pages are extremely underutilized, so they’re basically landing pages. They’re the windows into the house that is your WordPress block tag pages. They’re basically Norris the door salesman or Hare Krishna’s. We don’t necessarily want to have them in the house that much. We want to maybe noindex those. Totally okay.

Casey Markee:
But category pages are very important because they allow us to showcase our best content. And so one of the things I’m looking for on a theme: can I optimize that category page? Because a lot of themes do not have that built-in functionality. I might be able to go in and specify a custom page title, description, but do I have the ability to go in and add above-the-fold content?

Casey Markee:
Do I have the ability to add cross-link navigation? Do I have the ability to add any custom schema to that with item list or category list options? Very, very important. So that’s what I tend to like about Genesis. Jimmy, I believe, has that option. There’s a couple other themes that allow you to optimize category pages. Big fan of that.

Casey Markee:
So if you’re on WordPress theme, if you’re thinking about a redesign, you better be talking to your developer and your designer and say, hey, I need to make sure that I can optimize my category pages because you would not believe how many times I’ve been brought in and told them to scrap what they’re doing because they’re leaving all of this potential traffic on the table.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, right. I mean, the other way is then you’re talking about editing your theme and getting a developer to give you the functionality to start being able to add that content on your category pages, which now you’re starting to talk about extra cost, and oh, I know, I know. Think so. Try to get it in there early so they can minimize the cost as much as possible.

Casey Markee:
Yeah, absolutely. So there was some more questions here in the chat, and you mentioned here one you didn’t want to miss, which is the question from William Rock, is that right there?

Peter Mead:
Yeah, I mean, this one here. So yeah, if you had a choice for dedicated hosting, who would you suggest? They’re saying here about the SLA and support for high CPU type website with the growth only to 100k plus and growing each month. So looking for a long term.

Peter Mead:
Had a big outage a month ago and transferred their site to WP Engine growth package. So I mean, I’m guessing William Rock’s had a good experience since going to WP Engine, but of course, he is a little bit gun shy now, I guess, because once you have had a big outage and you do know the pain of your site being offline with thousands of visitors not being able to see your content, what’s the answer? What do you think, Casey?

Casey Markee:
So I’m a big fan of a Linode setup, fine. Cloudways, the Linode setup on Cloudways, I’m gonna go ahead and paste it over right now. And I’ll tell you here, not only is it cheaper than you’re gonna find most everywhere else, but it doesn’t go down. I mean, I can’t tell the last time I’ve had an issue with a Linode server.

Casey Markee:
Now, I occasionally also recommend Vultr, which is also one of the really cool options that they have over there along with AWS, but Vultr has gone down a couple of times. But I tell you, I don’t usually ever run into any issues with Linode. That is honestly what I recommend for a lot of bloggers.

Casey Markee:
Now, here’s the issue: Cloudways has pretty piss-poor customer service. They’re based in Cyprus. The prices are low, and they lease out all of their space, but the competitive rates are there, and, you know, as long as you have some experience with regards to managing your own migrations and things like that, you’re gonna be relatively good. Hence, the sites don’t go down a lot.

Casey Markee:
So I mean, I have my sites hosted through Cloudways. It’s not a problem. Very pleased with it. So if you have the ability to, you know, again, if you know how to do a site migration, you can make sure that you follow them and make sure that they’re not adding it as an unnecessary chain redirect or any of that other nonsense. Linode server over a Cloudways is a pretty good investment, especially during your site.

Casey Markee:
We’ve got sites over there running 500,000 to 8 million sessions a month. They’re doing fine. So there’s some homework for people to do. I mean, this sort of thing, yeah, it’s not a straightforward thing moving your site. I mean, again, you’re going to want to engage a professional to help you move all that sort of thing.

Peter Mead:
So let’s go. There’s several questions. I think we’ll have these last few questions and then we’ll call it quits. But there’s one here from Nevada Arjuri, and I guess the question here is to do with Mars. How do you deal with keywords with a high priority on Mars but also have a difficulty score with medium organic CTR?

Peter Mead:
I mean, I—I would say, what do you think?

Casey Markee:
Okay, it sounds a bit—might be thinking too much here about high priority scores and, you know, where is this? Did you paste over this question? Is it in the chat here, in case?

Peter Mead:
Yeah.

Casey Markee:
No, no, Mead in the—if you look at that on our internal group chat here.

Peter Mead:
Okay, I see.

Casey Markee:
No, yeah, yes. And how do you do it? Keywords with high priority and Mars. Mars is just a tool, that’s it. As I tell everyone all the time, maybe what they determine is high priority is a necessary high priority. No, it just also be aware that just like with SEMrush, you guys realize that SEMrush has great tools as they aren’t—they don’t have access to the Google API, cost too much.

Casey Markee:
So if you want to see things like keyword difficulty or if you want to see things like accurate costs on competition and how many searches a month, download something like Keywords Everywhere, which is a free add-on to your browser that actually has access to the Google API. Most of these big tool sets, including SEMrush, do not have access. They’re all guess estimates.

Casey Markee:
So in your case here, your question is how do you deal with keywords with high priority but also have high difficulty score at the median level organic CTR? Do we take them? Not unless you’re a strong SEO, and unless I have more information, there’s no other way for me to answer that.

Casey Markee:
I have to determine whether or not you’re competitive against the sites that are above you. So one of the things that you might want to do is download and install the SEOquake toolbar, then also download and install the Moz toolbar, overlay those results on the surface, and see exactly has it both, and then determine that. Use that data to determine whether or not you can even be competitive based upon your question.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, yeah. So, and can I add to what you’re saying, at least, which is, which is, Sisley, you know, what I’m a big fan of these, do your research. You know, you’re not just looking at one tool.

Peter Mead:
Exactly what you said, Casey, but I’m saying, you know, add these things up. You know, spend the time. You know, do your own research, put them into your spreadsheets, and there’s plenty of ways of doing keyword research, but don’t just look at one tool, one result.

Peter Mead:
What insights inside online says, what do you think were the major issues in the June 3 algorithm updates?

Casey Markee:
Well, some of the things that I saw myself were an increased Google’s awareness of PBN backlinks or spammy low-quality links. Also, what I saw is just general quality of content and trust factors again—where the trust factors of that content. But also, what I saw myself was massive, was to do with mobile speed, mobile page speed. So there are three things that I noticed.

Peter Mead:
Okay, Casey, what did you—did you notice any trends in particular that seemed to be happening from that update? And we’re talking about the most recent update from last week or the update from June the 3rd? This one is June 3, the question is here.

Casey Markee:
Okay, so with regards to that update, you know, this is a core update, so it’s basically building upon and refining some of the signals that happened during the March update from earlier this year. When Google runs these core updates, there are literally dozens if not hundreds of different things being addressed. It’s never just one thing. So whenever you hear about, “Oh my God, this one had link factors,” or “this one had page speed factors,” or “this one was rating E-E-A-T or the lack of expertise,” they’re just guesses. For us to say otherwise would be incorrect.

What we’re trying to say is that when Google pushes these core updates, they’re addressing a plethora of factors. That’s why a site audit is so important. We want to go ahead and take a fine-tooth comb to your site. We want to run a couple crawlers against it. Have you had—is there topical dilution issues? Are there any noticeable chain reactions internally? Do you have a lot of issues with the server? Do we have pages that are just hanging up? Do we have page speed issues? Is there content cannibalization going on? It’s never just one thing.

So when I say what you should focus on, I would focus on getting a site audit. That’s what I would say, because without us determining what is happening with your site, we can’t offer confirmed advice. We’ve had bloggers who are suffering from this; I don’t give them any generic advice. I will look at their site, and because I’m a site auditor, I will immediately see 100 things wrong with it, because that’s just what I do 24/7, every day, 365 days a year, is look at sites and find issues. And so hopefully I pull out enough of the issues that we can correct to increase the route quality of the site in the eyes of Google, because anything we can do to make the site more algorithmically pleasing, the faster it’s going to recover when there’s a next update.

And this is important for everyone on the call, folks. If you’ve been affected by a core update, you can get improvement between the core updates by making your site better, but you won’t have any real improvement until Google reruns the algorithm. That’s the whole point of these core updates. So eventually they’ll run something else.

Peter Mead:
Okay, so you can see—and this is what I think people need to, in general, you can say generally what are the things, but because every website needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis, and as you were saying, where your audit—now, of course, audit is the fancy word for analysis, and really what you’re doing is getting a professional who understands this stuff and looks at it day in and day out to actually go and do the analysis to figure out what is happening, which has to happen on an individual basis. You can’t tar any of the websites with the same brush.

Peter Mead:
Deborah Cruz says, “Which lazy load plugin would you recommend?” I would say my answer to that is that it’s personal preference again. There’s lots of them. Some themes have lazy load built into the themes—the good ones. Do you have a favorite, Casey, that you like?

Casey Markee:
So, the lazy loading that’s built into WP Rocket—WP Rocket is exceptional. And you can even get it separately, I believe, that you can actually go in and install the WP Rocket lazy loading separately, so that’s fine. Another one that you might want to consider if you have issues with WP Rocket lazy loading—and some blocks do—is called A3 Lazy Load. So A3 Lazy Load is also an exceptional plugin, and that works pretty well also.

Lucy’s on the call—Lucy, your check is in the mail. Thank you very much for—I’m glad that the audit experience was so fine. For those of you on the call, again, just want to warn you now: 2019 is completely full, so I’m bookkeeping audits for 2020 now, so don’t bombard me with requests for audits because I’ll have to send you off to some competent person like Peter or someone else. So just an FYI.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, so, look, let’s have our last question. I know there’s plenty more, but we have to stop somewhere, right?

Casey Markee:
Absolutely, and it’s probably a good one. I mean, your time is valuable, and we really appreciate your time, Casey, about where—and we’re giving all our viewers and everyone on the call here the best amount of time from us to get the most out of it.

Peter Mead:
So the last question here is probably a good one to end on from Matt McGregor: “If I’m about to start a new blog, what do I focus on first?” Wow, where’s the golden nugget when you’re starting a new blog?

Casey Markee:
So, you know what—quality theme. You know, there’s a lot of them out there. So first of all, I wouldn’t use anything custom. I’m against that. I’m not a big believer in a custom theme because custom themes result in custom headaches down the road. So if you can find a quality theme that is constantly maintained, that loads fast, that is responsive, that has a good reputation—StudioPress, which is now owned by WP Engine, has a lot of exceptional themes on the Genesis framework. You could also look into something like the Bootstrap starter; you can get WordPress plus Bootstrap, those work well together. Something along those lines.

But the less customizations you do on your blog, probably the better long-term, because I can’t tell you how many audits I’ve done where the bloggers have relied on a built-in theme, a built-in recipe functionality, or some kind of built-in schema that’s horribly outdated. We’ve had to rip it all out, or they’ve wanted functionality that they couldn’t add because of how the theme was designed. So just be aware that if you can use an existing framework, that’s always probably the best advice I can give you.

Start and search for our names—search for Casey Markee, search for Peter Mead, search for WordPress SEO tutorials. We’ve published a lot of free resources; those go into suggested plugins. Sign up for a solid support plan. Look for someone like Andrew Wilder with NerdPress, or Matt Greason Bell with iMark Interactive. Look at Arsen Rabinovich with Blog Tech Tutors. All of them provide superior long-term WordPress support, because this is a business. Invest in yourself, work with the best people you can, invest in the best plugins and themes you can—that’ll save you a lot of headaches down the road.

Peter Mead:
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Yes, there are more questions—we can’t stay here all day, but we always have more. Casey has more webinars coming up, and I have more coming up in the future, so stay tuned. But in the meantime, thank you so much for all of your wisdom and your advice, and it’s always—yeah, things are moving, shaking, changing in the world of WordPress and SEO all the time.

So, how do people stay in contact with you to stay up to date? Should they follow your Twitter or your LinkedIn—what’s the best channel?

Casey Markee:
That’s a good question. If you want a lot of irreverent humor, a lot of jokes about how my wife locks me out of the house and tries to feed me ridiculous salads, you can follow me on Facebook. I’ll go ahead and paste that over a little bit as well. Or you can go ahead and follow me on Twitter—that’s @MediaWyse on Twitter, and we’ll go ahead and paste that over as well. But I wish all of you the very best. Again, I know I wish we could talk about WordPress stuff all day—usually we can’t. And if you’re on the call and you are looking for a speaker who can completely underdeliver, that’s me. And if you want to fly me 18 and a half hours to Australia so that I can really see for myself that kangaroos and foxes overrun the city of Melbourne at night, and that it’s like, you know, like Mad Max at night—Glenn, I want to see that. I want to see that blend of the kangaroos and foxes.

Peter Mead:
Exactly. Thank you so much again. Have a great day, and everyone, thanks for joining for the Australian search community.