Webinar: SEO Roast – Audit of E-Commerce Websites with SE Ranking

This webinar features SEO experts Peter Mead and Nick Ranger conducting live audits (“roasts”) of two e-commerce websites, Soulmotive and LG South Africa, with SE Ranking.

Full Transcript of SEO Roast – Audit of E-Commerce Websites

Andrew: Okay, wow! Hi guys, we are live. Welcome, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening depending on where you guys are joining us from. My name is Andrew from SE Ranking. Today we’re joined by Nik Ranger and Peter Mead and we are going to discuss the topic of—well, we’re not going to discuss, we’re going to roast—do an SEO roast of ecommerce websites. So this is a new webinar format that we are trying at SE Ranking, and we’ve invited a couple of SEO experts to break down and analyse client websites in real time. Each reviewed website is looked at in terms of what’s working, what’s not, and at the end of the analysis, the two experts that we have invited will give their recommendations on what website optimization steps need to be performed in order to move the website up in search.

We are joined by two experts, but before I give the word to them and do an introduction, I just want to make sure that everyone can see and hear us. So if you guys do, make sure to find that chat and let us know where you guys are joining us from. We are, well, we’re in Melbourne, Australia, and it’s really, really nice to be out of lockdown here. It’s like the world is shifting and all is changing. Our local home here has definitely been able to shift gears and be able to come back out into the open. So that’s really nice. But I’m sort of like in a city area. How about you, Peter?

Peter Mead: Yeah, yeah, nice. Well, yeah, so it’s really, really great to see Melbourne, the world’s most locked down city, coming out of lockdown and looking forward to actually, as soon as possible, getting our groups back together in a community where SEOs get together and chat and discuss and talk about woeful SEO problems and complain a lot and cry a lot about getting smashed by penalties, things like that. So, lots to look forward to, quite exciting, and looking forward to this webinar. I got a lot of things to kind of roast, you know, most chili, that kind of thing.

Andrew: Absolutely, let’s light up the grill! I see that the chat can see and hear us. We have people from London, Germany, Madrid, Australia, the Netherlands, Ireland—so people from all over have joined us. This is great. So let me say a couple of things about our guest experts today.

We have Nik Ranger from Studio Hawk. She’s the Senior Technical Lead overseeing the tech team, as well as her senior management role championing innovation, business processes, research, and strategy. She is also an international search industry keynote speaker, voted top 202 digital marketers to follow in the world by Search Engine Journal. Nik is also the co-host of SEMrush’s Australia Search Marketing Academy, a brand ambassador for Rank Ranger, host of SEO Collective YouTube, Chair of SEO Collective Australia, and the founder of Women in Search Australia. Glad to have you! I never—I never, uh, well, just, um, just, um, seeing technical, he would have done, um, done really well. Um, I’m about to go as bright, um, bright orange or pink as the post behind me. Um, yeah, thank you for that. Uh, okay, thanks.

Sorry. And we are also joined by Peter Mead. He is a highly experienced, award-winning WordPress SEO consultant. Over the years, Peter has developed a heavy focus on technical SEO and content marketing. Well equipped with a large variety of advanced technological SEO skills, Peter has been involved in the SEO community for many years now and has become known to some as the Godfather. So this is a great privilege and an honor to have you with us. Peter was awarded a Special Recognition Award in 2019 at the annual Search Marketing Awards held at the Sydney Opera House. Peter is well known as a speaker and presenter for several groups, conferences, and events, and is very active in the SEO community.

By the way, we want to let you guys know about the SEO Collective and you are welcome to join it. I’m going to send a link to the chat, so maybe you guys can talk a bit more about this community there.

Peter Mead: Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s go to Australia! Excellent, yeah, thank you, Andrew. Maybe I’ll just jump in quickly and then maybe Nik can follow up. Of course, the SEO Collective—we’ve been involved in the SEO community here in Melbourne for quite a long time, since probably, you know, since the first kind of Penguin updates happened in about 2011, and the group’s grown over the years and we’ve just really developed a great community. There’s a great bunch of people who come together. Things changed during the pandemic and we weren’t able to meet in person, but as I said earlier, very keen to figure out a time for us all to get together and have a chat about SEO and have a beer. But now that we’ve changed the name of it all—so it’s SEO Collective—and maybe I’ll hand over to Nik Ranger to talk a little bit more about that side of it.

Nik Ranger: Yeah, of course. So, of course, SEO Collective is a volunteer initiative, and with myself, with Peter, with Peter Machinkovic, with Paul Glenn, with Dan Wilds, Chris Burgess, Pam Meaga, James Polidaris, and a host of others—Saijo George—you know, really, really amazing SEOs, PPC experts, and social media guns. We have decided that it’s really, really important to be able to provide access to site owners to be able to get really, really good expert advice without a paywall, and that’s really what the ethos is. Because let’s be real, in a lot of countries, and particularly in Australia, the digital marketing agency is a deregulated place, and we really want to make sure that, you know, we have some really, really good people to be able to step up and just be able to provide access to good information. That’s really what it’s there for, and yeah, I’m very proud to be a part of it.

Andrew: Alright, you guys heard it, so make sure to check it out. Alright, so before we move to the main part of the event, let me just say quickly what’s going to happen. So I’m going to flip a coin to decide who’s going to go first, and either Nik or Peter will start SEO roasting a website. As I said before, analyzing what works, what doesn’t work, and giving advice. You guys in the chat can ask questions at any point in time, and we will address them after each presenter covers their part of the presentation and roasts the website that they prepared. So you are welcome to engage with the chat as much as you like, and I will make sure to ask your questions to our experts when it’s appropriate. So just make sure not to wait until the end for the questions—start throwing them in at any moment.

And there will be a replay, and basically, yeah, that’s it. So without further ado, I’m going to flip the coin and I’m going to ask Nik: heads or tails?

Nik Ranger: Long tail keywords.

Andrew: Alright, oh, unfortunately it’s heads. I can show you, it’s heads. So, okay, you want to go first or, or is it, or, you know, you have the decision to make.

Peter Mead: Oh, I have the decision, do I? Okay, my choice. I would love Peter to go first.

Andrew: You want me to go first?

Peter Mead: Why not? Happy to go first, yeah, sure. So, terrific. I was—obviously there was a bunch of submissions and, you know, really happy to kind of present my findings on this website, you know, my own kind of special take on things. I look at things slightly different to other SEOs, and so hoping that I’ll be able to show some things that will be helpful. Now, Andrew, should I share my screen and get started?

Andrew: I think so, I think so, yeah. We’ve talked enough about the intro, let’s get down to business and see how we can roast our website.

Peter Mead: Yeah, please, please stop me if I go on too long. How does that look on the screen?

Andrew: Yeah, it’s nice, active.

Peter Mead: Okay, so, yes, no, okay. Now, so you getting—Andrew, I thought that was Chris Hemsworth because it looks like him, doesn’t it? That’s why it doesn’t come off. No, there’s no mullets allowed here. And this is why they call me Godfather, because of this hat, I think. Yeah, it’s got much more to do with that, more of a—I’m a fairy godfather because I’m so friendly, and this is going to be hard for me to actually roast people. So when I say roasts, it might not sound very aggressive, but I do mean it in the best possible way.

So this business, soulmotive.com, really interesting actually. I found it was a really interesting—because they are a retail, you know, sorry, they’re an ecommerce site, but they’re sort of leveraging a lot of these events and things, and I found that to be a really good mix. Of course, this is a fast live audit. I mean, SEO professionals can spend hours and hours auditing, depending on the scale of the audit, and in many ways, it’s actually the basis of what we do as SEOs all the time—spending that time doing the analysis, which we put all together and put it into audits.

And of course, I did some manual checks, checking things mainly, but I also ran it through the SE Ranking tools and found some very interesting things. So, first of all, usually what I do is some visual checks and starting here with the brand. So I think this is really important. I think it’s possibly overlooked quite a bit too, perhaps from some SEOs, but, you know, go in there, do that brand search. It really makes a difference if Google understands your brand and Google knows what your brand is all about, especially because we’re talking about things like Knowledge Graph and we’re talking about Google really understanding your brand.

So, I mean, it looks good. It’s dominating the SERP, and you can see quite a lot of results on the screen here, all to do with Soul Motive. The roast here is—did that sound aggressive? No. I’ll put it in red, that makes it maybe a little bit aggressive—but the roast here is, Google is swapping out the homepage title, as you have highlighted it here and here. You can see where it’s got—Google’s putting the brand, it’s changing up the title, it’s put the brand here in this column, and then the other descriptions in.

So the reason why this is important—I’ve got a bit more here about it—is, here’s your actual title, and it’s got Soul Motive at the end, but Google—it’s important for a brand search that Google wants to show the brand pages, the brand results. And so if you put your brand at the end of your title, it’s not—I mean, Google wants that up front, so it swaps it around, changes your title, and puts it in the SERPs that way. So I always say to people, for your home page, just your home page, always put your brand term at the beginning of the title. It just helps, it stops Google from changing it up. Take it or leave it, that’s the roast I’ve got for you there.

So then the next thing was to—of course, we always do a site search, you know, have a look, put the site colon on there, have a look and see what we got. And, of course, this was this particular search here, where it shows about 1,890 results. I say about because what Google tells you is in its index here on this result is not always completely accurate, but that was actually a few weeks ago when I did that. But something’s been changing, and pages look to be dropping out of the index, and here you can see it’s about 1,660. It’s just something to be aware of—what has changed? I did notice some things changing, and further on in this audit I’ll point out a few more things where actually we can see some things fluctuating.

But this is something to be aware of—it’s one of the first things any SEO will do, is just have a look to see what’s in the index. Later on, I found some more things as well, which I’ll point out about that. But I think it’s a great marketing strategy here, getting into the events, getting into the community—the Canberra Marathon, the Sandy Point, all these other things. It’s a really great way of getting people coming to the website. Of course, you know, it can also go a little bit too far the opposite way, because—I mean, the great thing here is that all this stuff, these marathons and everything, are very, very closely related to the actual product. So everybody who goes running is going to need running shoes, they’re going to need running shorts, and so it’s a great way of getting people, getting the brand exposed to people who are into these events.

However, if that’s done—if that is the only caveat I’d say here is, if that has been done in a way where it’s bringing traffic for the marathons but not bringing traffic for the brand, for the products, then—you know, so I guess the key is to, when you talk about it from a funnel point of view, the traditional marketing funnel is that you’re getting eyeballs, you’re getting the top of the funnel traffic in, and then you want to make sure you have your mechanisms to move it down the funnel towards the products as well. So I wouldn’t be forgetting about that.

So, next thing I did is to just simply open up the SE Ranking and just go through the process—quite simple, go through, just drop that website URL in there and add that project in, and it came up and suggested a bunch of keywords. So I thought, well, just to keep it quite contained for this very short live example, is just to work on five keywords here. So I’ve selected those five, and that’s good because I can use those for examples throughout the rest of this discussion. And then, of course, I’ve just made it simple again and chosen Australia, Google Australia as the search engine, but it is advised, you know, here you can add more search engines, so if you’re going to go into this and do a big thorough effort, I would definitely say put as many search engines in there—Bing, all of the other locations, every other search engine that’s relevant—because that should not be forgotten about, how things do appear differently in different search engines.

So, what does a search look like for a keyword? And here’s one of the keywords that we chose, and it’s the Brooks running shoes. And here we can see we’re on page two for that keyword, and we can see some other competitors here, The Iconic and a few other things. But I guess, you know, the roast here is that perhaps this result, perhaps this is a little bit bland—it looks a little bit bland in the SERPs, you know, it’s just sort of plain, you know, Brooks running shoes, Soul Motive, and there’s not really anything kind of flavoursome about that. I’d be thinking, Brooks running shoes—figure out how you can put some flavor into that, you know, Brooks running shoes, superior product, something—somebody, the wordsmiths do this work, but somebody, you probably need to change this up a little bit, because I guess, you know, you’re just looking at something that’s a bit bland there.

So let’s look at what happens, what are the competitors doing? Now, the reason why we’re looking at how the competitors are doing it—oh, by the way, some of these competitors I think automatically got added into the SE Ranking tool as well, as part of the project, and I think that’s going to come up in some slides a little bit ahead. So, what—so we can learn from this, right? So we can look at what they are doing, and is it a bit more flavoursome, is there a bit more—how can we look at what they’re doing and see if we can improve as well, just get some learnings from them.

So here we are, still adding the project in, and I’m skipping the Google Analytics and the Google Search Console because I don’t have access to that, but normally it’s very, very recommended to do so. Please make sure you have a Google Search Console account set up and active, and that you understand how it works, and connect it up to your SE Ranking project as well as your Google Analytics. And perhaps avoid GA4—I don’t know, someone might not agree with me, but I’m not having any luck with that one, I’d rather prefer the—anyway, let’s move on.

And SE Ranking is crawling, so I’ve added the projects, it’s crawling away, and just used to go, you know, I’ve set it up so it’s very thorough, it’s crawling, crawling, crawling, and I can see here it’s quite thorough what it’s doing. And so, you know, back while that’s crawling, I’ve gone back to the search engines and looked at a few different products, started Googling around, getting more specific here, right? Because I’m looking at it thinking, okay, I want to buy myself some 2XU products because I’m going to get out and start getting fit and run a marathon, so I know exactly what I want. So I’ve entered that into Google search, but here I can see straight away there’s an issue, because I’ve got two—I’ve got a duplicate result here. This duplicate—so what ends up happening is that—that’s a roast, is a roast—is you’ve got a product variation, and it’s just coming up, but really the only thing that’s different here is the color that I could see. So we see here, that’s just the color. However, there’s enough difference on the pages that Google thinks they’re different products, because you’ve got different photos and you’ve got a different couple of things on the page. So, and besides that, it’s the URL and everything, it’s just not enough separation. So it is a common thing with product variants that this happens, but I would be thinking, you know, it’s worth figuring out a way to de-duplicate that, so that at least in the SERP it looks like—you know, you could say a different color or something, to add something into here to make it really actually a bit more unique.

So, anyway, the crawl stopped and, you know, it did its crawl and found—so here’s the results after the crawl’s happened, and I guess the roast here is, we’re looking at a 50 health, so it’s not—you know, there’s a lot to be done, there’s a lot can be done here. Of course, we always need to be a little bit cautious—what does 50 actually mean? And, you know, it’s not just a number to sort of throw out there, but, you know, at first glance it looks like, you know, there’s a bit of work. I guess the way to put it is, there’s opportunity here to do better, so that we can start beating the competition out a bit more, right? And that’s what it’s all about, SEO—we want to dominate the SERPs, we’ve got to beat the competition, so we have to put the work in and really optimize all the things to be able to beat our competitors, and that’s my take on SEO, how I approach it. And so we just want to go into all these things.

So, one of the things that came up was your Core Web Vitals. Of course, there’s been so much about all this, you know, page experience, the—you know, Google’s brought out all this stuff—speed, user page experience, all these things, and it’s just one of those things. It looks like you’re doing reasonably well, there’s lots of kind of green on the page here, but, you know, by the same token, there is some red and some amber, but look, it’s just one of those things, it’s just an ongoing effort to try to keep your pages lean, to try to keep your website running fast and those URLs, so that people have a good experience when they’re on your site. That really is probably, you know, kind of the end result here, is making sure that it’s an ongoing thing, just to make sure that, you know, get onto your site, check it, test it, run it through different browsers, get other people to look at it, and then, of course, run these tools as well and just keep making it faster. It’s just an ongoing effort.

Here we can see some of the reasons—well, images are too big, 350 images that are too big. So this is really the top issue that’s come up in SE Ranking, and, you know, my bet is if you get in and optimize these images, you’ll see a speed improvement as well, and also, highly likely, you’ll see some improvement in your search results over time as things, you know, the speed improves, people start browsing more pages. It’s just a numbers game in that way.

So here we can see issue—this is in the SE Ranking tool, issues distribution—and here we can see across all of these issues, it’s quite not bad the way this happens here with all these different issues here, but you can see this is really the big issue that Soul Motive has. So I’d say definitely this is something to look at—looking to get into those images and look at, you know, look at something like WebP, next-gen image format, compression, whatever you need to do to just find a way to get those images down.

Of course, we’re getting on to—we need to talk about indexed pages, because URLs, it’s a big deal, right? So, what we’re looking at here is—which I found when I was digging through the SE Ranking results, and I guess the roast here is, yeah, there’s many, there’s quite a lot of pages here that are not indexed. And of course, if you remember, we went back to—we did the site command, and we could see there’s about 1,600 or 1,800 pages, but here we can see there’s stacks, you know, 4,687 pages that just are not indexed. Now, why? Maybe that’s valid, that they shouldn’t be indexed, and we can also see there’s a bunch here that are non-canonical as well, some are blocked by robots, and many are non-canonical. So definitely, it’s—I mean, look, I can’t tell from this short audit, I can’t go into all the details of why are those pages not indexed, because that’s going to take, you know, an SEO to do some analysis to dig into all of that. But it’s definitely worth looking at, for a starters, why are those URLs there and why are they not indexed, and if they’re not indexed, should they be or shouldn’t they be, that kind of thing.

Here we also see some evidence of some possible keyword cannibalization, and this is kind of a bit of a doozy, you know, it can get you. So the roast here is, look at your structure, and are you focusing on the same keyword for multiple pages? And if you are, you know, figure out your page hierarchy and do internal linking, figure out the structure, and really drive those internal links to your definitive page for that keyword.

And here we can see across here the next issue, which I can see here—I just went back and I did another site search and started scrolling around, looking around, and I’m looking at this. So the roast here is, why is there a test page indexed? I’m like, oh, that’s strange, but it actually has all the information here like an About Us page. And so it looks like someone’s created a test page, but it’s exactly the same, so the test and the About, so just complete duplicate, but they’re both indexed. And here we can see not only are they indexed, but it’s actually self-referencing canonical here as well.

So, I mean, of course, the roast here is that the About Us page actually is one of the most important pages on many websites—both, you know, Google’s looking at that stuff, and people are reading it to figure out if they’re going to spend money with you. And so we definitely don’t want this sort of thing duplicated in the search engines.

So here again, I’m looking a bit at competition, and this is—I’ve dropped it in, had a look, and you can see more evidence of—you know, we can see some of these competitors here. Look, I’ve just chosen these competitors, just plucked them out based on what I saw from—you know, I mean, deeper competitor analysis would be required, but just at a top level, you can see actually competing quite well for those five keywords. However, you can still see the evidence there of that fluctuations up and down, which we think is to do with the cannibalization.

But here again, we can see the roast here is, your—some of you call money keywords, but you look at these, you know, here we can see the Canberra Marathon, you’re ranking number one for that, and your competitor is not ranking anywhere for that, which makes sense because they haven’t got it on their site. But for these other keywords, like Nike running shoes and Brooks, that kind of thing—yeah, my advice would be double down on optimizing those pages and really figure out how, you know, which—what is your definitive page for your Brooks running shoes, and then build around that, structure around that, and then branch out, you know, silo around that, but branch out and have your internal linking structure working for you in that way.

That’s all I got.

Andrew: Great, thank you, thank you, Peter. And Nik, do you want to add anything from what you saw?

Nik Ranger: I think there’s a lot of really, really great questions that have come in here, so I might let the questions sort of dictate the direction of it.

Andrew: Okay, so we have one question from Anastasia: “Does Google still replace titles with H1s in the SERPs?”

Peter Mead: Yeah, I’m still seeing evidence of that, 100%.

Nik Ranger: It’s not consistent though, is it, Nik?

Peter Mead: I think it’s some of the time, most of the time, and yeah, I don’t know what the pattern is. Have you figured out what the pattern is?

Nik Ranger: In any instance, like, Google always points to quality as the reason why they ignore some of the things that we’re wanting them to take as the signals for these pages. In a lot of instances, I kind of have to reverse engineer the logic, like, why would they decide, like, oh, we’re going to use H1? Well, it makes sense, that’s the experience that most people like. Yeah, they’ll make a decision, I’ll click on it, but as soon as they click on it, they are scanning through those pages, they’re looking at it to basically make sure that it matches their whole search intent. So, yeah, it makes sense that maybe the H1 now has been taken as the title tag, and, you know, everything else, you know, when you’re going onto that whole page experience, maybe that’s where the logic comes through. So if ever I’ve seen instances of that, that is one of the first things that I want to be able to look at for the keyword that we are wanting to go after, for the target keyword—what is Google presenting to us in the SERP to say, like, you know, does this match the information or the transactional, commercial, navigational kind of intent that matches in the SERP and what you’re wanting to go after? If it doesn’t, then maybe we need to do something else or make the content better.

Peter Mead: Yeah, relevant to the search term, right? And relevant to what the person is searching for as well.

Andrew: Okay, okay, let’s move to the next question from Carlo: “Please talk about facets and filters, and in particular how to save the crawl budget or how to better rank search pages. Thank you.”

Peter Mead: Oh, crawl budget! This is one that you and I have talked a lot about in recent history. So, facets and filters—that, look, Nik and I have worked together on this kind of thing quite a bit, and crawl budget, yeah, absolutely. So look, perhaps—I mean, you could talk, it’s quite a bit in it, but what I would say is, have a think about what are the kinds of things that Google wants to crawl, and everything that’s a hyperlink, Google wants to crawl it. So, everything that’s kind of a clickable element, Google wants to crawl it. So you can do all kinds of things with your filters, you know, to stop Google crawling those filters by making sure it’s not a hyperlink. I mean, do you need your filters to be a hyperlink? No, just make them into a JavaScript link of some kind. What do you got, Nik? What do you think?

Nik Ranger: Well, I’m going to break it down into two parts, because there’s two parts of a story here, right? And one doesn’t necessarily necessitate the other, and vice versa. Facets, filters—honestly, always start from the keyword research perspective. Like, say, for example, you’re looking at, you know, dog supplies, and that might cover a whole silo of different products and things like that. Well, maybe, you know, underneath that, there will be dog food, but then there will be wet food, there will be, you know, as you’re going through, you’re making better and more distinctions. Now, what actually has volume, what actually has weight, what are the kinds of modifiers that your customers are wanting to find? You know, if you can be able to hear the actual—like, what customers want out of that, then that’s where you’re going to be able to really, really be able to hear what is a static page and what might be something that you’ll have as a dynamic filter that maybe a self-referential canonical can point back to. That’s where you start, that’s the logic that you need to apply there. And there’s all kinds of ways that you can sort of, like, split the difference with that, but again, find us on Twitter after this and maybe tweet some specific examples, because this is a big topic and really important.

Yeah, first budget is concerned, Search Console is your friend in the trenches, and when you’re looking at this, you can see what’s valid, you can see what has basically been seen as a warning or anything that they’ve excluded. There might be a whole ton of things in the discovered but not indexed that are really important to you. So again, maybe there is some quality issues there, maybe it’s like an internal linking issue there. Go through all the checks and balances to make sure that there’s nothing that is blocking with your robots.txt and making sure that that’s all in there, and check your sitemap. Your sitemap is what you are able to submit and to express to Google that every single page in here is the one that I want you to consider for competitive index. So go through your methodology. Listen, if you’re ever having trouble, again, Twitter is a great resource.

Andrew: Hey, thanks both of you for this extensive answer. We have a next question from Changul: “What are your suggestions for third-party code issues on Core Web Vitals?”

Peter Mead: Yeah, defer them. Just, yeah, what are they trying to—further execution, get them out of the main thread and, I mean, just grab it. I mean, depending on the complexity of your website, your CMS, how it’s been developed, you know, is it JavaScript rendered, all kinds of other things, you know, but just in general, defer them. If they’re just a plain HTML website, just grab them, put them down the bottom of your page. Yeah, there’s all kinds of ways of going about it. What do you think, Nik?

Nik Ranger: 100%. As soon as I see third-party codes, you know, it kind of reminds me of a question that I got from a junior, I think yesterday—what day is it, I can’t really remember what day, isn’t it? But one of our juniors came to us and was like, “Well, you know, I’m looking at trying to, like, give some suggestions and things like that, and there’s all this third-party code.” And I’m like, have you even looked at what is in there? And, like, a lot of the time, third-party code might be, like, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Facebook pixels, all kinds of other stuff, you know, look at the things that maybe aren’t meaningful. Like, do you need to have Hotjar running all the time? Make some decisions about, you know, what kind of plugins and things like that that you are running on the site that maybe aren’t necessary for you to carry around every time you go on an adventure with your website.

And just as Peter said, like, you know, use—if you’ve got render-blocking resources, you know, with that asynchronous, you know, deferment, like, that’s, you know, some really, really great ways you can be able to do it. You know, CSS sprites and other stuff can work, really improve the perceived load time. Any above-the-fold videos or images and things like that, it’s like, you know, that will really hamper down, like, the largest contentful paint time. You know, look at those kinds of things and just be like, can this be compressed, can this be put into another format? Again, use, like, field data, lab data, PageSpeed Insights, you know, Lighthouse, they are your friends, and a lot of the time they’ll actually even show you every single file in there that could have some, you know, saving of time and exactly how to fix it.

Andrew: Cool, cool. We’re going to take one more question before moving on to the next part of the presentation, and then we’re going to resume with the Q&A session after that. So the question that we’re going to discuss now is: “Would you consider Core Web Vitals step number one? If you have a bad score, no matter how good other areas are, would it be best to improve this score relative to competitors?”

Peter Mead: That’s a good question, because going back a number of years ago, SEOs used to think of speed as number one, the number one thing to do, and it was definitely the first place where we started, because we would speed up a website and see the results, you know, this is—and it was also Google’s big agenda. But of course, things have changed now. I think it needs to be considered now much more in alignment with other factors. I mean, if your site is completely so slow that it’s just not usable, definitely get into it, fix that speed. If it’s just, you know, if you’ve sort of got some performance issues, but it’s still quite usable, then you’re going to need to think about a lot of other things as well, like you want to make sure your URL structure is working, your products are all in place, your titles, your H1s, your content, all of the things that you’re looking into for SEO in context. So, I mean, yeah, so far, is Core Web Vitals step one? Yeah.

Nik Ranger: Oh, did you say step one, Nik? I was—you know, maybe this is because, like, my approach is a little bit more, let’s start with the big picture and then look at the details, and, you know, that’s where the devil lives, apparently. So, starting big picture, start with your goals. What are you wanting to do with this website? Do you want to get leads, you want to, you know, get email signups, are you wanting to build an audience so you can be able to use it later on for ad space? There are a number of different ways you can sort of cut the road to be able to find that goal, and without a goal, you cannot score. So, step one, you know, like, does a website actually facilitate what you’re wanting to do with that? And I think, you know, even when you’re looking at, you know, the website you were looking at before, Peter, one of the things I really, really love that you honed in on was, you know, emulate the customer journey, going through, being able to make key decisions, be able to find more granular things, you know, are there any inhibitors to that? Because at the end of the day, your website is there to provide a service or, you know, a point of information or a point of transaction for somebody, you know, it’s there to justify a means. And if you’re not being able to do that, then, you know, you can have the fastest running site in the world, but if it’s basically useless, then what is the point? So, start maybe from, you know, the user experience first, start with the customer, and then work your way backwards.

Andrew: Great, great, thank you. I hope this answer helps, Andrew. Alright, so let’s move on to the next part of the roast, and she’s going to take apart LG’s website in South Africa, is that right?

Nik Ranger: Correct, correct. 1.5 million pages, let’s go.

Andrew: Yeah, and just to ease the minds of our viewers, we will get to all the other questions as soon as Nik finishes her part of the presentation. Alright, Nik, please take it away.

Nik Ranger: Yeah, awesome, sharing screen, screen one. Okay, so I’m going to go a little bit on the road, off the road with this one, mainly because, like, I can never stick to it and I’m getting some internet issues on my end. So, there is—and you can see it there, you can—there is a title page to this, but it’s not going to show any images, so I do apologize, but, you know, thank you very much SE Ranking for this opportunity, thank you everyone for coming here and seeing what we have to, you know, have in store. I’m just going to get rid of all this ads, other stuff—oh, rewired, great, come on internet, let’s go.

Alright, I’m going to get straight to the bones. Alright, so, like I said at the very start, I’m in Melbourne, Australia, and I’ve never worked on a South African site before. It’s my first run at it, and it was really, really fun. But the thing that I want to kind of know, like, right at the start is, okay, like, when I’m looking at a website in a different country, like, where, like, what is the platform, like, where am I playing it? So, looking at this sort of stuff, Google, yeah, it basically emulates the rest of the world, 94% of users use it, great.

Now, second of all, this website is in English, and English is maybe is not the primary language for the country, so that was really interesting. The primary language, by percentage-wise, is Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, and then English, but from all my understanding of what I can find about it, it’s understood in most urban areas and—but extremely dominant in government and the media, and a lot of the websites that I was looking at, you know, in this particular space, is all in English. But again, like I was saying at the very—like, just before, it’s all about understanding your user, your target audience. Now, is this for the everyday, you know, everyday South African, or is it something that is maybe there is, like, it’s more like an informational piece? And I’ll get into that why a little bit later on.

Alright, so I’m going to go kind of right in, roll up my sleeves and be able to see, okay, what is working for this site right now, and I’ll just kind of, like, toggle to it here. I’ve already got some stuff that I’ve got opened up. So this is the site, this is what it looks like. Let’s go back to our TVs, great. Now, this is a subdirectory, it’s an international website for LG, it’s not working on a subdirectory, and this is really, really awesome. This is really what it looks like, love it. So what is working for them right now is a lot of branded keywords, no surprise, like, when we’re looking in the SERPs and things like that, we’re hoping to find brands, and, yeah, they rank all number one and they’ve got a lot of traffic that will go through from that, that’s great. 

Nik Ranger: But what I’m more interested in is where’s the missed opportunity. Alright, so LG—LG TVs, electronics, home entertainment systems—they’re a pretty big player globally, and I am very familiar with LG products here on the home base. One of the things that I was immediately struck by was that I could not find smart TVs, a page dedicated to smart TVs. And yeah, they rank for it, they’re on—you can see they’re on the second page for it right there. But, you know, that’s a search volume of 2,700 searches per month on average in South Africa. Why are they on the second page? Why is there no page for it? That’s a massive missed opportunity.

Second of all, they’re also on the second page for TVs. They’re on the first page for dishwashers, and that’s really nice, but like, they’re not even ranking for speakers. And one of the things that you could see there right in their main thing right there is like “TV audio and video,” and they don’t have anything about speakers. That’s a problem. That’s a problem right there. So again, like, when I’m looking at them and when I’m looking at their competitors, I can see some discrepancies where there’s a lot of opportunity on the table that they’re missing out on.

So when I’m looking at this stuff, like, let’s use smart TVs as an example. Now, SE Ranking is really, really good—oh no, that’s when I’m going to talk about Core Web Vital stuff, love it. SE Ranking is really good at being able to do this. It will do all of your keywords and will be able to track them all in here with your ranking stuff. Let me just open that up, be able to show you like who’s who in the zoo and what they’re ranking for, which is nice.

Similarly, if you use a VPN or—like, I like to use SERP API. Let’s use smart TV—oh, let’s open that up. I use, I like, you know, serpapi.com. This is also really, really good. You can be able to show you in South Africa, you know, what is populating in the SERPs right now. And when I’m looking at the word “TV,” you know, what are the top performers in here? I’ve got HiFi Corp, I’ve got Takealot, I’ve got Game.co, I’ve got—no, I can’t say that—but that one there, and they’ve got like a little second one in there, Samsung, Makro. So again, really, really big brands, really, really big, you know, product category pages that are ranking for this.

Let’s go back to here. So why is a keyword like “smart TV” not ranking here at all? Right, so this is their main navigation. You can see here there’s like their top-level category page, which is encompassing everything from TV to audio to video, but home entertainment as a whole thing. And then they’ve got their main category page, TVs, and then that sort of gets put down by OLED and mini LED TVs, etc., etc. No pages exist about smart TVs.

Now, a really, really good one to use—and I use this literally every day—is site:yourwebsite plus a keyword that you want to see. Now, what this will do is basically look at how search engines perceive your site, the keyword that you really want to be able to go after. Now, look at this. We can see that it’s pulling out—and you’ll see it with both of the text right here—it will be pulling out from the HTML on the page, words, keywords, smart TV from this, you know, smart, smart digital TV, you know, LED TVs, smart TV, you know, they exist there on the product pages. But where’s the category page? Where’s your—where are you going after the 2,700 searches per month?

Now, when you think about the importance of pages around this, a lot of people think product pages—let’s have a lot of product pages around, you know, being able to get as much on the ground for your smart TVs or web TVs or keyword or any other variation of whatever product that you want to go after. Category pages honestly bring in the most amount of traffic and have the best performance because that’s where people are trying to decide. When they finally get to the product area, they’re not thinking, “Oh, I’m going to think about, like, you know, comparing this,” or, “Maybe this is what it is.” They’ve decided that they really, really want a 75-inch NanoCell smart TV, and that’s exactly what they’re going to look for. And that’s why long tail keywords is what they’re going to try and hero in the SERPs, not the keyword “smart TV.” That’s what your category page is there to do—to get them before they’ve made that decision, to get them while they’re making that consideration.

And this is what I’m talking about. So even if I’m even just being like, “Okay, well, I want to find a good TV. Who’s, you know, who’s who in the zoo that, you know, even, like, sell good TVs?” I mean, just again, thinking super broad right here, and this is actually what it is—it’s a broad kind of keyword here. But you’ll see all this thing, and then that’s where you go through. So again, right off the bat, there is no category page just signaling out, “Hey, this is LG South Africa’s collection of smart TVs.”

Also, another thing—yeah, LG’s TV and home entertainment systems—yeah, I’m not wild by that title tag. It’s also kind of trying to stuff in as much as possible. Let’s go to the actual TV page here when it finally loads. Awesome, living the digital age, time is money. Oh yeah, I’m going to ask them for their schema as soon as well. Here we go, TVs, LG TVs, awards, 4K smart TVs—yeah, where, LG South Africa. Okay, so this is really what they’re going to go after.

Now, again, from the SERPs, you know, people running, like, TVs, TV and audio products, HiFi, that sort of stuff, shop for TVs, TVs, television, satellites. Okay, it’s not the worst one in the world, but that’s the wrong tab. That’s even the wrong tab there too. There we go, that’s what we’re looking at. So even, okay, so they’ve got duplicate H1s on here—again, another little bit of a roast thing. If we were just talking about before that Google is picking out H1 to be able to display in place of your title tags, well now they’re trying to figure out which one to pull out. Like, is it about TVs or is it about, like, your voice to the CEO’s office? I mean, what is even—what is that? Even your voice to the CEO’s office? Goodness gracious, take that to, um, take that to customer, uh, customer control or something like that to get rid of that. Definitely get rid of that, that’s silly. So yeah, TVs, there we go, get rid of—did we get H1s?

Now, we talked a little bit—I just said a little bit before about schema. Now, Schema Builder is a great app. There’s also the right structure data testing tool, and there’s a ton of errors all over this page. Gross. Look, so again, this is a category page. It’s a category page, why is there product schema on it? It’s the best—like, if you’re going to look after your category pages, look after it with item list schema. Item lists will basically be able to list out, like, all the products that will be showing up on this page and be able to give you a little bit of information about it, and that’s a really, really great way of being able to do it. But product schema is there for an individual product page to give you information around the price, information around the reviews, information around availability, any particular offerings on that, if there’s any, like, sales on or, like, reduced cut prices—all things that search engines are going to be able to pull out from the JSON-LD or microdata or whatever and be able to place that in the SERP so that you can take up a little bit more real estate in the search.

So again, there’s a ton of problems right here. Now, another thing that’s really interesting about this site—and anyone who’s looked at this site is probably glaring at their screens right now—it’s like, you’re not even talking about the biggest thing. You’re talking about this like it’s an e-commerce site. It’s not, it’s not. And I would really love to have a chat with, you know, someone from LG and ask them a really important question, which is, why can you not sell from the parent company? Like, I get that a lot of, a lot of, you know, companies like LG and Samsung and Sony and all kinds of other people have distributors that do that heavy lifting for them, but you’re a company, you make things, why not sell things to the consumer? Like, what’s the problem here? Like, obviously you reached out, you wanted to get some SEO help, why can’t you sell the products? I’ve just got that question.

But here, look at this stuff right now. LG QNets—yeah, I can barely read that. Again, text over images, I’m not a big fan of, but you know, here it’s basically a comparison website, you know, where to buy it and all that other stuff. Yeah, you can be able to add to compare, you can be able to do all that sort of stuff, but, um, let’s see if it’s going to do it—where to buy. I’m just going to click on that, and there’s waiting for doubleclick.net—again, third-party tool. Yeah, so now I’m doing that and we can be able to find it online and then look—now here’s all those competitors that were showing up in the search before: takealot.com, does that, a push, the one that I can’t, I want one that I can’t say, the digital experience—you know, this is where you can actually go and actually buy them.

I’m sure that, you know, behind, you know, closed doors, like, this works really, really well for you guys, but again, if you’re trying to take up the SERPs and actually, like, you have this, now what? Like, why even have these pages to sort of, like, you know, find all the products in the first place if you don’t have a blog? Yeah, guys, a comparison website comparing products doesn’t have a blog. I would love to be able to find one. If anyone can find this for me, that’d be awesome, because again, next part of my roast—and I just realized I’m going completely off script, I had this whole thing prepared, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t let this one slide—like, why do you not have a blog? This is a prime opportunity if you’re a comparison website to be able to go into all the little nitty-gritties, all the little crevices, and say, like, okay, like, we think that we’ve got the best quality, you know, keyword TVs, like, let’s choose the category page that they actually made here. People—yeah, they have, like, the best keyword TVs. Well, what is the difference between some of these specs that they’re highlighting? What’s the difference between a keyword TV and a NanoCell TV? Yeah, there might be a massive price difference, but if I’m going to be paying, like, anywhere upwards of over a thousand dollars plus, you know, these kinds of, like, luxury purchases, I want to make for certain that I know exactly what I’m paying for.

And when I do try and do something like, okay, like, let’s add this to the compare thing, let’s do that, you know, we’ll just do this, cool, now let’s go and actually, like, click the compare button. What does that actually produce? A range of comparison things. Now, this is actually not too bad, I don’t mind this. But again, like, even some of the questions that were coming out of the step right here were talking all about faster navigation and filters and all kinds of other stuff. Well, look, we’ve got a self-referencing canonical—every single comparison type is going back to this one URL, compare. Well, I’ve got a bit of a saying that’s starting to take a little bit of traction among all my colleagues, but that’s about as useful as a partner jar. What on earth is that meant to do? If you were to have a static page that was meaningful and doing these kinds of comparisons, something that you knew that had some real weight and some real volume behind, and you’re taking all this time to be able to put this all up there, well, maybe, maybe that’s going to utilize all that traffic and be able to rank for some longer tail keywords that you’re going to go after and make these specific types of comparisons. Missed opportunity. Come on, guys, come on, guys, how much money did you spend to be able to make a site like this? This is actually pretty awesome. Like, if I really, really loved and I was fully sold on the LG brand, this is actually pretty awesome and I’d really like to be able to use this. But again, I’ve got to go, I’ve got to know that your site has this, I’ve got to go to your brand because I really care about it, I’ve got to go to the specific type of TV that I’m looking at, and only then might I, like, choose maybe a couple of other ones that probably, like, with the price modifier—oh wait, that’s, of course, there’s no price modifier in this, which is, again, with any large ticket purchase, is the whole reason why they’re comparing things in the first place. What is this going to cost versus what this is going to cost? But I guess after you’ve made the decision on just the specs, if you really, really cared about this self—let’s look at the difference here, come on, front firing withstands, down firing, I don’t know what on earth that means, I really don’t, because they’re not explaining it to me, and I’m more than happy to sound like a dummy. OLED surround, suppose there’s no OLED surrounds, what does that mean? I don’t know. Is there any internal links to anything meaningful? No. But again, great idea, great concept, but you failed to kind of come out of the gate, you haven’t even run the race yet.

So again, I really, really love some of the stuff here, but there are some really big things that—not taking any opportunity on the table here. So that’s a really, really big thing there. Alright, I should probably get back to back on track. Alright, like I said, this is a 1.5 million page website, but when we just look at these ones, you know, there’s around about, like, what, 9,000 pages that have been indexed—oh, my bad, there we go, that’s just about smart TVs, there’s 8,400 pages, here we go, there’s 10,400 pages that Google has case units in its index for all of these URLs, that’s great. So again, like, there is so much opportunity here.

Oh yeah, so at the very start of this, I talked about lg.com/za as being a subdirectory. Yeah, so it is a subdirectory, but how would search engines know that? There’s no hreflang on this, there’s no head-to-reflex on a subdirectory, international subdirectory site. Now, if anyone doesn’t know what that means, it’s basically a script that tells search engines what the country, what the language, whatever you want to, like, really, really say, what this subdirectory, this whole thing, everything after /za is actually for, and you can be able to go through, be able to, like, you know, write this out. You can be able to apply that across all the different subdirectories, and I think, like, when I looked at the sitemap, you know, there’s a whole ton of these, like, look at all these, look at all these sitemaps, this is actually done really well, and I really like this, like, this is really nice to see, like, little index files, and they can be able to go through and be able to just, you know, submit them to their own prefix Search Console. I love this, this is good, but, but again, like, how would you be able to differentiate between any of these if there’s no hreflang to be able to say what country is there for? Why spend all this money to develop this really massive international global website if there’s nothing to say any of these things? I think that is probably one of the biggest fails on this website.

And again, you know, the application of actually doing that is a little bit tricky, but again, it is wholly worth it because when we’re looking at this stuff—let me go back to this and did I open this up with the keywords? Is that keywords? Yeah, yeah, thank you—you know, we can be able to see this. I really feel like, you know, I’ve specifically looked at South Africa, but if I were to, you know, open this up to, like, maybe, like, a worldwide kind of thing, we would probably see, like, a lot of bleed-through with different countries, a lot of different, like, misunderstandings. I would love to get a look at their Search Console and actually see, you know, like, hopefully see that they’re in the international section on their prefix, that they’ve actually said this for South Africa so it’ll actually go into the right, you know, version of Google to be able to look at the keywords. Again, if they haven’t done that, Google’s probably, like, sitting there scratching its head, being like, “Okay, I’ve got 1.5 million URLs, guys, what am I going to do with all these pages? Who is this all for?” I can see little discrepancies in the HTML that, you know, “Oh, well, this is for South Africa,” and like, I’ve seen a million of guys like you, I know that you’re trying to do this, and you know what, I’ll be kind to you, and I’ll try and, like, organize this as best you can because you haven’t done the greatest job of actually applying this into the code. But again, Google’s not perfect, we should never assume it’s perfect. In fact, I honestly, for the most part, you know, try and, like, you know, put everything on a silver platter and just kind of, just like, “Here you are, my liege, this is what it’s here for, this is what it’s there for, so come on, help a guy out.”

Alrighty, yep, there’s a bunch of other stuff—yep, HTTPS to HTTP, I mean that, yeah, you know, security is such a massive, important thing, and yeah, it’s a comparison site, but I’m sure, like, you know, maybe not, not the whole site’s, you know, comparison, I don’t know, I haven’t looked at, like, you know, anything other than the 10,000 pages that we’re looking at here today. There’s temporary redirects, you know, there’s broken canonicals, there’s incorrect URL formats on this, there’s, again, missing hreflang stuff, there’s invalid structured data as we can see there with, like, product schema and offer things, you know, kind of all, like, displaying errors, you know, there’s a lot of stuff, there’s a lot of stuff on here that’s kind of not great. And, you know, this is a short roast, but I’m just going to put this all up here and just be like, “Guys, you got some stuff to figure out.” More than happy to take it offline to be able to help you guys out with that.

Alright, on here as well, I’m just going to, like, go through internal linking on pages, like, I wrote some stuff about it, but, like, what does that actually mean? Internal linking is one of the most important things you can do for your website. Why? Because it shows what pages are the most important from a crawler’s perspective. Like, how do crawlers go through and be able to find anything? They’re following links on your site to new and other pages, and, like, they’ve got a crawl budget, they’re only going to follow, you know, the pathways so long along the maze that they can’t see, but guided by the sitemap, you know, for so long. So what we can really do to be able to help them to find our most important pages is add some good internal links.

Now, again, I’m going to go back to TVs because I know this one really, really well because I work with one of the biggest—well, I guess the distributor in here in Australia. But again, like, so TVs, now we’ve got this, and, you know, Peter knows this more than most, like, when you’re looking at this, you’ve got a certain amount of PageRank, and when you’ve got an internal link that’s here, you’re wanting to pass that on to something that is relevant, that is within its particular silo, if you know, or silo hub, or however you want to say it, if you want to go down the hub kind of analogy, this is what that means. Your main hub is TVs, and everything that kind of, like, you know, spokes out from it—your own, your keywords, your—oh god, help me out here, your NanoCell TV, your Ultra Large QNED—my god, I’m discovering new words and things today, I’m clearly not, I don’t own the most fancy thing at my house. But these are all the things that make sense to be able to link to.

Now, when we’re looking at internal links, you know, that’s where it’s going through and be able to find this. Now, again, we had a really great, great question with faster navigation and filters, you know, this is what they think is the most important thing. They think that screen size is really important, and you know what, it is important, you know, like, maybe, maybe you’re renovating your house or you’re looking at your living room and just being like, “Okay, I want the biggest thing for that wall,” and I know that I’ve got, you know, about just under 70 inches to play with, so let’s look at all the 16 variations in there, and I might just, you know, just look at that sort of stuff. That’s not the worst thing in the world, but again, I mean, you know, taking price off the table, you know, what are the other modifiers that are really super important to these people? Let’s have a look at the SERPs. What is Google saying for South Africa, mind you? And I don’t know why, but this usually shows all of the HTML for all these pages, that’s bringing all the elements out, which is a really, really great way to be able to first enter, like, some of the things that are being pushed out and anything that you’re missing, it’s kind of fun to watch that space.

My internet’s kind of crapping out, so I do apologize, but usually that’s full of stuff. But again, I guess I hate to do this, but, like, this is very interesting, but, like, we’re running short on time. I really hate to do this, I would love to continue listening to this, like, maybe you could kind of—

Andrew: I knew that I’d be the one to be called out to shut it down, I did, I did. Look, guys, you know, main takeaways are, you know, look at, like, why, why, what’s the whole purpose of this site, you know, what is, what are you going after? If you’ve got a comparison website, well, content is going to be your key, that’s where you can be able to get a lot of traffic, you can use that ad space, you can put ads on there, whatever, you can do whatever you want with your website after that. But if you’ve got a comparison website, you’re wanting to get as many eyeballs in there as possible, so get a blog in there, be able to do that. Again, if you’ve got filter things like that and you’ve got some really meaningful things that you’re going to be able to do with—yeah, cool, self-referencing canonicals are good, but maybe there are some things that do need that static page, maybe there are some things that are, like, frequently searched or something in between your main categories that you can be able to link to and get really good information and be able to internally link out to, like, you know, what are some of these specs, what do they mean for the layman’s like me who are probably just doing their discovery searches? There is so much opportunity in there. Start with the why, work out back to you guys, great.

And if you don’t mind, I would love to share your presentation with our viewers, because we didn’t get through all of it, and that way they can look at it at their own pace. Alright, so let us look at the comments that we have and the questions.

Andrew: So let us look at the comments that we have and the questions. So let’s start from Ruben: is it better to index only important pages instead of the total number of pages? I say this because of link juice.

Peter Mead: You know, PageRank sculpting and that kind of thing’s been around for a long time, and particularly, you know, looking at your power pages on your website. Of course, this bleeds off into all kinds of other things—internal linking and all of the things like that. I mean, in general, there’s many ways to answer this, but yeah, you certainly don’t want to have useless pages indexed. But then again, why have you got useless pages on your website? That begs the question. If you’ve got pages on your website that are good pages and you want people to read them, well then why wouldn’t you want those to be indexed in Google? So there’s kind of a logic thing there. But I mean, yes, absolutely, so far as link juice and link sculpting, you know, internally sculpting this kind of thing, definitely think about that. But that’s a lot—there’s a lot more to do with structure and a lot more to do with your categorization and your architecture of your site, and that’s how you can pass that link juice around and spread that out through your important pages.

Nik Ranger: Perfectly said. I couldn’t add to it, other than just consider this: every single page that you want to index is a representation of your brand, your website, what you’re wanting to be able to show to customers and say, “This is a page that I’ve made that I’m really, really proud of.” Do you want that to be seen by your customers? If not, repurpose it.

Peter Mead: Yeah, I mean, it costs you good weight, that’s right. You know, parameters on the query string and sort of weird sort of, you know, filter page URLs, things like that—you just don’t want those indexed, right? But I mean, you just keep them out because they’re just not—I mean, search result, you know, s= and all these kinds of things, you just don’t want those kinds of things indexed. But that’s not—yeah, I mean, they’re not the kind of pages that you’re working on building in, 100%, for those results anyway. Yeah, but definitely do—definitely look at keywords, definitely look at traffic, and canonicalization and 301 redirects are your friends, and then if it’s basically worthless, you can make sure that is then maybe blocking with robots.txt or noindex, you know, is for you.

Andrew: Alright, thank you. I hope that helped, Ruben, and let’s move on to the next question we have from Boon How Julio Lim: are you able to rank keywords that are not entirely in the title or H1?

Peter Mead: Yeah, you’d see this, you see this a lot. Yeah, of course. I mean, obviously, yeah, I mean, how do I unpack this one a bit? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what’s the topic? Because really what you’re getting into is a lot more around semantic SEO, getting into what is the topic of this page, what is this all about. And if you’ve got a page that’s getting much more into, you know, what are the things versus the strings, what are the things on this page, what are we talking about, what’s the ontology, we’re getting into all this stuff instead of really just, “Oh, I’d better put some keywords on this page to try and rank for them.” We’re actually starting to talk about what does this page describe and how does it fit together, and does it describe the thing that I’m talking about well enough. So you can rank for keywords that aren’t even on the page anywhere at all if you’ve described the thing well enough. So yeah, that is 100% correct.

Nik Ranger: Actually, just reminds me to maybe just do, like, a humble, you know, lovely plug to Dixon Jones, who just released his new book, Entity SEO. I picked up a copy and really, really excited to read that one because it just came out. But you’re 100% right, Peter. You know, when you’re looking at the pool of keywords that any site ranks for, there’s going to be more keywords that it, like, just universally might rank for than any third-party tool or that Search Console is sort of indicating, than it has pages. And if every page has, like, its title or H1 equivalent, well then obviously there’s going to be a lot more context that gets built into a search engine’s understanding of what you represent.

Now again, for exactly what Peter was saying, there is a really important side set that is behind it, but just maybe put really, really simply again: don’t get too focused on specifics and really start from the user again. Then make it really nice and logical, have clear headings, have paragraph text that is short, succinct, and makes sense, and it’s not using too much jargon. Dot point things, make it really nice and explainable, and be able to see that if you’re going to do that, then you can then look at the quality signals that are going to be able to help you with that, and then again, just chipping away because SEO is a long-term game.

Andrew: Okay, thank you, guys. We have the next question from: what’s the best pagination setup—self-referencing canonical tags on every page or canonical to page one, or do you have some other recommendations?

Peter Mead: Well, there’s lots of ways of going about this, and I think it depends on the scenario. Of course, actually, we talked about this quite a bit within the team over at Studio Hawk, and we dived into some different scenarios. Look, I think if the pages—self-referencing canonicals is fine if you’ve got—it depends on what’s on those pages. If those pages have the content, if they’re unique, and if they work, then do it that way. Otherwise, absolutely set up your canonicals to page one, that can work as well. Or you can actually build—you know, Patrick Stocks has got another way, actually, he’s got a great tweet about this, and I really, really love the way he went into this, because, you know, there’s other ways you can do this. Why not build a page and have that as the canonical page, right? So anyway, there’s lots of ways of going about it. What’s your most standard way of going about it, Nik? What would you do?

Nik Ranger: Well, whenever I see self-referencing canonical tags, I always think that they’re necessary for every site, just right off the bat, to be able to have something universal—every single page on the website to have them. So any variation, anything that sort of dynamically changes the URL, it can kind of be neatly just wrapped up in there and be able to point back to it within reason. You know, the one that I was talking about before with, you know, the comparison page, like, you know, dynamically changing it and putting it back to, like, /compare and then any other variation, there might be some things that would warrant to have those static pages. So again, a case-by-case reason, but I’m pretty sure that Google has, like, publicly said that they prefer to have self-referencing canonicals be applied to websites. I think even, like, when—in Yoast, you’re supporting it, so even Yoast, like, every time you even just install that plugin onto WordPress, you know, CMS, which is like 30% of all websites and things like that, they automatically apply self-referencing canonicals. So I think they’re really, really important ones, but again, everything has its “it depends” answer, and because of that, it really goes on case by case, and that’s the next thing. And yeah, I love the Patrick Stocks shout out, yeah, it’s a great explanation—there’s many ways of doing it.

Andrew: Alright, we’re going to take three more questions, guys, and finish this off. Let’s see, the next question that we have comes from Anastasia again, and let me bring it up on the screen. Yeah, because Nik was using a lot of different plugins, and the quick question came up: what are your favorite browser plugins that you use for SEO? So people want to know.

Nik Ranger: Yeah, awesome. Well, I think I just said it. You know, Yoast is great. You know, it does a lot of things like your preferences, provides self-referential canonical tags across all your pages and makes that nice and clean and easy. It’s really easy to have your robots.txt or your htaccess, depending on the settings you’re doing, it will automatically apply your sitemap, and it’s really easy for page to page to be able to change the canonical tag as per your wishes with that. They’re really nice. Schema stuff—I really am liking Smart SEO on Shopify, mostly because even though it’s like $9.99 per month or something like that, you’ll have item list schema for category pages that I mentioned earlier, so that’s really, really nice to make sure that those things are just looked after, and you know, their other ones don’t necessarily have those kinds of these synchros in there, if you’re not someone who likes to program them from scratch.

Peter Mead: I took this a little bit differently. I was talking about Chrome—I looked at this and thought that it was Chrome plugins, Chrome add-ons, because it says browser plugins, which, I mean, I guess you can read that as being website plugins, but I’m looking at that as Chrome add-ons or extensions. I’m going to say—just run through a couple, I’m just looking at my list that I’ve got. I’ve got a tool called Web Developer, which is really nifty just for quickly identifying JavaScript issues and things like that. Also, View Rendered Source, which is another one, really good for just seeing the difference between the rendering. Of course, the Google Tag Assistant, we use that all the time. The Strata Structured Data Testing Tool is another one I’m still using. I’m also using SEO Minion, and what else can I say? Ah, I’ve got a Scraper plugin here, oops, and I’ve got Redirect Path, that’s a great one, and NoFollow Simple, which is an older plugin, an older sort of extension, but you turn it on and it just highlights all the nofollow links on any page, it’s really handy. And there’s a few here—Lighthouse, of course, right? But also the Majestic Backlink Analyzer tool is—yeah, so that—I can keep going, but I might stop there.

Nik Ranger: No, I love that, I agree with all those. The only one that I would say, because I look at JavaScript sites all the time, is React Developer Tools, and another one, Robots Exclusion Checker. Really, really love that one because it will be able to pull out meta robots and extra robots status and canonicals, and if there’s anything weird with the redirects.

Andrew: Great, great. Another question is similar but about the CMS: what CMS do you think is the best for an e-commerce website, especially in terms of speed? This question comes from…

Peter Mead: Well, yeah, okay, so thinking off the top of my head, you’ve got your WordPress, your WooCommerce type of thing, then you’ve got your Magento kind of thing, which is also self-hosted, and then your Shopify, which is not—you can’t control the speed at some point on your Shopify. So, I mean, again, if you’re sort of going for something, if you’ve got a team of developers and you want to head down the track of your Magento kind of thing, you can absolutely ramp up the speed of that site, you can really make it lean, you can work on the server, you control the server, you can do all kinds of things with your distributed—the way that the, you know, about load balancing, all kinds of things you can do with that. But of course, you’re talking, you know, teams of developers, DevOps guys, all kinds of things to get involved in that. But you can do something similar if you have a self-hosted WordPress site with WooCommerce, that kind of thing, and if you’ve got maybe one or two developers, you can still really speed that up and make that into a really nice, fast site. But if you’re just wanting to stay with Shopify, you just optimize your theme, make sure you’ve got lean images, you haven’t got bloated code, and then you rely on Shopify to—because Shopify servers are actually quite fast, right? So once you remove all the bloat, Shopify is a very fast platform as well. So, horses for courses—you know that saying, horses for courses? I think it’s an Australian saying.

Nik Ranger: No, it just means, again, depending on your budget, depending on your resources, all kinds of things. But I hope that’s given some nuance to help people make a decision. Yeah, the way I tackle this one is, like, it’s a cost versus benefit analysis, right? Like, you can have Magento, and I really like Magento, and it’s a really, really great platform, you can do almost anything on it, but that being said, you will need to rely on a team of developers to be able to help you go through a lot of different stages with that. But there’s, like, you know, WordPress also, you know, something that—you know, go open source with WordPress, you can have, like, a fully custom site or you can use some of the themes in there and you can work back with your optimizing elements on that page so they run really, really fast and they sort of do what you want. WordPress is extremely powerful and you can do a lot of really, really great things with it. Similarly, Shopify, like Peter was saying, I like to think of, like, maybe comparing the two most common ones that are compared—your Shopify is kind of like your Mac, right, versus maybe your WordPress that might be more of your PC. There’s a lot of things you can do with it. Is every element on it necessary? No, but you can really, really get quite granular in there. It really depends on who your team is, what your budget is, what actually, like, makes sense for you as a business owner to be able to deploy a good e-commerce website if you are using any of these.

I love CDNs—CDNs like Cloudflare, Craft one, you know, if you’re going AWS or anything like that—but CDNs, which are content delivery networks, they boost the speed of websites by caching content in multiple different locations around the world so you can be served something in between you and the browser to be able to get it a little bit quicker. And honestly, sometimes I’ve seen it cut the speed down, like, so much, you know, so you can apply it from multiple autonomous networks, you know, from users, so it can really, really cut down that page load time.

Andrew: Great, and then just in case our viewers are worried, you will get a replay and you can watch and get all this list, just write it down once you re-watch the whole thing, because it is a lot of useful advice and different tools that you guys can use. Thank you, Peter and Nik, for your answer, and we’re going to take the last question from Shariq: how would you internally link product pages from category/subcategory pages if you have 1,000 plus, 4,000 plus product pages on the site?

Peter Mead: Well, so this is something—again, there’s lots of ways of going about this. First thing I would do is make sure you’ve got your breadcrumbs sorted out, so you’ve got your breadcrumbs so that they’re working and so that they follow your structure of your site and so that they reinforce your internal linking structure. Because if you’ve got 1,000 plus products, you’re not going to go into every product page and do your internal links back to your category pages. However, this is kind of what is needed, and so having a great breadcrumb structure, especially making sure that the schema and everything is working properly for the breadcrumbs based on a good, solid architecture so that your top-level categories and your subcategories and your products all fit within that hierarchy that makes sense—so your breadcrumbs, the first place to start.

Then get into your category pages, your collections pages, and make sure they’re linking out to the most prominent subcategories and also linking to some of your important products as well from those pages. But also, on your big product pages that you do get a lot of traffic for that are important, why not place a contextual internal link within those pages back to your categories or back to your—you know, also go into your blog pages, your buyer guides, your product comparison articles, and linking from there to your category pages too. Presuming that, you know, if we’re using that example of TVs, that really you’ve got one page you want to be the primary page, which should be the page that you’re doing your internal linking to that page, and then, you know, based on—to try and get you to rank for TVs for that page, and then link—then using that as your sort of hub and spoke. I’ll hand over to you, Nik, I could keep talking, but I’ll let you have a go.

Nik Ranger: Yeah, no, I was really loving it, and I’m probably going to just basically tack onto what you’re saying. But, you know, obviously, you’ve got a good idea, you’ve got a thousand products, right, and you’ve got a topical category, and you might have done some keyword research and say, like, okay, the top-level category has X amount of searches, you know, search volume per month, and now I’m breaking down this, and now I’m starting to split it up with my subcategories—this is really great. Tags—tags are what we use to make sure that the products are populating those subcategory pages in a way that is meaningful. I used to have a bit of a rule of thumb, you know, four or more, or sometimes, you know, in some instances it was like three or more products—if there’s three or more products that can be split up from that, then maybe that could be a really, really good subcategory product to go after for that if there is some meaningful granularity that has some search volume around that.

So tags are a really, really great way to be able to start looking at a big list of things and breaking it down into smaller chunks, be able to do that. Now, there are all kinds of things you can do with related products, which is a really, really great way of, again, using those tags to your advantage to say, like, okay, you’ve now clicked onto this product, here are your related ones—they’re all internal links you can point around and be very helpful for the user. Having those ones there will be really, really helpful.

When you’re looking at, you know, how would you internally link product pages from the category/subcategory pages, using Algolia, Searchspring, or any other main sort of new category or product organizer is a really, really great way to go, because they make suggestions for you based on what you’ve got in there with each of those different SKUs, so that can be really, really helpful as well. But again, start from the keyword research, have your main category be able to basically broadly cover everything within that whole hub of cluster of keywords or just that idea of that product type, and then that’s where your subcategories will be able to list underneath that. Use the content in the above fold and maybe even have a couple of internal links embedded into the content of that, linking to that related one within that hub, and that’s a really, really good way of making sure that on all kinds of different fronts that you’ve been able to do that, in addition with your breadcrumb schema.

Andrew: We actually have a follow-up on this in the context of tags: how would you solve all the problems that tags cause by producing a ton of pages?

Nik Ranger: Yeah, well, not every tag page is going to be useful, because I think—and Yoast does this, it will ask you, “Hey, do you want to uniquely index all of your tag pages?” Well, unless you’ve been able to build them out, it’s like, here’s something there and meaningful, it’s just going to be index bloat, or they’re going to start to ignore a lot of these pages. Most of them are dynamic. Do you need them? A lot of the time I’ll go into Yoast and basically just say, “You know what, just turn it off, let’s not even bother with these pages.” If you get a cascade of all these different, like, I think it’s like underscore tag and then forward slash and whatever tag variant there is, chuck all those into whatever tool that you want to look at to see the organic traffic or any keywords that have been populated on that, and see if it’s been in there long enough to get some traction. If it has, maybe you should, again, talk to an SEO or your developer about making these pages really interesting or making them into a new subcategory page if you don’t already have that, and then redirecting it, or just being like, “We’re just going to turn off anything towards indexing those pages.” So again, tag pages can be really useful, but most of the time they’re just there—they’re just going to index bloat the crap out of your site.

Andrew: Alright, great, great. Yeah, we went over time, but I was—sorry, it was totally worth it, it was interesting, and I’m glad we had questions. So we’re going to finish it here. I want to thank everyone for joining us. I want to especially thank Peter and Nik for being our guest experts today and sharing their experience and expertise.

Just because we had a couple of comments in the chat regarding following new events, roast events, so we have—just subscribe to our channel and/or just to our newsletter and we will let you know as soon as we have our next webinar where we’re going to roast an e-commerce website. And I’m just going to throw into the chat a reminder to the SEO Collective community that you guys can check out and join if you want to. Plus, we have an extended free trial of SE Ranking that you can check out and take advantage of the website audit tool.

So thank you again for being here, and I hope everyone enjoyed it, and yeah, stay safe and thank you, thank you so much.

Nik Ranger: Thank you very much for your time.

Peter Mead: SE Ranking, find us on Twitter, and check out SE Ranking. Cool, bye.