034 – Can you do SEO on a Budget?

00:02.21
peteeveritt
Hello and welcome to this episode of the WPSCO show. I am your co-host, Pete, and I’m joined by my co-host, Jeff, all the way from California. How are you doing, Jeff?

00:11.74
Jeff
Well, howdy Pete, I’ve been doing pretty good, how about yourself?

00:16.05
peteeveritt
Sounds like you’re rooting and tooting.

00:18.62
Jeff
I mean, if you got that cool British accent, I guess I should try to find one, right? I don’t know.

00:24.83
peteeveritt
Yeah. Yeah. I suppose you should try. I mean.

00:27.56
Jeff
I tried, we’re done with that one.

00:32.14
peteeveritt
So, yeah, it’s it’s been, it feels like it’s been a while since we last recorded something. So, you know, how’s how’s life?

00:37.75
Jeff
Yeah, you know I don’t think it’s been that long, but like it’s at the time of the year where the seasons are changing.

00:38.41
peteeveritt
How’s things going?

00:43.07
Jeff
And they do like change from you know like hot to like not quite so hot here in California. um But like it’s actually been cold this week, so I feel like it’s a whole and other season. like Even though it’s only been a little while, it feels like it’s been months at the same time.

00:56.22
Jeff
So it’s very weird, very weird.

00:59.17
peteeveritt
So I’m just going to have to do the conversion on this quickly. ah But as I walked up to the cabin to do this recording, it was minus one degree centigrade. So that is ah twenty nine point three degrees Fahrenheit for all you Americans.

01:14.43
peteeveritt
I don’t think you’re that cold.

01:15.17
Jeff
Not quite. We’ve been down about 40. So a little bit above freezing, but that’s about as cold as it ever get here. But yeah, it’s it’s you know, it’s that time of year. It’s like almost like Christmas is coming or something here to slay bells can editor Can you put the sleigh bells and Santa flying across the the video for us, please?

01:33.71
peteeveritt
I don’t have that as a ah as a sound effect, I’m afraid. I’ve got ballpark and I’ve i’ve got a small cheer and that’s all I’ve got. um Yeah.

01:46.12
Jeff
but we We will never play that cheer again.

01:46.78
peteeveritt
There we go.

01:48.32
Jeff
We’re very sorry to everybody who’s listening. That was ah painful in my ears. And I do have to say a little housekeeping here. um I have a browser tab that keeps making a sound that is driving me nuts and I can’t find it.

02:03.19
Jeff
So like, if I’m looking around today on this video, or if I might lose my train of thought, you know what, we’re just we’re just rolling with it. We’re just rolling with it. if If Joe Rogan can have three hour podcasts, people can deal with us you know having a couple of these on our 30, 40 minute podcast, right?

02:19.37
peteeveritt
Absolutely. Absolutely. and And, you know, if only Joe Rogan had the listenership that we do, I mean, that would be in and the the download numbers.

02:23.67
Jeff
ah but That might be a good thing, but I’m gonna go ahead and end that thought there.

02:26.21
peteeveritt
He’d be he’d be absolutely flying.

02:32.91
peteeveritt
So anyway, if we have any listeners left today, we’re talking about can you do ah SEO on a shoestring on a bit of a budget? And the short answer is absolutely.

02:46.05
Jeff
Sure.

02:46.48
peteeveritt
And if you.

02:47.00
Jeff
Thanks for listening, everybody.

02:47.96
peteeveritt
Yeah. ah And that that wraps it up, though. See you next week. ah But yeah, no, we we we wanted to take a bit of time. We’re fully aware that a number of agencies that come to us, they.

03:01.38
peteeveritt
yeah Investing in SEO, is particularly when you’re getting outsourced help in, isn’t always the cheapest thing to do. And there are absolutely some easy, but fundamental sort of grassroots level things that anybody can do. You don’t need, you don’t need like a master’s in SEO or you don’t need to, you know, it’s just about getting the basics right. And, um you know, whether you want to bake those into a care plan or a website build or you know, just a low level offering, ah a lower price offering, I should say, for for websites that come your way, then that’s absolutely fine.

03:32.80
peteeveritt
And that’s kind of what we’re going to bounce around today.

03:34.70
Jeff
Yeah, it’s all relative. There’s a balance to it. um I think at a bare minimum, whether you want to consider it low budget or whatever, you know as assuming that you’re you or your agency, your team is building a website, signing up a a client for a care plan. There’s a lot of things, and we’ve talked about them over and over again on this show, but there’s a lot of things that you can bake into that process that don’t really cost you anything other than a little bit of time and a little bit of thinking. And in my opinion, they need to be done when you when you build a website like I almost feel like it’s irresponsible and I don’t want to insult anybody who might be doing this, but I almost feel like it’s irresponsible for you to just build a website and throw it out there and not do any of this stuff.

04:13.67
Jeff
And then when they go, hey, why is anybody finding me or, you know, I just got an email from some so SEO guy who said my SEO is trash. And then you go, well, that’s because you didn’t pay for SEO. I mean, that’s that’s just bad.

04:24.00
Jeff
That’s just I would never say that it feels so gross if I said that.

04:25.27
peteeveritt
yeah

04:28.59
peteeveritt
Yeah, I mean, yeah you know you you don’t go and buy a new car only to find out that it it doesn’t have an engine in it, or it’s it’s not you know its it’s only got a very underpowered engine for the model you thought it was, or whatever it is. it’s you know You wouldn’t stand for that. or youve you know yeah Buying cars and building houses seem to be that the two comparisons that we get with SEO quite a lot on website building.

04:49.93
peteeveritt
And you know if if you’re having extension built and then all of a sudden you know the builder said, yeah, it doesn’t matter if you know the window doesn’t fit that whole properly, you wouldn’t be too happy with it.

04:58.68
Jeff
yeah

05:00.11
peteeveritt
And it’s exactly the same with with ah building a website.

05:02.86
Jeff
Yeah.

05:04.09
peteeveritt
I’m not going to get on my soapbox, because which I have done in previous episodes, but let’ let’s just say you know you are the web professional in this deal. It’s up to you to make sure that the website that you’re producing is better than and more fit for purpose than the website it’s replacing. Otherwise, what’s the point in doing the project?

05:22.08
Jeff
Yeah, or and if it’s a new one, help them get started. Sign your website up for Search Console.

05:26.06
peteeveritt
Yeah, absolutely.

05:32.58
peteeveritt
So there’s there’s two parts to this, I think, that we we’re going to cover in this episode. The first part is a little bit more of kind of the practical stuff, I guess, that you can you can do. ah You know, I’m sure we’ll mention some mention some tools and we’ll mention some some tips and some sort of areas that you should cover. And then the second part is um we we do have some advice that we give to people who want to start SEO but can’t afford it. So we’ll run through that as kind of like phase two, if you like.

06:02.41
peteeveritt
So let’s let’s dive in. I mean, ah for for me, the first things that are obvious are things like page structure, on-page SEO, ah making sure the tools are there, and site speed. I don’t know.

06:13.04
peteeveritt
Have you got anything else? to but We’ll go into those in a little more detail. But you got any more on those on that list?

06:16.95
Jeff
I think that’s a great list to start with.

06:20.98
peteeveritt
Okay. Now I’ve just got to remember it. So ah let’s do them in reverse order. So site speed. ah Right. So this is, well, this this is your more your bag than mine. So so you go for it.

06:29.61
Jeff
Oh, I thought we weren’t gonna let me go off on a site speed rant today, but that’s okay. no Yeah.

06:35.04
peteeveritt
I know what, I circumnavigated the the whole, ah you know, duty bound thing, so so I’ve thrown the ball back to your court.

06:40.70
Jeff
This is an interesting. And this is not an interesting one. It’s kind of a boring one. And I can’t believe it’s one that we still have to talk about so often. But my goodness, we do. um Look, sight speed is not the end all be all to SEO success. In fact, I’d argue it’s probably the lowest, you know, on that lit on that list. But it is that tiebreaker one when it comes to your competitors. So if you’ve got a website is living in 10 seconds and, you know, the the the nearest competitor that for all other purposes are equal.

07:11.57
Jeff
There’s this loading in two seconds. It’s going to win. right That’s going to win when it’s when it’s coming to that neck and neck race on Google. The worst part about those things really is the user ability to or the user’s ability to load the website. like you know If they’re loading in 20 seconds, but it is piecing some scores, it’s you’re going to have people just leaving the website. So it’s, who are you?

07:34.41
Jeff
really optimizing for you optimizing for humans or you optimizing for search engines. So I’ve seen some people where they go to town to optimize a website for the search engines and all they have done is make it unusable or or they’ve used so many tools and and and page builders and things that now all the you know effects are baking onto each other and it’s just crashing down and it’s just such a nightmare. So I just kind of keep recommending people to build with the basics, stop getting too fancy. um Not everything everything doesn’t need to be flashing and having animations and and all that stuff. ah ah You can, if there’s purpose to it, go for it and you’re prepared to deal with optimizing those things, then do it. But

08:13.28
Jeff
um Most of the time I see people building things with modern tools and just throwing them out there and they’re loading fine. It’s when they’re using big page builders or they’re embedding all kinds of third party tools and and all kinds of scripts and stuff. And it just becomes an absolute nightmare. and ah I don’t want to lose too much sleep over it. You know what I mean? If you’re getting like a C or a B, you’re probably fine. But if it’s an F and you’re doing all these things, you need to look at your stack and figure out what you’re doing to make these websites perform so poorly.

08:41.47
peteeveritt
Yeah, i I got to say this is one of the one of the really ah hard sort of downsides with the WordPress ecosystem and particularly the plugin repository. I mean, in theory, you could build the site by adding one plugin for every function that you needed and just racking up hundreds of plugins in in your install.

09:02.54
peteeveritt
i’ the the the honest The code, actually written code, is always going to load quicker than a plugin that works on a call, that works on another database to look up, that works on whatever. um So essentially here, you’ve you’ve got to be really careful that you’re not kind of over-developing websites beyond ah what’s what’s kind of reasonable.

09:29.07
peteeveritt
you know i mean i guess most I don’t really want to give a number as to how many plugins we we kind of average have on a website, but you know

09:36.34
Jeff
It’s very arbitrary depending on so many things, so yeah.

09:39.65
peteeveritt
Yeah, absolutely. But then on the same note, if you’re adding a plugin in just to get a slider to work or just to do a particular animation or just to put a filter on something else, then yeah that that’s kind of a friend of mine has this expression about the tail wagging the dog.

09:55.75
peteeveritt
you know, yeah it’s the wrong way around. So just don’t, yeah depending on what what it is you’re doing, um try to make sure you’re not stacking up needless plugins just for tiny little animations or tiny little bits of functionality. And if you don’t know how to code those things yourself, then that’s fine. Maybe the project doesn’t need it. I mean, that’s a perfectly viable option. a lot of I find that a lot of developers, a lot of agencies,

10:21.66
peteeveritt
put stuff on websites that clients love in the end, but actually they only love it because they saw it in the first place.

10:26.12
Jeff
Yeah.

10:27.52
peteeveritt
Um, you know, if you’d never shown it to them, they would have loved it just as much. Uh, so that’s, uh, you know, you’ve got to take some of that into, into account. Um, and also knowing how to use those tools properly.

10:38.84
peteeveritt
We we have mentioned in the past about the difference between like theme layouts and page layouts and page builders. And all of that stuff can have a dramatic effect on SEO from a speed perspective, because you know most page builders bake this stuff into the database.

10:54.60
peteeveritt
And whilst servers can read websites, read databases quite quickly, them the more over bloated that becomes, because the more stuff you’re stuffing in there, um the slower it’s going to be.

11:05.78
peteeveritt
It’s just, it’s just logic. You know, that’s, that’s kind of the way it works. So yeah, the being conservative is always going to help you in in this scenario.

11:17.52
peteeveritt
I guess that’s really what I’m trying to say.

11:17.90
Jeff
Yeah, it’s the you know, you mentioned the plugins and

11:22.94
Jeff
We’ve got sites with 60, 70 plugins, which sounds insane, but that’s because a lot of them are modular, right? They’re little tiny plugins that, like you mentioned, installing one to add a new feature. Well, that’s how some of these plugins or some of these systems work. Like, ah you know, your theme might have, instead of giving you all of the options built into the theme itself, you add a little plugin. Well, that’s adding a little bit of code, but it also saved a ton of code from the theme. So it balances out, you know what I mean? Like, so the number of plugins isn’t always necessarily Um, just, just based on the numbers and always necessarily bad. It’s more of what they are and what they’re trying to do.

11:58.96
peteeveritt
Yeah, and and you’re right. I mean, you know, if if you have a plugin that’s from your theme developer or from your page builder developer, that’s likely going to work quite well with the with the stack that you’ve got going.

12:09.15
Jeff
Yeah.

12:11.89
peteeveritt
If, however, you just go and pick any random plugin out there and because that’s the other thing you can end up with code bases from 30 or 40 different developers all within your website if you’ve just got random plugins that are completely unrelated to each other. So you’ve just got to be, as I say, less is more. that’s That’s all we’re saying. You know, a bit of conservatism, a little bit of a rationale about, is this really necessary? Or hey, could I could i just learn this?

12:37.33
peteeveritt
um you know i Not everybody’s got the time to do that, but ultimately, you know, building a website, basing it all on plugins, that’s not really building a website.

12:48.74
peteeveritt
It’s certainly not one that somebody’s paying for, um in my opinion.

12:50.21
Jeff
Yeah.

12:52.46
Jeff
and And Pete, you know how I feel about like WordPress themes and the block.

12:52.84
peteeveritt
Anyway, I’ll get shot down for that, but there we are.

12:57.55
Jeff
editor like I love the block editor. Not everybody does. I love it. um But here’s the thing. Since we have switched over to just doing everything with the block editor and we do use like a couple add on plugins here and there and stuff like that.

13:09.40
Jeff
It’s not just the basic no frills blocks that come to WordPress these days. But since we’ve been doing that, I mean, I’m telling you, we barely have to optimize the site anymore. I launched a site for ah a local company, ah some friends of mine last ah two weeks ago or something like that.

13:26.69
peteeveritt
Yeah, you sent me this on a Saturday or a Sunday.

13:27.43
Jeff
and the say Saturday morning, I literally built this thing in like an hour before going over there, um you know, is there you go.

13:28.69
peteeveritt
You sent me a screenshot.

13:34.46
Jeff
And I literally slapped this thing together. And it’s 99% on GT metrics and a all the page speed scores. It has a huge Google map embedded in a footer. It has ah an image slider, which you know, these are things that I keep recommending, don’t put that on there.

13:48.81
Jeff
If you’re concerned about speed, the code for all these is just fantastic. And that’s just that I’m seeing that with block themes, not all of them, obviously, there’s too many to say that’s a blatant like, you know, ah but whatever that that’s a blanket statement. But I’m seeing that more often that these things are just working with WordPress and not trying to reinvent the wheel.

14:08.40
Jeff
And as much as I’ve loved page page builders over the years, including, you know, once a Beaver builder that a little more on the on the lightweight side, they still just add a lot more that you don’t need. um And if you can build without them, then do it.

14:20.23
Jeff
You know, it’s you’ll you’ll be happier. I can assure you that.

14:22.03
peteeveritt
ah there’s been There’s been so many memes about the amount of code that are in the number of divs and whatever that are injected by page builders.

14:27.90
Jeff
Yeah, yeah.

14:30.15
peteeveritt
It’s it’s hilarious. um But anyway, right.

14:31.73
Jeff
And that’s well, ah sorry, on that note, that’s one thing I hear from from some SEO people we work with.

14:32.74
peteeveritt
So that’s

14:36.01
Jeff
They go, hey, can we can we ah you know lower the number of like DOM windows or whatever? I’m like, no. it’s ah that’s That’s how the theme builder or the page builder built it. That’s what you guys wanted to use.

14:46.64
Jeff
This is the code we get. ah

14:48.49
peteeveritt
Yep.

14:49.41
Jeff
is it perfect? No, but it works to do its purpose. So you’ve got to balance the pros and the cons. And ah honestly, we’ve probably talked longer about this that is even worse, you know, worrying about so in most cases, but it’s just, ah you know, it’s just the things you got to think about and make decisions for.

15:08.50
peteeveritt
So that’s, that’s the first thing. The other thing that I think is important to mention on site speed is making sure that you have. things like caching and image optimization set up properly. i am And again, you know you only have to do this ah once when you when you launch a site or if you inherit a site, get it um do it as one pass. We generally tend to use WP Rocket if there isn’t another caching plugin in there. I do a lot of hosting on Cloudways, they have their Breeze plugin, which also works really well. um And I know I’m more of a fan of this than you, but I do enjoy ah putting perf matters on a site as well. I think that really does

15:43.32
peteeveritt
you know, help boost things quite, quite substantially too.

15:45.69
Jeff
Yeah. Well, I wouldn’t say it’s not, not a fan of it.

15:46.88
peteeveritt
i am

15:48.01
Jeff
It’s that some people tend to go a little too crazy with that. And it’s like, let’s look at WP rocket, which has, you know, if you look through all of the panels, there’s maybe like 15 options that you can click. Everybody breaks every website by clicking all those various options.

15:58.99
peteeveritt
Yeah.

16:00.88
Jeff
And then perf matters, let you do that like times a hundred.

16:02.49
peteeveritt
yeah

16:03.64
Jeff
So I, I, I’m just uncomfortable leaving something in there where people go crazy. And we just, you know, as a white label provider, we have so many different hands in there that. It chose me nuts. And as soon as you exclude that JavaScript file, you find out the contact form is not loading or something like that. So it’s, they’re great. Perf Managers is awesome. I love it. Highly recommend it. But it’s one of those things, like if you’re going to put it in there, know what you’re doing and make sure other people aren’t going to be doing anything with that.

16:30.86
peteeveritt
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a fair, fair warning in there. Uh, and, uh, you know, there’s, there’s a whole load of options for image compression as well. I personally use you. I think that’s how it’s called. E w w w dot IO is the address. Uh, and they have a CDN network that goes with, with that as well. Um, again, all for site speed, all just to speed stuff up.

16:52.86
peteeveritt
Full transparency, don’t use any of that in development or in staging. That only gets applied post live or to a live website. And then of course we do the appropriate checks thereafter.

17:03.36
peteeveritt
So that that’s the site speed side of things, I think, sorted out. um What was the next one? Site structure.

17:12.15
Jeff
I was going to say, I hope you remember because I forgot.

17:16.73
peteeveritt
So site structure. ah I mean, basically, look, you need to make sure that Firstly, you need to make sure that your permalinks are set up correctly. For most most cases, that means that you normally go and knock it into post name, or you go and put category forward slash post name. And if you have WooCommerce or something in there, you’re you’re removing the appropriate yeah URLs, um ah category yeah URLs and stuff. There’s options. If you install WooCommerce, the options are appear. i So yeah, that that’s the first thing.

17:49.45
peteeveritt
But then more than that is actually thinking about how the content of the website is kind of nested together. And this is one of the big, big things I come across when I’m running SEO audits for people, which is essentially they have what’s basically like a flat website structure. So they have the homepage at the top.

18:09.37
peteeveritt
And then every other page is the direct descendant, the direct child of the homepage. So everything is domain dot.com forward slash, and then the slug of that page.

18:20.98
peteeveritt
There’s no, no nesting of pages into little sort of family trees within to to build up pockets of authority.

18:26.72
Jeff
And then then that’s fine for like the basics, right?

18:27.71
peteeveritt
And that’s yeah,

18:28.72
Jeff
For like your about page or contact. your That’s for the basics, but what you’re probably doing a little bit more than those pages on most site builds.

18:34.50
peteeveritt
for the basics and for your main

18:38.33
peteeveritt
Well, that’s it. And for your main like sort of um main pillar pages as well. So let’s let’s bring back Bob the Plumber. he hasn’t been He hasn’t been mentioned for a week or two, I don’t think. i’m But, you know, he’s not going to have a massive website, but you know what Bob the Plumber might do? um He might do boiler boiler services, you know, boiler installations, boiler servicing, boiler repairs. He also might do, you know, like bathroom fitting and kitchen fitting and first fits and second fix plumbing. He also might do, um you know, like leakfinage or leak finding. And he also might do drainage. So let’s say that that he’s got three or four key key things he does in in those areas. So within

19:23.89
peteeveritt
Boiler installation, there could be, as I say, boiler servicing, boiler repairs, emergency boiler call outs and whatever. So in order to give Bob the plumber a bit of authority about boilers.

19:35.45
peteeveritt
You should have a Boiler Services page as like the pillar page at the top. Now that pillar page will have it’ll have a little overview about all of the sub pages that are going to be in it, but it won’t go into any kind of detailed depth about the yeah any specific. The purpose of a pillar page is to show the breadth of your knowledge about a particular subject.

20:00.08
peteeveritt
And then you’ll have sub pages to that pillar page called cluster pages. And the purpose of those cluster pages is to take one of those things from the pillar page and then go a mile deep into it. Literally like you’re teaching your granny to suck eggs about whatever that particular topic is.

20:17.02
peteeveritt
And that will then sit as a child page to boilers. So you’d have domain.com forward slash boilers forward slash boiler repairs, for example. And that’s the page that you’re going in all about boiler repairs. And likewise, you’re going to do that for each of the subsets of boilers. So that would instantly take your, like I say, like a flat structure and create it into a 3D structure, basically. You would then have various layers of content grouped together by pillar pages at the top and then cluster pages underneath. Now, if you’re in a more complicated website, we’re not talking Bob the Plumber now, we’re talking about, you know, some big national organization, they may have sub pillars. So a pillar may have pillars within it, and then the cluster pages come down. So you end end up adding multiple layers of this, but just to keep it simple for a podcast and and what we can do with it.

21:09.53
peteeveritt
Audio only, hopefully I’m sort of illustrating how that works. And likewise, that’ll be the same cluster for um for boilers and boiler repairs as it would be for drainage, as it would be for bathroom installations and kitsland kton and kitchen installations or building services. or You know, you might have commercial plumbing and that could be a whole different thing as well. So that’s, ah you can structure the site in that way. Even if it’s a website that you’re inheriting, you can you can look at that and you can you can see where the gaps are going to be. You can sort of figure it out. Okay. So if we move this here and move that there and do, where do the holes appear and what’s the new content that needs to be written?

21:49.38
peteeveritt
And even if that content that’s on that page isn’t like fully SEO optimized, even if the client has written it, it’s better to have the structure in place so that the ah URLs are indexed so that when a client gets to a point that maybe they can afford some SEO, the SEO has the framework in place to start start building from.

22:07.05
peteeveritt
i um So yeah, that would be what I’d mean by site structure.

22:09.90
Jeff
Yeah, and potentially, you know, you mentioned inheriting a site potentially reorganizing that stuff and in a, I don’t want to say the the proper, but a better manner without even revamping the content can be very powerful. I mean, set up a couple redirects, make sure you don’t break any links, but starting to put that in the right pillars or categories or however you want to frame it. yeah That can be a nice quick win on a on a newly inherited, ah you know, previously built website.

22:37.13
peteeveritt
Now, the one thing to mention about pillar and cluster pages is that the pillar page, well, like I’ve said, there should be like an overview of each part of the cluster that’s underneath. And likewise, there should be a link that goes back from from the pillar page down to the cluster page so that you’re forming the tree there. And likewise, each cluster page should end up pointing back to the pillar page. So the pillar page is going to have a whole ton of links coming, internal links coming back to it.

23:00.99
peteeveritt
by the time you’re done with this process. But that’s that’s kind of the point. So you’re nesting them and you’re creating internal links and that makes the the ah SEO juice flow, basically.

23:10.76
Jeff
the SEO juice to flow and flow.

23:11.91
peteeveritt
Have I just really used the words SEO juice and flow? Dear me. Right.

23:19.67
Jeff
Trigger warnings.

23:19.79
peteeveritt
Well, there’s the complaints coming in. in if we haven’t If we haven’t offended anybody yet, we certainly have now. ah Right.

23:25.92
Jeff
Uh huh.

23:26.51
peteeveritt
So then we’ve got site structure. What was the what was the other thing?

23:29.73
Jeff
Yep, there was.

23:29.96
peteeveritt
There was another one.

23:33.01
peteeveritt
I think the the the next one was page structure, which is, I mean, page structure is about generally getting your, ah making sure that things are in the right order on the page. We kind of touched on this a little bit with the page speed thing about the number of divs and and whatever, but making sure things like the appropriate scheme is in place, making sure that your heading tags are being used appropriately.

23:55.47
peteeveritt
and making sure there’s only one H1 on the page with the main keyword in it, and making sure that each section starts with an H2, and then subsections of that start with H3s, and so on and so forth. um Please, please don’t use…

24:08.34
peteeveritt
You know you know how there’s this um sort of design style now, where you have like your main heading, and then just above it you have like a typeset of a heading, like a subhead that’s above,

24:14.99
Jeff
yeah huh

24:17.79
peteeveritt
Don’t use an H tag for the subheading. So if your main heading tag is boiler services and that’s the H1, don’t have like an H4 or an H5 above it just to get the styling right.

24:33.57
peteeveritt
H tags aren’t there for styling purposes. They’re there to indicate page structure.

24:37.27
Jeff
Yeah.

24:40.03
peteeveritt
So set up a span, set up a div, set up a paragraph, set up whatever you want and give it a class name and style it the way you want to.

24:42.25
Jeff
Mhm.

24:47.84
peteeveritt
But don’t use, I’m now on my hobby horse. Don’t use heading tags for those subheadings.

24:52.86
Jeff
but So the real, the real thing or real important thing here is that before we release this episode, we better go check our website and and i mean tell you why. and i And I’ll tell you why.

25:03.72
peteeveritt
FYI, Jeff built it.

25:06.19
Jeff
And I’m not going to lie. They might, there might be one or two there. Hopefully not by the time this pops cast releases. But I see this so often with Pete, I don’t, want I don’t want to say just page builders, but with the prebuilt layouts that tend to come with them.

25:20.39
Jeff
And these are in, you know, block editor. thing like cadence has a bunch of pre-built templates still there seem to be a little bit better from what I’ve noticed but oh my goodness this is one of the most common things I see whenever you go oh let me install this starter site or this page template or whatever and then you take it and you make it you know fill in your client stuff and it’s awesome they look great they usually are are really nice but yes so often they use h1 or h tags all over the place just based on like the size of the text they’re wanting and that’s not the point of them right?

25:49.83
Jeff
you You should look at h tags as stylist, you know, take all the style off the page and then read it and see how it makes sense.

25:50.73
peteeveritt
That’s not the point of them at all.

25:57.95
Jeff
And if you’ve got, you know, a big fat heading at the top that says, you know, the best, and I’m not even gonna think of an example right now because it’s gonna be stupid, but you’ll quickly see what we’re talking about. ah Go through all of those, change those too, like you like Pete said, and a P tag, a span, it doesn’t really matter as long as it’s not an H tag all over the place.

26:20.39
peteeveritt
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Now, ah Kyle and I, Kyle Van Dusen and I actually did a workshop on the proper ah proper structure of pages and how how to use headings and stuff ah in the admin bar. This was about a year ago. ah Kyle set up some pages where he used the headings incorrectly. And he also found a Chrome plugin, free Chrome plugin that you can put in, which will just expose the the the heading structure so you can see how the page structure looks.

26:45.59
peteeveritt
Go and check that out on some some sites and particularly sites of your clients and so stuff you’ve built and see if they have any, you know, just see what it looks like. It’s dead easy to tell if it’s wrong, right?

26:56.02
Jeff
Yeah.

26:57.25
peteeveritt
That’s that’s the thing. um Because ultimately what you’re doing with that is you’re passing the incorrect structure of the page to Google. And you know what? Google isn’t going to do you any favors. If it doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t get indexed.

27:08.90
peteeveritt
It’s that simple.

27:09.25
Jeff
ah You mentioned a Chrome extension.

27:10.51
peteeveritt
So just keep it right.

27:11.09
Jeff
I don’t know which one that one is, but I use one called, um let me check, ah Meta SEO Inspector. It’s a Chrome extension. It’s free. Nothing too fancy. And any page you’re looking at, you just click it and it gives you way more info than you probably want, but you can just scroll and it’ll show you the h the heading tag breakdown.

27:28.43
Jeff
um And so like even right now, i we’re we’re using Zencaster, this you know program to record the stuff in browser.

27:29.72
peteeveritt
Mm hmm.

27:35.91
Jeff
Obviously, this is never going to get indexed from a ah by a search engine. But I can see right here in a real big red warning you know line that there’s no H1 tag on this podcast recorded website that we’re using.

27:46.50
Jeff
And that’s OK for this.

27:46.61
peteeveritt
Yeah.

27:47.62
Jeff
But that’s a good example of how easy it is to just click one little button. You scroll down and you go, oh, I forgot that H1 tag. Or, oh, we’ve got seven H1 tags in the footer?

27:57.91
Jeff
like Why would we ever do that? you know I’ve seen like all of the the page links in the bottom, and they has H1 tags or H1 whatever. And it’s just like, What a mess, what a mess.

28:08.73
peteeveritt
Yep, absolutely. So just to give another another shout out, i I’m a Firefox user normally. um I have to lower myself to using Chrome to record these podcasts, obviously. I have an extension in Firefox called Headings Map, which does exactly the same thing and works all the time. So yeah, that’s ah that ah make sure your page structure is correct, as well as your site structure, as well as your page speed. And look, if any of if anything we we’ve spoken about, ah you’re unsure about, or you you want to get some more information on ah SEO Hive, we offer tech audits on their own. They’re $47 and we’ll send you a PDF and a link to all of this stuff so you can see how site’s performing. ah Or we do Scout reports at 97, which

28:58.51
peteeveritt
have that reporting and some other stuff as well about site health. um So feel free, you know, you you don’t need to spend a lot of money to get this information, either getting it for free or using a provider like us to actually generate a report for you.

29:12.21
peteeveritt
They’re not expensive.

29:12.30
Jeff
Yeah, and you get a lot of info with that. I love the the tech audits that we do for people because it’s, it enables us to now be in a position to say, okay, cool. Here’s our, you know, our, our, our breakdown. Here’s what we need to get done. But also here’s what you can do if you’re on a low budget, you know what I mean? Or if you’ve got the expertise, like now you have, now you’ve got the blueprint know what needs to be cleaned up.

29:35.16
Jeff
take it around with it. We’re totally happy if you do that. right like it’s It’s okay. um And then speaking of like the extension, you know if we ever have a pre-sales call and we didn’t get info about it beforehand, we didn’t get time to run an audit or you know they didn’t order one or something like that, and I’m going to call with somebody, I click that extension and they go, well, okay, right off the bat, I can tell you there’s 17 different structure issues with your page.

29:57.92
Jeff
And that’s not even doing a full audit.

29:59.07
peteeveritt
Yeah.

29:59.24
Jeff
There’s going to be more. There’s gonna you know what i mean there’s going to be a different plan to or we’re gonna have to put a plan in place. That’s not so simple, but it’s very easy to kind of just look at that real quick, whether it’s a new site or a potential lead or something like that, and just be able to see real quick, well, you definitely have some problems here. And let’s do an audit and look at the act, you know, the the real data here, though, because this is just showing us that there’s issues.

30:23.39
peteeveritt
Yeah, absolutely. So just bringing this kind of part of the show to a close, I think that the only other thing I want to mention, unless you’ve got anything else, is just to say, you know, we’ve mentioned a few things here to do with speed plugins and to do with, you know, um caching and CDNs and that kind of thing. Really the only other plugin I install from a, um ah you know, regularly or as part of the stack, as part of our process for this is obviously an SEO plugin to make sure that all of the meta boxes are in the right place. Make sure that you can control the schema, make sure that the site map is generated, make sure it’s linked from the robots file.

31:02.72
peteeveritt
all of those kind of things. Now they’ they’re, again, just good household cleanup items. um And yeah, by all means, you know, there’s multiple ways that can happen. We normally use SEOPress Pro. um People ask me why. The simple reason is I found that SEOPress Pro gives me the most reliable results in the search results. You know, what, i.e. the data we put in the website is more accurately reflected in the SERPs using SEOPress than anything else I’ve tried.

31:30.55
peteeveritt
But that said, we do run websites that have rank math. We run websites that run all in one SEO. that A lot of them are ah much of a muchness. I prefer SEO Press Pro.

31:38.50
Jeff
Yeah, it it comes down to preference, I think. For all the premium plugins where they have a Pro version that you’d actually pay some money for, they all essentially do the same thing. it’s you know i’ve se I love SEOPress Pro. It’s the one that we always use, like Pete mentioned.

31:53.71
Jeff
they’ve had a couple security vulnerabilities. I’ve had a couple bugs over the years. All plugins will eventually, ah but I’ve seen like 10 times more with RankMath. So that’s kind of why I go, well, okay. And then you know we’ve gotten into some very interesting things with schema with ri math with sites that have RankMath installed and you know only to find out a couple you know revisions later that they’ve kind of put it back into proper things. So we just had more you know kind of a couple of issues here and there.

32:20.85
Jeff
your experience may differ, use whatever’s comfortable. The only thing I will ask is please just don’t use the free basic Yoast plugin. It’s so limited. You can use the free version of SEOpress. You can use the free version of RinkMath. Any of those are better than the free version of Yoast.

32:34.50
Jeff
The free version of Yoast is still going to do the same thing, except there’s only so much that it will allow you to do. but you know Comparing exactly what they do for this feature to that feature, they’ll all be app about the same.

32:44.77
peteeveritt
Yeah.

32:46.54
Jeff
It’s just a matter of which one works better, which one has the features included. And yeah, I’m ranting about something that hopefully everybody already owns. ah

32:53.91
peteeveritt
Yeah. Well, and and just to say, you know just make sure it’s set up properly.

32:57.26
Jeff
Yeah.

32:57.70
peteeveritt
Make sure that the the site map is the XML sitemap is generating. Make sure that the robots.txt file is generating and has a link to the sitemap in it. Make sure that that sitemap is registered with Google Search Console.

33:10.64
peteeveritt
i am you know um ah Make sure that you if if it’s a local business that the local schema stuff is set in the back end of the SEO plugin. all of that you know um ah All of that stuff you can very easily do. You don’t need external help from it. um We should probably put together a checklist that’s available on the website to of all of this stuff, just so people can get hold of a list. But that’s, you know, that’s the that’s the kind of stuff that you need to, you can absolutely do. And look, all of this stuff, we kind of started on this foot. Anyway, all of this stuff’s of contextual. ah SEO is a game of, I call it a game of displacement. I know you referred to it slightly differently, but

33:49.90
peteeveritt
Essentially, for your client’s website to appear in the top 10, in the top three of Google, you have to display somebody that’s already there. Now, if your client isn’t in a massively active market or it’s, ah you know, yeah, then you you don’t need to be doing loads and loads of stuff.

34:09.00
peteeveritt
If on the other hand, your client makes trainers or training shoes and you’re going up against Nike, you’re going to have to get your SEO game on. So, you know, there’s a whole spectrum there about how much effort and how, or how little effort you’re going to have to put into this. It’s all um comparable to the, the, the fight essentially that your particular client finds themselves in.

34:32.76
peteeveritt
um But everything we’ve said, if you’ve got a website that doesn’t have that stuff set, you go and sort that stuff out, you’re going to see an improvement. It might not get you all away, but you’re going to see an improvement.

34:42.37
Jeff
Yeah. And if, you know, when people say no, make sure this scheme is set, if that stuff is like daunting or overwhelming to you, I assure you, it’s not that bad. Load one of the plugins, they have a wizard that will walk you through, they’ll hold your hand through it. um You don’t need to go into all the advanced stuff and start tweaking everything. And if you don’t know what that is, then leave it alone. But go through the wizard at a bare minimum and just such a client upright, you know, it’s, yeah, it’s it’s too easy not to.

35:07.98
peteeveritt
Absolutely. Right. So that have you got anything else to add to the kind of onside things outside of those three or four areas that we just spoke about?

35:13.81
Jeff
you know Specifically, no, I just i just think that um I feel like we really need to keep drilling it into people’s heads that this is approachable. You can you can handle this stuff. um the The more you do, the better your clients will like you for it and the better footing you’ll have when they launch their websites or you know when you take them over. um and Then if you’re doing these basics, then you’re you’re primed right to actually go into doing advanced SEO, to work with a company like us, to to take you know the knowledge that you or your team might have and start actually giving them some real benefits.

35:48.11
Jeff
The stuff that we’re talking about is really just to make sure that they are at least making it to the dance. right It’s just not getting left behind that that you didn’t forget anything.

35:54.78
peteeveritt
Yeah.

35:57.23
Jeff
I see so many websites launch and people just didn’t take any care of this and it’s just I don’t want to say it breaks my heart because it might turn into business for us. So, you know, I mean, selfishly keep doing it, everybody. But at the same time, it’s like if you want to be a respected professional, you can spend some time and you can do this stuff for your clients. And it’s it’s too easy not to.

36:16.91
peteeveritt
have I’m going to do the Colombo thing. I have thought of one more thing that we haven’t mentioned, hosting.

36:24.19
peteeveritt
you know, making sure that you’re on a reasonable host, that you’re not sharing an IP address with hundreds or thousands of other websites that could be um of explicit nature, let’s say, but also could be of ah like a big data kind of load. You know, if you if you’re on a shared server and somebody decides to upload a whole load of videos on there and You know run ads to get people to look at their videos then all of a sudden they’re gonna swamp the server is also from you as well so you need to make sure that the hosting is fit for purpose and if you’re using reseller hosting that’s fine but again just don’t.

36:55.56
Jeff
Yeah.

37:10.62
peteeveritt
Be aware of the hosting that you’re on. I guess that’s that’s really the point. Again, people are coming to you as the web web professional. You should have some kind of preferred hosting methods set up in there. I’ve just said, I use a lot of Cloudways. I know you do as well, but you have you have a number of other companies that you use.

37:29.48
peteeveritt
I’m not recommending one particular one here, but please, please don’t go and use cheap shared hosting that’s on that can be shared to hundreds and or thousands of websites. Go and do a reverse IP lookup on a domain name or an IP address of your client if you’re inheriting a site to find out where their site is if you haven’t built it and you know what what potentially needs to be done about it as well.

37:52.92
peteeveritt
So yeah, that was just ah an addendum that I did think of.

37:55.92
Jeff
I feel like I’ve got a whole huge story just of something that occurred last night around that, but i i we’ve already gone long enough on this podcast. it’s ah

38:06.20
peteeveritt
Well, we’re not at phase two yet. Come on. Defcon two. Here we come. Right. This, this won’t take quite as long. Um, so we do have conversations with clients. I have them in my agency as well as we have them at SEO hive where people may come for a tech cleanup or a tech audit and they, they just, they’re not in a place. The client isn’t in a place to start paying for regular SEO yet. So what do they do?

38:33.29
peteeveritt
And so we have two pieces of advice that we give them, but they all start from the same point. And that is firstly, make a list of all of your services and all of the sub parts of those services. And from there, they can then go and write the pillar pages and the.

38:51.83
peteeveritt
i’ cluster pages for those services, just like we mentioned earlier. So if the content doesn’t exist, get the client to write it. if the If the website goes live and you know what, it has just a single services page that lists out the services that they do. Right, job one for SEO, ah which you don’t have to pay for, is you’re now gonna go and write an individual page for each one of those services. And then when you’ve written those pages, you’re gonna break that that down into the sub parts of that service, and you’re gonna write another page for each one of those sub parts.

39:21.38
peteeveritt
and you can just get them into WordPress. WordPress does all of that anyway, so you can you can get them into WordPress. If you’ve set your theme up properly so that the templates apply properly, then you know a client should be able to do that on their own. That’s the that’s the first part of the plan. The second part of the plan is what you’re then going to do is you’re going to write down every question that a customer or potential customer asks you about your products and services. What are the things that you have to answer multiple times, you know, through the sales cycle. What are the things that you have to answer for every, every client you come across? What, what is the the questions that, you know, crop up all the time? You’re then going to write a blog post about all of those different questions. Just list them out, have a Google sheet, a ClickUp list. I don’t, I don’t care how you do it, but have a list of them and work through them and release one every, one a week or one every few days, however quickly they can write them. And that becomes phase two. And

40:19.53
peteeveritt
way you Where you want to get advanced with this, and this is an advanced like employing SEO advanced, this is just now a little more than writing some copy, is if any of those questions apply specifically to a product or a service or ah a yeah cluster page that you’ve already written, then you’re going to go and create some internal links and you’re going to link one to the other and then link it back again.

40:41.89
peteeveritt
And you’re going to go through that process for every question that you then write a blog for. And that, in a nutshell, is the best thing that somebody that can’t afford SEO from a you know an external supplier can do, because it does two things.

40:59.65
peteeveritt
it makes sure that the website has an active structure and it demonstrates to Google that the website is being used. So if you bring us a website that hasn’t been touched for three years and expect us to do SEO on it, I mean, it’s it’s like turning the Titanic. We we have to, you know, it’s like steering the Titanic with a like lollipop stick. you You know, we have to convince Google that this website is now active again before it’ll do anything else. So yeah, that’s our advice to clients that can’t afford SEO.

41:32.36
peteeveritt
There you go. Phase two is a lot shorter.

41:32.87
Jeff
Yeah, you know and you were talking about advice to the clients. A lot of that you can do as the professional, but I’m not so sure you should do all of that if you don’t have ah an agreement on you know what you what you’re doing.

41:44.00
Jeff
That’s a lot of work right there.

41:44.16
peteeveritt
Yeah.

41:45.64
Jeff
But you can coach your clients with this stuff and you can guide them in the right direction. and if you know i mean we’ve all We’ve all dealt with plenty of you know small budget clients and and you love them.

41:56.96
Jeff
um Not everybody has a huge budget to spend on this stuff. It’s okay, but you can guide them and you can support them and you can help them do this and two things will happen. One of two things will happen. They’ll either do this and you can help them get some results. They’ll put the work in and it’ll take some time or they will try. They will get very overwhelmed and then they’ll be primed to actually start paying for this.

42:19.41
Jeff
when they actually see how much work goes into it.

42:19.48
peteeveritt
Yeah, yeah.

42:21.57
Jeff
It’s not the hardest, but it does take time. and And I’m not trying to say, oh, show them how scary it is. And then you can make money off of them. It’s just putting them in a situation to make those decisions because you’re always going to bounce.

42:31.69
peteeveritt
Yeah.

42:33.21
Jeff
I love doing things myself. I sometimes have to stop myself and go, dude, I just spent three days doing something I should have paid somebody like $100 for. Why did I do that? You know what I mean? And that’s the same thing that though they will realize eventually if if their business is making money and they’ve got the budget for it.

42:49.70
peteeveritt
There’s this massive misconception that organic SEO is free simply because the clicks are free. Organic SEO always costs you, and it’ll cost you in one of two ways, either in time or in money.

43:02.98
peteeveritt
Paying people so that you don’t have to spend the time, essentially.

43:04.32
Jeff
yeah

43:06.17
peteeveritt
ah that’s that’s the That’s the truth behind it. So yeah, you’re dead right. it’s um ah yeah yeah but Letting them see how much… in all In all honesty, I’ve found that some clients that have gone and sort of taking it on on their own and then have come back to me three months, six months, a year later, whenever they’ve been in a place to to start paying for for this, when their business is in a better place.

43:29.60
peteeveritt
They’re the ones that always appreciate a bit more what what we’re actually doing for them and than people that just get it served upon a platter.

43:30.37
Jeff
Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm.

43:37.07
peteeveritt
But, you know, that’s not every client’s like that. What ultimately you’re trying to do here is help people. And yeah, you know, if they’ve not got the money to spend, great. Advise them how to spend the time because they’ve got to do one or the other.

43:49.36
Jeff
Yeah, and once they realize they gotta hire somebody.

43:55.22
peteeveritt
Well, and you know, if you’re a if you’re a small agency and you’re, yeah you know, ah I’m not saying for one minute that you should, you should then take this on. You know, if you’re an agency owner, agency of one small agency, and you’ve got clients that ah are at this, ah you know, ah at the point of saying we can’t afford SEO.

44:14.30
peteeveritt
Don’t you offer to copyright for them if that’s not your jam, right? Yeah, this isn’t this isn’t a place that you want to be inserting yourself unless that is what you can do.

44:27.16
peteeveritt
If you know of ah you know local copywriters that you can team up with, maybe you can start referring some work to each other, that might be the next step. Or of course you can come and use a white label provider ah like SEO Hive where we can provide the copy for you. So there’s this kind of layers as to how you can gear this up, but yeah, just Unlike the stuff we were talking about, like page speed and site structure and all that kind of stuff, this isn’t a thing that you want to insert yourself in unless you can do it, because, yeah, ah it it can become a very much a labour of love.

45:01.25
Jeff
I don’t want to get too far out of my comfort zone with things like that.

45:06.04
peteeveritt
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

45:06.06
Jeff
I love trying new things to a point.

45:08.65
peteeveritt
I was going to say, and and and this man even used to work in journalism, so there you go.

45:11.54
Jeff
Yeah, I I have a degree in journalism. i’ve I’ve worked for many newspapers and I hate writing. I hate it.

45:22.79
peteeveritt
And that’s how the press works, people.

45:24.07
Jeff
It’s true.

45:27.44
peteeveritt
So, look, i think I think we’ve pretty much covered covered it with with this. I think there’s been some nuggets of um useful information.

45:36.26
Jeff
yeah i Yeah, this was a bit of a longer one, but that’s okay.

45:37.17
peteeveritt
Might have listened to it a few times to find them, but yeah.

45:40.74
Jeff
I think this is one of those topics that people need to hear and they just need to decide that they’re willing to be comfortable trying these things and putting the work in, you know what I mean? Or spending the money.

45:52.24
Jeff
It’s one or the other. um But we have a lot of, um we we talk with a lot of agencies and they are, I don’t want to say it’s the most common thing. It’s definitely not, but very often they’re, just worried about the budgets of their clients.

46:07.10
Jeff
They don’t have the budgets for ongoing SEO or they can only do a little bit here and there or what it is. So I think that hopefully these ideas give you some things that you can do internally or you can coach them with without spending the money.

46:18.45
Jeff
And then it’s probably better to try this and save the money and then invest it properly than just throwing it out the window at a random SEO campaign that you’re not familiar with or you don’t even know if that’s what you need, for instance.

46:31.50
Jeff
So, you know, Talk about learning how to be comfortable with it.

46:36.82
peteeveritt
Absolutely. Absolutely. And on that bombshell, I think it’s time to end.

46:40.63
Jeff
I think so. Is it lunchtime yet?

46:43.28
peteeveritt
Yeah. You got much on for the rest of the day? Oh, well, I was going to say, have you got much on for the rest of the day?

46:46.11
Jeff
Lunch, I’m hungry.

46:49.70
peteeveritt
All right, everybody, we’ve got to stop because Jeff’s hungry.

46:52.08
Jeff
Yeah, right. You know, you’re ready to go have that that beer before dinner or whatever right now. So go go for it’s okay. No.

46:58.95
peteeveritt
It’s 20 to nine at night here. I’m committed to this show. What are you talking about?

47:01.86
Jeff
That is. Yeah. Have you had dinner already? It’s late. Oh, okay.

47:05.42
peteeveritt
Yeah, yeah, we’ve eaten already.

47:05.73
Jeff
All right. See, I wouldn’t have had dinner yet. I’d i’d be starving.

47:08.10
peteeveritt
I already had the beer.

47:12.07
Jeff
No wonder you’re so giggly today.

47:15.49
peteeveritt
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Well, you know, it’s your it’s your rugged patch based charm. That’s, you know, it comes through the airwaves.

47:21.21
Jeff
Yeah. What can I say?

47:22.01
peteeveritt
What can I say? You’re not wearing a hat. I’m i’m all hot and flushed and stuff.

47:29.29
peteeveritt
And anyone who’s listening to this fire audio is now going to go and check out the YouTube video. Uh, no, seriously, uh, thanks for listening. Um, and we, if you need help with anything we’ve spoken about, hello at SEO hive dot.co, we can certainly point you in the right direction or as I say, generate some reports for you or whatever the help is you need with it. But, uh, yeah, you certainly can do ah SEO on a bit of a shoestring budget if you need to, um, and, and get out the gate. So we’ll see you in the next show.