Transcription
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined once again by Zach Blackburn. You might remember we just did the first episode of our series all about SEO, and today kicks off the second episode of the series where we're going to start diving deep into some of the technical aspects of SEO. So, Zach, welcome back to the podcast.
It's super awesome to be here. Thanks for having me. We're going to we're gonna get a little bit nerdy today. So, for anybody wanting more of a high-level overview of SEO, that was kind of the last episode. Only nerds are allowed beyond this point. So, if you want to get into some of the details here, we're going to talk about that stuff. And and Zach's definitely the Zach's definitely the guy for that.
There's this this world of of something we call technical SEO that that can go pretty deep, and it's it's the first of the the four major themes that we consider important for SEO. And then within this this category of technical SEO, there's kind of three things that we're going to talk about today. So so a little preview for that. We're going to talk about your website crawlability. We're going to talk about structured data and also indexability. And I know that sounds like pretty boring, but we're going to try to do our best as we're going along this to show and demonstrate how and why these things are important and some of the most common mistakes that we see people are making with these things that you will be able to understand, that you will be able to to to apply. At the end, we're going to tell you about a free tool that you can use to help fix a lot of these problems and and improve your your site's technical SEO. So, Zach, I'll let you I'll let you take us away at the beginning here. Let's talk first about crawlability, which fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair fair warning for everybody listening this is this is the biggest like category there's the most stuff that falls within this category compared to the other two things that we're going to be talking about but it's so so critical like this I mean that that's really technical SEO in general I guess we should probably talk about like foundationally what is it and it's it's foundation right like technical SEO is kind of like you can you can do the best SEO work in the world with everything else but if you're you know if you're not indexed with Google. If your website's not crawable, like some of these basic things, if you're not winning on these, then then you're never going to you're never gonna actually rank in search engines. So, technical SEO is is actually usually the first thing that we're going to be focusing on for any client. And the reason it's the first thing is because it's the most basic. It's the most foundational. It's the kind of stuff that if you don't have it figured out, then nothing else works. And it's one of the biggest mistakes that we see other agencies making where they don't have some of those basic foundational things figured out yet they're layering on top of it all these more complex things and because of that it just doesn't doesn't get the results that they're looking for. So anyways with that introduction Zach if you have anything else to say about technical SEO go for it. And if not let's jump right into the crawlability and talk about some of the components there.
Yeah, I I think let's jump into this and I think that that question will be answered when we start talking about our website crawlability. What what does this even mean generally speaking? And one of the biggest pieces that we have to understand your website is a a living breathing thing and in order for it to get found there has to be roadways. That's why they called the worldwide web. Everything has to be connected. Everything has to work together seamlessly to provide users with the best result. So when we're looking at a website, we need to understand Google's mative pardon me major motive which is providing the best possible option for whatever keyword or query that is being searched for. And how Google does this is through their index. And the only way to get in their index is making sure your website is crawable for Google. So, let's kind of unpack a little bit of this so that we can kind of dive into this. There's a few facets that fit into this. One of those is sight speed. We get told a lot, we hear it a lot. I'm sure you've heard it a lot is that sight speed is one of the the bigger factors. Google has an algorithm dedicated towards it, which is called the freshness update, and that goes towards content that's the newest, and it goes towards content that's the most re relevant and valuable. Then we look at at your website overall with the sight speed there. There's a few factors that kind of play into this. Without getting too much in the weeds, it's the way your website is structured, your hierarchy, how things are laid out, whether your call to actions are done, what pages you have your forms on, where your phone numbers located, how much content you have on pages. So, there's a lot that kind of encompasses website crawability. One of the biggest issues that we've seen in our industry is that the websites are built by mechanics instead of specialists that try to get them to be found on the search engines. So what I mean by a mechanic, they're very methodical. They're very technical, but they're not looking at the end user. Okay? They're not looking at who is getting them. I mean, who who they want to get to the website. So, we need to detach those two just a little bit so that we can be mechanical, be methodical, but also make sure that our website loads fast, hierarchy is defined properly, and that at the end of the day, Google is able to come to our website and crawl it appropriately. So, there's a little more to unpack, but I think that's a good starting point to jump off.
Yeah, that makes sense. And I think it's I think it's just in the nature of of business. Like we see the same thing with with PPC services, for example. The kind of things in PPC that a client will really notice, agencies are really good at, right? Like if you if if a PPC agency goes under budget, do you think the client notices? Yeah, the client notices. They say, "I told you to spend 10 grand this month. You spent six grand. What's going on?" Right? But if a if a PPC agency is over bidding by 10%, do you think the client notices? No. So what happens? Well, PPC agencies are generally really good at hitting budget and they're generally really bad at over bidding. And it's just because, you know, some things are seen, some things aren't. And it's the same thing when you look at like website builders or people who build websites. Like no no no business owner gets a website delivered to them from the person who built it and says like oh this is awesome but like I just really don't like how it's not very crawable. Yeah. Nobody's ever given that feedback to a website developer, right? They say like I want this button to be this color or I don't like that font or I think we share a different picture here or something like that. So that's what everybody focuses on is how can we make this thing visually appealing. But you don't realize that these robots that Google has, they don't they don't see your website the same way that you see your website. In fact, they they actually see all the technical aspects of your website. Some of the stuff that you're talking about, Zach here, this is like like making your your website load faster, for example, or having a proper hierarchy that's easier to crawl or structure it better. That's the kind of stuff that's like the equivalent of having that nicer looking design for the human eye just for the the Google robot that's going to be looking at it instead. So, and by the way along those same lines, this this is the same for this this category that people are talking about AEO right now. Basically, the the the optimization for for language models because those are also robots, right? They don't they don't really understand things and see things the same way we do. So, let's dive into those those components. I think a good one to start with is is page speed. Um, if we're if we are talking about page speed, obviously if a page loads slow, it's bad. If a page loads fast, it's good. But how do you know how fast is enough and what are some of the big things that people have going on the website that's preventing a a good page speed more often than not?
That that a very great question. So I'm going to answer the first one about what is kind of the bigger hindrances for this. And this is one of the most common mistakes is that when a developer puts an image on the website, they may put it in, and this is going to get very technical, but it may be 2,000 by 1,000. So, it's 2,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels, but then they shrink it down at 400 by 200, whatever the actual metrics are. What actually is happening on the back end of that is the website is still, pard, the image is still loading as this gigantic image, but it's only being rendered as this. So it's called e im image compression that you need to do to make sure your image is not kilobits or megabits large that it is as small as technically possible without degradation. So that is one of the biggest issues that we see in that regard is that the website is not loading properly or as fast as it possibly could. Kind of jumping to the first part of that. When is enough enough? Basically, how fast can a website load before it's too fast or if it's too slow? Generally speaking, a website should load anywhere between two seconds and 3 seconds. Okay? And that's generally speaking. There are a thousand tools out there. One of them is called Page Speed Insights. And in that tool, we are able to throw your website in there and it'll break down all of the the issues that are running in there. A lot of it's going to be very technical, but it gives you a grade score and it lets you know where your website should be. Generally speaking, you should be at 80% or above in that metric. Uh, just to give kind of a a a representation of where it is. Most websites that I see when they first come into into our shop basically is that we're looking at anywhere between five and 7 seconds, which just to clarify that that small second seemed like very little, but in the the scope of the internet where if your website isn't losing loading fast, people are leaving within a second. Oh, nope. The website's not working. I click out of here quicker and you can blink. So we need to make sure that every second beyond three is calculated methodically and addressed as as efficiently as we can. The next part and this gets very technical is the amount of HTTP requests that are done from your website to your server. So an HTTP request would be plugins would be information you're gathering information on the website images things of this nature. So another great kind of easy tip is never embed your videos on your website. Always host them on YouTube and then grab the embed link from YouTube itself because then your servers are not being responsible for that bandwidth. That's a easy way to shave off a little bit of extra time on your website. Th those are kind of if I were to break down those would be some quick, valuable, easy ways to address some sight speed.
And the cool thing about what you're talking about here with Google page speed insights too, Zach, is it'll it'll score you. It'll say how you're doing and it also gives you a list of things that you can go in and fix, right? Which is pretty cool. Including like in there you might see you might see image compression being one of those things. You might see the number of HTTP requests being one of those things. And there could be many others, right? There's there's sort of like an infinite number of things seemingly that could be the problem here, right? So that's where you have to like diagnose it and then fix it. But the key thing is it has to be fast. And do not measure your page speed by just like refreshing your browser and seeing how quickly it loads because everybody has different browsers, internet speeds, you know, different amounts of the website could already be cached on your browser, making it a little bit faster for you. So that's where using an an objective tool like Google page speed insights is definitely the best way to get this information because this concept that Zach's talking about if it you know should it be two or three seconds should it be 5 to seven that's that's not measured like on one computer in one condition one time you could there could be a site that loads in five to seven seconds that loaded for you in one second and that doesn't mean that it loads in one second for everybody right? So that's where we have to figure out like what are those things on average so so yeah p page speed is huge and and actually page is one of those things that hits you twice. A lot of people don't realize this. The first way that it hits you is Google prioritizes their user experience. So they notice when somebody clicks on the link and and if you've ever used the internet, you've done this before. You've clicked on some link and you said, "Ah, it's not loading." You click back and then you go find a different one. Google notices when that happens and they notice that happens often on slower loading sites. to them. They start to analyze all these sites for for page speed. And a combination between those those user interactions that Google's monitoring is happening and also them just knowing that your that your website loads more slowly helps them understand that actually their experience that they're giving to their users is not as good if a site loads slow. So what does Google want to do? Well, they want to give the best experience possible to the people using Google slash also make lots of money. And sometimes they, you know, they balance those two. But if we're just talking about organic results, you know, it's all about what's the what's the best result for the for the search. So, so what Google will do is they'll actually make it harder for you to get rankings because they'll look at someone else all things equal. They'll look at another site and say, "This one loads faster. It's a better experience. So, I'm not going to rank Zach's site unless Zach's site's way better in all these other ways." Then maybe that's a trade-off, right? So, so, so one, you'll get less traffic because you won't get ranked as well. That's that's already an issue. And then two, there's so many studies proving that tiny differences in page load speed have a massive impact on conversion rate because even for the traffic you're already getting, a lot of those people are not going to actually stick around through your page loading. So, so if you had a slower load speed, what you would see is maybe you'd get half as much traffic and then maybe that traffic would convert half as well. So, at the end of the day, you're left with a quarter of what you would have been otherwise. Obviously the quarter being arbitrary just making up numbers here but a lot of people think of it as like oh it'll affect their conversion rate or it'll affect the traffic but really it hits you two different ways and that's why it can be so dangerous.
Well and especially with Google one of the algorithms is dedicated towards your site speed but it's mobile index first. So it's not even just your website holistically. It's it's there's a desktop version and a mobile version and the mobile scales on different areas. So you you have to make sure that your website is pretty efficient in in a lot of different regards, not just how fast does it load on my computer in downtown of my city. It's that there's a lot of factors play into this and that's why you use the objective tools.
A fantastic point. I'm sure you've seen just as well as I have seen many a website that loads really quick on desktop but not on mobile because Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that that that's fantastic, Zach. So now that we've covered covered sides speed, let's dig a little bit let's dig a little bit deeper. Let's talk about navigation and and how that works. And when when people are figuring out what the navigation should be on a site or let's just say I already have navigation on my website, how can I know if if that's contributing positively to my technical technical SEO or negatively?
Yeah, most certainly. One of the biggest ways in which I assess this is determine how much impressions and click I'm getting from you to those individual pages and determining that comparative over a time frame because naturally the way that you should be looking at your results is things should be growing and if they're not then call us. But if they are growing then you should be able to see pages starting to get more indexed. you should be able to see more pages, more keywords coming in for that, more users activating those. That is generally where it comes in. One of the big things, and I'm going to kind of foreshadow this a little bit, your hierarchy will directly affect the amount of Google impressions you get organically. So if your website hierarchy is not defined appropriately and you are not internally linking properly because that is a part to your hierarchy, if you're not doing those things, you're going to see negative ramifications for those individual pages. So that is one of the the ways.
So let's talk about this hierarchy. The way I like to picture this is like your standard like I mean I guess you can kind of think of it like like or structures are Exactly. Yeah. Top you've got like the CEO. That's going to be like your homepage of your website, right? And then after that, you're going to have like usually these pages that are on your main menu of your website. Those are like your leadership team that are going to, you know, sit there. And then those pages have multiple things. Like if you look at baitman collective, babelective.com, that's that's the main page. And then we might have like a services page, right? That's like the, you know, the leadership team member there. Then below that, like we might talk on that services page about how we do PPC and how we do SEO, how we do social ads, etc. Then there's going to be like LinkedIn there pages specific to those things, right? So that's kind of how the hierarchy builds out. And all these pages, they actually link to each other and it creates this like web, this interconnected web that is your website that includes hierarchy. And there there's like more science than a lot of people realize to how those hierarchies are built and how it influences like which pages are going to rank. What's the best way to communicate that? Like how would you communicate like what makes a good hierarchy and what makes a bad?
Yes. Generally speaking, and there have been studies and studies that have done about this is that if it takes more than three clicks to fulfill an action, you're doing it wrong. And what that means is is someone lands on your homepage and there's not a good call to action there, form fill, phone number, whatever the case may be, and they have to go to maybe your contact page and then the contact page has it, that's two clicks, right, to get to the action. But if you're going three or more clicks to be able to fulfill an action, you're not doing it right. You have to make sure it's as simple and as easy as possible from the search results that someone lands on an individual page that they're getting as close to possible the exact solution that you're wanting them to fulfill based off of their search query. So, for an example, if we're learning the process, how does Zack Blackburn REI.com, how do they do their their house buying process? they would land on the how we we do our process page and on that page would outline all of our information, how we do this information we gather, t timelines, prices, whatever else we want to divulge. And at the very bottom of that, we have a good call to action, either a phone number, a an email, a form, some variation, maybe even multiple of them. that that is what defines a good hierarchy is the least amount of clicks to fulfill an action.
Okay, that that makes sense. So, help me understand. So, let's just say I'm looking from like a conversion rate standpoint. Yes, totally makes sense, right? In fact, for a lot of conversion rate focused stuff, the idea of three three clicks away is actually probably like for a lot of conversion rate stuff, it's like they shouldn't even have to scroll down the page, right? It should be like right there, right? So, so I get it from a conversion rate standpoint, but you know, there's going to be like more more out there call to actions that that have to be looked for a little bit more. Help me understand why this matters from a technical SEO standpoint though outside a conversion rate.
Yes, absolutely. Because one of the biggest things is, and you kind of talked about it a little bit earlier, is that Google understands how long it's going to take for things to to happen. If Google sees you go from their website and I assume you have some level of analytics, maybe tag manager, maybe all of it. So you go from page one to page two and then you bounce away immediately. Google sees that as a negative signal, sees that as a negative experience for the users because the result that they originally search for is not on your website because you left it so quickly. So it is a very robust technical view of how this is all playing together. And as we stated earlier, Google looks at this from a users's perspective because how they make money is getting people on your website and that and that's the really the bottom line of it is getting someone on your website to fulfill an action because you paid for it or you're using their services. So that's what they want and that's the algorithm as well.
Yeah, that that makes sense. And and I Yeah, it's funny because for for a while people hypothesized, well maybe use Google uses some of these like experience metrics on a website, but it's become more and more apparent. That was part of the data leak re recently, wasn't it? Yes, it was. That they're they're using like these specific user experience metrics to determine that this person's actually having a good experience on your site that they're actually it is so important. the way that I've always done SEO is very dedicated to what's going to be the best for users because Google's trying to match that almost one for one. They're trying to say what gets users to stay because then they'll come back and use Google in the future. If they don't trust the results, they're going to go to Bing. They're going to go here that way in this way. And honestly, I believe it's the best way to do SEO, too, because you've seen I mean, you've been in this industry much longer than I have. I've only heard about some of the things people used to do in this industry like back back in the day. But even today, you know, there's still people trying to like hack the algorithm, find the way to make it like favor their site instead. and and like every time there's this algorithm update, you know, all those companies that just kind of found this little loophole in the algorithm that if you do it like this, then Google sees this and and then it and then it boosts you up and and eventually Google just they adjust the algorithm, they adjust the algorithm and everything they're always pointing towards when they adjust the algorithm is how do we create a better user experience because that's how they make money is they need people when they search on Google, they need them to find the right things that actually give them value. If you don't find what you're looking for when you search on Google, you don't search on Google anymore. Right. Exactly. You find it's super simple. Yeah. So, if you're if you're just creating the best experience, then then you know when the algorithm updates, in theory, it's in your favor and it's not in the favor of those other people who are trying to gain the algorithm in some way or another. So, I I love that. So, so we kind of talked there about navigation and hierarchy. Is there anything you'd add to any of that or should we move on to structured data?
I I think let's let's move on that there's so much that goes into that. I'm sure we could dedicate a whole podcast to towards that.
Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about a lot of the crawlability stuff is it is stuff that you experience as a user. As a user, you you actually experience the page speed. You can actually use the navigation. You see the hierarchy. You just don't understand how it affects, you know, technically how the how the site is is performing with Google. As we move away from that, we move towards structured data. This is stuff that's like to the naked eye like pretty invisible. It doesn't it's not even clear that this is a thing that exists on your website. Again, what are the things that are commonly missed by marketing agencies? The kind of things that clients don't notice or don't even know exist, right? Because when's the last time the website developer delivered the website to the client? The client said, "I like it, but you know, if you could just fix these things in the structure of data, that would be really nice." Yeah, probably never has that ever happened because they don't even know that it exists. So, let's talk about what structured data is, why it's important, and how you optimize it.
Yeah, most certainly. So, I'll I'll give my pitch that I give with this. The way that structured data is is that we all know in America that a 10-digit number formatted in a certain way is a phone number because it's formatted. We know this. We are able to interpret that. Google does not interpret it as such. It guesses it's a phone number because we give it some factors, maybe some a tell link or maybe we define it and say it is a phone number right next to it. But the code is still guessing at what it is. So structured data all it is is specifically defining programmatically what a piece of item is on your website. So that 10-digit number, it is now programmed to say this is an actual phone number or your address, your name, your author, a product, a service, a review, a location, the and the list goes on and on. There are so many different things that we are able to programmatically define in structured data that helps not only with rankings, but also helps you in search results. So I'm going to paint a little picture. We've all been on Google search and we are searching for a pizza joint of some capacity and what we end up seeing is we Google pizza near me whatever it is and we end up seeing Joe's pizza whatever that is and right underneath it there's a little star rating and this is not a Google business profile. Okay, so it's in the actual search results. It is in the organic section and there's a little five-star rating and that business has 4.8 that is structured data that creates that Google's able to read it, interpret it, then display it and it's called a SER features which search engine results page feature. So it's part of it. So another feature is your maps listing. Another feature is your Google ads that there are about 10 to 12 different features that are available in each search and it ranges depending on the search. But where structured data comes in and where I believe a lot of people don't understand is when you get your website it's kind of that old statement where it's like you don't know what you don't know. With structured data, it is so vitally important to be done accurately and effectively that it will impact your results because there are reviews on your website. There are reviews on your Google business profile. There are testimonies that you can have. There's authors that you are creating yourself as an authority in this space. If you want to be the best REI person in your region, that is a way that you could build your authority and Google will see that and over time can credit that. So, it's kind of like turning into the Mark Cuban. I don't know why he's in my mind, but the Mark Cuban of of SEO and search results. So, that's something that we're able to build into with structured data as well. It gives us opportunities to be found. And this is a little secret for you in AI because AI reads that. That is how AI gathers a lot of this information is that they crawl your website. They're not as sophisticated as Google's AI because Google's been doing it for 25 years now, something like that. So, there's a lot of information that we're able to provide to Google and to other search engines and AI that will provide you with the best leg up. Being found three or four times, maybe even one time with a good Google review under your name versus your competitors where they do not have that. That is a huge advantage to you. You can almost double the likelihood of getting clicked from 3% to maybe 6% comparative. So that is a huge difference between you and them and all of that is structured through structured data.
Yeah, that that's really cool. And just to paint a picture for for everybody here why this stuff is important even even be beyond just what it why it seems it's initially important. So so let's just say Zach you you made this you made this search for a pizza shop near you, right? and and they're show up like you have your number one pizza shop and then you got number two, number three and then there's Joe's pizza shop and that one's number four, but then this one has the structured data for reviews, right? So there you see that it has the reviews and and then maybe none of the other ones have that. So what's going to happen? You're going to see this whole page of results and you're actually going to be more likely to click on that one than you are to click on the other ones. So to your point, your clickthrough rate is now higher, right? We have the same amount of search volume. We have the same ranking. Now we're getting more traffic from that. If we can get twice as many people to click in theory, if everything else pans out like it typically does because there's no real expected change in the traffic quality or something, we're getting twice as many leads, right? So that's that's already something. Here's the other thing though. Remember in the algorithm leak that Google recently had, we learned that despite Google saying over and over again for a very long time, actually we don't look at click-through rate data as a ranking signal. We learned actually they do look at click-through rate data as a rank key signal and what's going to affect that structured data. Now Google looks at the fact that this person searched they looked at options one through five but they chose option four. Why did they choose option four? And then it happens again. Someone else chooses option four, right? And they're looking at it like well option one should have this clickthrough rate. Option two should have that clickthrough rate all the way option four which should have a low clickthrough rate but on these searches with this company the clickthrough rate's higher on option four. And what is that? That's a signal to the algorithm. Joe's Pizza Shop is actually more relevant for this because people out of all the search results, they're choosing this one. So, what's going to happen is then Joe's Pizza Shop is no longer number four. It's going to become number three. And then if it's still outperforming two in one and number three, then it's going to become number two. It's going to become number one, or at least it's going to be one thing that contributes to that, right? So, kind of like how I mentioned page speed kind of hits you in multiple ways. The thing is, if if you can increase your click-through rate on search results, you actually also can increase your ranking because a higher click-through rate is a ranking signal because if people are choosing you instead of someone else, even though you're lower on the page, that's a signal to Google that you might have a really good relevant authoritative authoritative website. So, structured data is pretty cool.
Yeah. And it you you you nailed on. I just want to hit it one more time is that it allows us to take from other search results where we may not have or keep where we are. So we're already position one. Having that extra review section could keep more people to us and will not go to position 2, three, four, five, whatever the case is because they know we're authoritative. And especially in our industry, that trust factor that those reviews provide are paramount to organic results.
Yeah, agreed 100%. All right, Zach, that's awesome. Thank you for for talking about structured data a little bit. Time to go to our third and final subject under this topic of SEO. I'm sorry, technical SEO indexibility. What does that even mean?
Yeah. So, one thing and and we'll kind of I'm foreshadowing a little bit about the free tool, but one of the the factors that we look at in our indexability is that we have let's say 200 pages on our website. We've been doing SEO for a long time. We created a lot of blogs and a lot of articles out there. We have quite a few location pages, whatever the case actually is, but we have 200 actual pages. We find out when you go into Google Search Console that half or more are not even indexed by Google for whatever reason. Okay? And we'll dive into that in just a moment. But we find out that Google hasn't even seen isn't going to see for whatever reason our pages. So that is something where we're looking at our indexability. We have to look at it from a a robot. We have to look at it. Is this good, valuable, useful content that will provide value to the internet or is this the same fluff that 500 other REI specialists have? That is something that we need to to address. But indexability itself is going into can Google crawl the content, can it be seen? Is it worthy of being indexed by Google? And then the very last piece is really coming down to what's the right way to say this is the hierarchy of it allowing you to flow through the website appropriately. Making sure that the website answers things in a methodical path. Does that make sense?
You know, it makes it makes about 50% sense, but we're going to need to like dive a little deeper into these specific things. So, so let's talk let's talk like like you mentioned a few different aspects of of should a page be indexed or should it not be indexed. I can tell you it's it's like that that that saying if a if a tree falls in the forest but nobody's there to hear it did it did it really fall right? Is there like if if a if there's a page on the internet but it's not indexed by search engines does it really exist? Yeah. the answer probably not like unless you're linking to it which actually as we probably will discuss is smart in many cases especially if you have pages that are dedicated to specific marketing channels you really want that to be true that they're not indexed right? So there's there's like a real science here of like index or not index but yeah let's talk about it so let's just say let's just say you have this these hundred pages on your website let's talk about some examples of pages that should be indexed and why pages that should not be indexed and why and what are the really common mistakes on either end there.
So, generally speaking, anything that we put in our top navigation should be indexed because that is part of indexability. We are telling Google's and our users these are the most important pages from our business to you. Okay? So, those obviously should be indexed. We are telling Google and the users that's important. The pages that should not be indexed are pages where we are doing specific marketing campaigns. So maybe paid campaigns or social media or TV or radio and we're creating dedicated landing pages for them from our root domain. We do not want those pages indexed because we're going to give Google mixed signals. We're going to have double pages. It's called keyword cannibalization where we have pages that are similarly fighting for the exact same keyword and we do not want them to be fighting for each other. We want one page that's a master of one individual vertical or in our circumstance like a distress seller. We only want one major page dedicated to bankruptcy as an example. And then there could be subpages that talk about nuances within that, but there's only one master of it, right? And then where we're going on these other marketing campaigns, we don't want those to conflict with our organic channels. And then the very last piece is that like why do we care about this? And I I want to be very clear is that anything that we put on our website that is meant to be client-f facing should be a representation of our website and our business model and our thoughts like our approach, our kind of like mission statement as it were. And that is what I look at when I build websites is I look at how does this help the mission statement. And that is one of the ways in which I determine pages being indexed and not being indexed.
That makes sense. And to me, it's super clear. Like if I have, you know, my website.com/tv and on my TV commercials, I tell everybody go here. And then also, if you just search for my company, there's my website.comtv popping up in the search results. That's going to create tracking issues, right? So, I I see I see the problem there. But help me understand the problem with too many pages that are indexed, right? Because I think it's easy to just assume, well, let's just say I have the one page about bankruptcy and I have the other page about bankruptcy. And yeah, maybe one of them's better than the other, but if I'm going to throw a hat in the ring for search results, why not throw two hats in the ring? Like, why would having two pages on bankruptcy be worse than one? Why wouldn't I make a thousand pages on bankruptcy and just hope that one of them's going to catch and Google's going to rank it?
So what Google does in its algorithm, it determines what's the most relevant and valuable to its users. And in that relevant, it determines, do I already have a piece in my index dedicated towards this? So if we're just duplicating pages, excuse me, and we don't have a good unique proposition from us to drive someone to our website from that, someone else is going to take it that started before us. So having unique pieces gives us a better opportunity to condense all our thoughts into one page. Instead of having two mediocre pages, we have one master page. Does that make sense?
It does make sense. So, what you're doing is is you're trying to like It's funny. I heard in there there's a there's a SEO like what's the word like strategy that's sort of similar to this as it relates to like backlinking called like the what do they call it like the bigger skyscraper method. Yes. you just kind of take someone who's like doing really well because they have a page that's like really well built and then you just build one that's just like a little bit better and then now you have like a taller skyscraper, right? Because you know that already works. It's that same concept of like Google wants like like you'll notice a lot of the stuff that ranks on Google is like it's it's significant content. It has a lot of words. It has a lot of the answers because Google's, you know, looking for that thing that's that's the absolute best. So you're you're you're basically arguing for like let's let's condense when we could have multiple things. is try to condense them into one where we can and that will work well as long as they're targeting the same keyword. Of course, the where it branches as if they're targeting different keywords.
Exactly. And I think a bigger piece of this is when we do this, if we have multiple pages trying to rank for the same term, we can have half of the searches go here, half go here, or quarter, however many pages it's divided, and we'll never know exactly when or how it's being triggered. So, we can never know our marketing channel is doing the right the right thing. So, we always want to make sure that we're looking at this from if they land on this, are they going to get the answer to their question? And are they are we going to provide them a solution? Because this page is dedicated towards a problem and a solution.
Yeah, that that makes sense. So, what's the harm though? So, let's just say let's just say we got all that. Let's say we have a website that is perfect from a technical SEO standpoint, has good rankings, you know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. But I've also got like a hundred blogs that are all useless that are indexed. So what's the harm?
Yeah. In my experience, they actually would not be indexed because if they're not useful and they're not relevant, Google is going to skip over them because Google says I already have this in my index. So in in without being so mean about it, they're basically saying this content is not useful to any person I could think of. So I'd rather just not even put it in my index. So you're wasting time and effort and resources and blood, sweat, and tears on something Google has already deemed irrelevant.
Yeah. Well, and here's the really cool thing about indexing versus not indexing. You can see what Google indexes and what Google doesn't index, right? There's a lot of SEO stuff that's kind of in a black box where it's like how how does Google see this exactly? We don't know. With indexing, it's like they indexed your page or they didn't index your page. The why might be a little bit hard sometimes, but but you can know like did it happen or did it not. So, that's that's something I encourage people to look at. And I can I can tell I can tell you and and I'm sure you could share many stories of websites we've taken over where we see like major important pages that aren't indexed. And it happens all the time. It's crazy that it can't happen. Some of this is also from the developer end is that you may get a brand new website, but you don't know what you don't know. So, you end up thinking, "Hey, my website's on the internet cuz I Googlezac.com. I see it pop up." But realistically, on the back end, the the program is saying, "Google, don't crawl my website." So, that is one thing that we have to make sure and educate you on. And hopefully through this podcast, you'll be able to be that much more informed about is my website indexed, can it be seen by users, and what can I do to basically get that jump started? Um, and I think that's a great segue into the the next piece.
Yes. Yes. So, so we talked about the a few different components of technical SEO. Let's talk about what what's arguably the number one tool for technical SEO, and it's free. Google Search Console, for someone who's never heard of it, what is it?
Google Search Console, think of it this way. Analytics, Google Analytics is how people came to your website and how they interacted with your website. So, it's a a user view of your website. Google Search Console is Google's view of your website with some spattering of user data, but it's all from the search engine search engine's view. It's a free tool. It's relatively easy to install. It is free, which I love. and he gives us all of the information about what pages are indexed, how many pages of our website are indexed, what pages are not, what the reasons for them are, and we could dive into those a little bit more if we need to, but it gives us an entire view of our website and it allows us to troubleshoot some troublesome pages. So, it gives us a lot of insight there.
Yeah. So, so if you're if you're listening to this and you're wanting to dive into it a little bit more, you want to understand it better, installing Google Search Console is is a good next step, you do have to install it on the website. It's not horrible horribly hard. We won't go into it right now. You can you can find probably a million different YouTube videos that'll show you how to do that. The same with like learning how to use the the program on a on a simple way, but yeah, Google like there's a lot of stuff that you could do could could do with could do without in SEO. Google Search Console is one of those things where you know nobody nobody can really make a better tool than Google for telling you what Google sees when it looks at your website, right? All this other stuff we can guess, right? And and do we use other tools? We absolutely use other tools. They have different like angles they attack things from. And if Google Search Console does it, we're going to use Google Search Console for that particular thing. It's it doesn't do everything you'd ever want, but it it's it's pretty dang cool.
Well, and it gives us straight from the horse's mouth. Like that's the the most important part of this is that it takes you straight to what Google sees and generally tells you why it's seeing this and it provides you some solutions on how to fix it. It doesn't give you the magic wand. It doesn't give you everything. That's why you do need some help. But it does give you a lot of information. It gives you your search impressions. It gives you your clicks to your website. Therefore, your click-through rate. It gives you the queries of the keywords that you were being found for. Like it gives you so much information and it is I I can't stress this enough. It's free. Like it is one of the best tools out there for this because it's straight from Google. So we know the information is trusted and we are able to see where your website is and how it's trending and how it's trending over time. It gives you about 18 months I believe worth of data or 16 months my apologies 16 months worth of data and you could do year pardon me 6 months versus six months worth of data which is awesome but it doesn't give historical beyond that.
Okay, cool, awesome to know. Thank you Zach for taking the time to to to join me today and to talk about all this stuff. For anybody listening if you're curious about what's next, we just talked all about technical SEO. That's the first of four major pillars in in SEO. Up next is going to be onpage SEO, which if you're not listening closely, might sound like the same thing as technical SEO, but it actually, believe it or not, is a different thing. And so, we're going to talk about onpage SEO next time. And there's a number of topics we can dive deep into there. That'll be followed by off-page SEO, and then we're going to talk about Google business profiles, which are ironically one of the one of the quicker ones you can get in this particular industry. They gather a lot of the traffic that's available on Google. So anyways, hope you found this valuable. Reach out to us if you have any questions about SEO that you want us to put into this into this series. And if not, I will see you next time.