10 Easy SEO Wins You're Probably Overlooking

Matt: [00:00:00] SEO is an important but yet scary term for some because once you start getting into SEO issues or you want to try to improve your SEO, you're gonna be like, "Uh-oh," like, "What do I gotta do here? Do I need a bunch of technical changes, content changes, marketing changes? Do I need Google ads? Do I need Facebook ads?"

Like, "What do I need?" You know, running around all over the place. Now, Mike and I, we deal with a lot of small businesses, and the thing is, is that there is some low-hanging fruit that small businesses really could benefit from. So in this episode, we're gonna be talking about some low-hanging SEO fruit to try to help you, maybe even right as you're listening to this episode or after y- after you've listened to this episode, you can be like, "Hey, I haven't checked that." You can kind of run out and, you know, check the consoles that I mention, try to, you know, do some of the tips and tricks that I mention as well. So if this sounds interesting to you and you want to support the show, you can go and check us out on that Patreon, leave a review or rating in your podcast app, join us in our Discord server, or share this with your friends. And if you want to learn how to code, [00:01:00] Scrimba is the place to do that. They have an interactive media player code editor where you can actually pause the lesson and play with the code that the instructor was showing you right inside of that media player, and then can press play and have the lesson just pick up from where it was. There is a Scrimba Pro plan that you can get up to 20% off if you click on our link that's in the RSS description or in the show notes on htmlallthethings.com. More details are in show notes. So I'd like to kind of kick off this episode with sort of a, a thesis and just sort of a, a, I guess a layout, if you will. So I've, I've come up with 10 low-hanging fruits that we see and help small businesses with constantly, um, or at the very least help them, you know, them in the right direction, and then maybe sometimes their marketing team will go into it. So I have 10 of those. Now, I don't know if we're gonna necessarily get into all 10 just due to the natural course of conversation, but all 10 are in the show notes [00:02:00] if you're interested in seeing the list. I'd also like to say that what we're doing here is trying to use tried and true methods, trying, tried and true, uh- I, I was gonna say methods again, but tried and true, like data-driven actions. We're not just kinda like shooting into the dark. SEO can feel like that sometimes, and, you know, there's always a little bit of that aspect. But what we're doing today is we're looking inward. We're looking at what we already have. So if you have a brand-new website where you quite literally have nothing, then you don't really have much to look inward on. But the biggest thing for small businesses is gonna be time. Time, money, right? How much time th- that one of their workers spends on something, how much time it takes, and how much, you know, ROI, return on investment, that's gonna be. And so the thing is, with SEO, is that a lot of the time it gets scary because you might say, "Okay, we need to improve our SEO. Well, what do we need to do? we need to add something [00:03:00] new. What do we need to add? Well, let's, let's add a, let's add a blog post. Sure. Let's write a blog post. Okay. Well, what do we need to do with that?

Well, we need to start targeting more keywords." Now the keyword research has led to a list of other blog posts that we wanna write, so now we have a list of blog posts. "Oh, hang on a second, we... Our backlinks aren't doing too good. Why don't we mess around with our backlinks," right? "Oh, okay, you know, let's, let's, let's add a schema in here.

You know, let's start optimizing for AI search." And all of these things are valuable, 100%. All these things are valuable. But the thing is, is it takes a lot of work. Like, if we, if we take a look, if we decide, like, you know, we do the research, we do all these things, and we say, "Okay, we're gonna write a blog post on something," did that take?

It took some competitor research. It took some keyword research. It took planning, of course. Uh, we had to write the thing. We had to do the design on it if we needed to, maybe even potentially have some development on the page if we had some sort of fancy widget on there or something. We need to pass it off to a colleague and have them edit it or peer review it. Then we need to actually publish it, choose the right time to publish it, when, where, et cetera. Uh, maybe even cut it [00:04:00] up and, and share it on social media in different ways, where maybe you have this full blog post on, you know, how to change a tire, and then you have like a little like 30-second clip of how to change a tire on your TikTok and that type of thing, and then that points people to the...

You know, you kinda have like your funnel going, right? Then you gotta wait for Google to crawl and index it, and then you're gonna be waiting even longer to see how it actually performs. So is new content valuable? Yeah. boy, oh, boy, does it cost. Even if it's not money, it costs time, it costs effort, and it costs a lot of context switching.

You're doing a lot of back and forth and switching. And by the way, Google switches whenever they want. Google updates whenever they want, and user behaviors change whenever you want. So if you did all this research and all this keyword stuff, then all of a sudden, that keyword drops off the map next month, oh, fantastic.

Now we've spent, two days doing this or... And two days doesn't sound like a lot. You might say, "That's only two days, Matt." Yeah, but to a small business, that's potentially quite a lot, right? Now, the thing is- If you already have an established website, you already have [00:05:00] pages, and those pages are already doing what?

They're already ranking, right? But if you want to improve your SEO, clearly they're not ranking high enough, right? Maybe they're getting impressions, but very few clicks. Maybe they're outdated, they have out- outdated information. Maybe you need to go in there and update it. Oh, the government actually changed this law, and we can't, you know, donate $200, uh, you know, in this guide.

We need to, we need to say that you- it's a minimum donation of 300, or something like that, right? it's poorly internally linked. Uh, maybe there's missing information. Maybe it's, uh, targeting the wrong search intent. Now, you might say, "Well, Matt, you, you know, you listed out a bunch of stuff when it comes to making new content, and then now you're r- listing out a bunch of stuff when, when you're talking about old content."

But the thing is, the old content is tried and true. content has data. We are gonna take a look what that old content is doing literally in terms of numbers, how many impressions, how many clicks, et cetera, we are going to make decisions [00:06:00] based upon that. you have to remember here, we're fixing old content. So the thing is, in order for that blog post, that new one to exist, a lot of the steps have to be done. You have to do the research and figure out the keyword and do this, make the decision, then make the actual blog post, get the images ready for it, then do the SEO and all this. Clearly, this thing already exists, and so let's say it's, uh, there's 10...

Let's just say there's 10 checks, and 8 of them are already checked. Fantastic. You don't have to do 9 and 10 right away. Small business, you have a free afternoon for s- for some reason, or you have a free hour. Maybe you can check off number 9, and then later on in the month you can check off number 10. improving what you have is gonna be faster, more efficient, and usually cheaper. Obviously, every situation is different, but generally speaking, looking inward on your website is actually going to you time and money, usually

Mikhail: I, I think the other part of this is, like, doing these kind of lower-hanging fruit fixes has the same mindset of [00:07:00] you gotta be the f- the one that outruns the bear, at least, like, not the last one to outrun the bear. So for example, like when you have, when you have a situation where there's a bear chasing you, you know, you just can't be the fat- the slowest one.

Well, if, if there's a lot of slow people out there, and there probably is if you're in like a plumbing industry, if you're in an industry where you don't have time to work on this SEO stuff and you're trying to stand out, the low-hanging fruit can actually put you ahead by quite a bit, right? Like 'cause these guys, like they're not doing it.

Like they're not, they don't have time to spend on it. So if you're just getting in there and trying to h- either help them as a, you know, web developer, or you're the person that's opening up the business and you're trying to outrank your fellow plumbers in your local area, look at what they've been doing.

Like a lot of them probably have old websites, not updated copy, they're not SEO friendly. Just doing these minimal fixes that Matt's gonna outline in this episode is going to make you faster than the slowest person, right? And it's going to get you more leads. So there is [00:08:00] value in doing these things before you start the next phase, because what happens if you do five down the list and all of a sudden you're, you're just having leads come in all of a sudden, like nonstop, and you don't have time to work on the other ones?

I would say you, it's still valuable to continue down, but now you're doing it a little bit slower and you're probably not gonna get to creating new content. And then the, the thing that you wanna do is make sure you have your hand on the pulse and s- make sure that the s- the next guy that comes in, the newest client, the newest, you know, plumber in your, in your area, isn't all of a sudden trying to eat your lunch in the, in the SEO space.

So you gotta, you gotta keep your hand on the pulse, but overall, see what's happening. And you might not even have to get to the point where you're, you know, creating these TikToks and, uh, you know, do- doing the content strategy and all that. But if you do, great. You've already done the baseline SEO.

Matt: I think what you're describing, Mike, is, is you're, you're constantly competing with yourself. There's gonna be a section of this episode where we are gonna

look at competitors, and you mentioned that, right? You gotta kinda see what your competitors are [00:09:00] doing, what they're doing better, and it's kind of, um, they kinda influence you in a way, right?

It's friendly competition in, i- in a way, and it's also, um, it, it, it's influence and it's also inspiration, right? It's like, "Oh, they do this so much better. I should do that," right? "I should do this. I should do that." But the thing is is that, you know, your business might only need six clients. The other guy might need 20.

He has more staff or whatever it is. And if you constantly just keep competing with yourself and still take those outside influences, eventually you're just gonna keep improving and improving and improving. Whether or not you hit number one, I mean, all that matters really, especially in the small business space, or even just even in any business space, is you just wanna be successful.

Like, you wanna

be profitable, you wanna be successful, and then if you, you know, we wanna hit some certain macros or some certain goals, you know, those are, those are sometimes healthy to, to set, and that's fine. But at the end of the day, if, if you constantly improve your website, to zoom it back into that, if you constantly improve your website SEO and you're seeing traffic or m- maybe even just less traffic or e- equivalent [00:10:00] traffic but better quality traffic, where every 100 people I'm getting a lead whereas before I was getting 1,000 people and I was getting a lead, it's like, okay, well I've, you know, I've ma- I, I've improved the quality of the traffic.

I've targeted it better. And that's the type of thing, like again, you're just constantly competing with yourself, constantly striving to do better, and you're just trying to improve your own, your own sort of standing, and in this case, your own website's standing. The entire kind of reason why I mention this is that is evidence before effort And what we wanna do is we wanna see numbers and we wanna see, okay, what articles should I improve?

What things should I actually, you know, go in and fix? And what things should I actually aim for? Now, you might be thinking, "Okay, Matt's gonna start bringing up, you know, Google Analytics and maybe some other analytics software, maybe some AB testing stuff and whatever." And no, uh, we're talking low-hanging fruit. I actually think, in my opinion, that Google Analytics is overrated. [00:11:00] Now, I mean by that is Google Analytics is an amazingly great tool, but it is not a low-hanging fruit. Many people, especially if they're not super versed in analytics, are going to l- go on there and they're gonna look at the sessions, maybe the active users or the users.

They're gonna look at a couple of pieces of information to ultimately determine how many people landed on their site. People who are a little bit more advanced may look at what pages generated some traffic, and that's it. That's what they're gonna be looking for. that's what I mean by it's overrated.

Is the tool overrated overall? Absolutely not. Google Ana- Google Analytics is extremely powerful, very, very useful tool, but f- but in the hands of those that know how to use it or have the time to use it, generating proper reports, comparing old months and things like that. actually think there's another product out there that you should be using that's a little bit more of a low-hanging fruit and is easier, espec- is easier to read, especially for those that are not as tech-savvy or SEO-savvy, and it's Google Search Console, [00:12:00] also a Google product. Now, the thing with Google Search Console is, this is not gonna be a, a tutorial on Google Search Console by any means, any stretch of the imagination. The thing with Google Search Console is it describes your relationship on Google Search. So when we say Google it, we don't really think of it, but Google Search is a product that Google has or Alphabet has. when you try to do your SEO, most people Most people are aiming to be good on Google, everything else just sort of falls into place. DuckDuckGo kind of falls into place. Bing falls, kind of falls into place. Most people care about Google. They're not being like, "I only want to be number one on Bing.

I don't care about Google." That's a really rare statement. If you're one of those people, then obviously this tip makes no sense to you, but Google Search Console a great tool if you want a good relationship with Google Search. Now why? Why Google Search Console? Google Search Console is focused on your website's relationship with Google Search, meaning that product, right? Now, the thing is, is you can very quickly find out [00:13:00] some really key pieces of information. What searches are you appearing in? pages are appearing in Search? How many impressions are you getting? How many clicks are you getting? your approximate average position? Whether Google is actually even indexing your pages.

You can even request indexing on there. You can find potential indexing or search problems. For websites that use a lot of subdomains, I've noticed that for some, for a couple of clients, they were, "Why isn't this showing up? Why isn't that showing up?" Get into Google Search Console, and a certain subdomain wasn't indexing properly.

It's like, okay, this indicates an- another issue, which is less low-hanging fruit, but still, it's like quick check, and I was able to be like, "Yo guys, we got a problem on, you know, X, you know, so-and-so subdomain here," and, you know, away we went to go kind of fix it. So to me, I think it's easier for a beginner to use Google Search Console over top of something like Google Analytics, and Google is constantly updating Google Search Console. So the thing [00:14:00] with Google Search Console is now you can actually add other properties. So an example of a property would be your website, but you can also add other ones now re- more recently. Earlier this year, they added the ability to add social channels, so you can log into some of your social media accounts and get some information from there too. Now, I think I'll probably in the future do, like, a Google Search Console episode, I'll, like, kind of get into it. But the reason why I wanted to mention this is because a lot of the low-hanging fruit is gonna mention numbers, and this is where you're actually gonna get a fair bit of your numbers, in my opinion.

Google Search Console's extremely valuable. Very,

very valuable.

Mikhail: would you, say that Google Search Console is something that, like, a l- a small business owner should invest time in learning?

Matt: Yes

Mikhail: Okay

Matt: If they're aiming, if they're aiming to appear on Google,

yes, I would say that. The reason why is because it is less intense than Go- something like Google Analytics. They don't have to go in and sort of generate reports and mess around with it. Um, they can just go into Google Search Console, and it's, it's, [00:15:00] in my opinion, it's, it's very easy to set up. Um, I just set up a new property just yesterday, and I just added a TXT record to my DNS, and i- if you have a developer, they'll be able to set that up quickly. If, if you know how to do it, you know, you can do it. There's guides out there type of thing. Please be very careful if you're messing with DNS, 'cause DNS issues can be a real pain and can take a lot of stuff down. so if you're not sure, ask an expert. But the thing is, is once you're set up, in my opinion, like Google Search Console is extremely valuable. Assuming that they want to be on Google, it's extremely, it's extremely valuable because what, what it, what it does is it gives you, it, it gives you, and this will come up throughout the low-hanging fruits, but it gives you an impression, literally a, a number of impressions. Um, are we showing up under the, you know, the web design? Like if someone types in just web design into Google, it might say, "Well, you're getting 100,000 impressions and two clicks." oh, okay, well, something, something's gone awry there, right? Um, you can, you also can get different insights from them.

There's actually like [00:16:00] an insights tab where it'll say like, "Hey, like these pages grew and these pages fell," and then you can make your own correlation between, okay, maybe those pages need to be improved, the ones that fell, or maybe there's a shift in the market and you can kinda like, you know, see what's going on. In my opinion, in my opinion, Google Search Console is something that a small business owner should get used to using because honestly, it's not that difficult. It really, really is not that difficult, and you can very quickly and easily, and I mean Google Analytics to an extent as well, but it's very quickly and easily you can check certain URLs.

So let's just say, for example, you wrote a new blog post and you want to know if it's indexed on Google. Google Search Console will tell you. Is it indexed? Is it showing up on results? Like is Google aware of it? Has Google crawled it? 'Cause like I've had stuff where a link has been crawled, but it's not b- it's not actually showing up on the SERP.

It'll let you know that, "Hey, you know, this isn't showing up," and then you can r- request a reindex or whatever it is that you need to do, and you can do that right from inside [00:17:00] of the, of the Search Console. So if you want a good relationship with Google, I, I think that Google Search Console is great. Now, do you still need a Google Analytics just, just to tell you like how many people have actually visited your website?

Yes. 'Cause remember, this is a relationship with Google Search. So if you're a person that's super, super, super heavy into like you go to like markets, like physical markets, and you have a QR code and people are constantly scanning your QR, your QR code, it,

Mikhail: Search console won't give you that.

Matt: up in Google Analytics as a

direct link, like someone's effectively, effectively typed in your URL and has shown up on a landing page that you made or whatever it is that they've scanned into.

It is not a relationsh- ship with Google Search. But if you're worrying about getting rankings, helping your SEO, Google Search Console, I would say So let's jump into the first thing here. Now, again, I've made 10 of these. I'm not guaranteeing we're gonna get into all of them today, of course, but number one is [00:18:00] improve pages that are already close to ranking. what you wanna do inside a Google Search Console is you actually wanna look through the queries and pages that you're already appearing for, and what you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna wanna pay particular, a particular attention to relevant searches where you're somewhere around position, let's say like 8 to 20. Now, this isn't a hard rule. You'll eventually start getting like a, a feel for this stuff, right? But we wanna just start looking at pages that are close, meaning, again, this is data that we have. We know that I'm ranking, we know that I'm ranking on page eight, maybe I'm ranking on page 18, whatever. These are...

This is hard data. Okay, Google's showing my link, so there's no problem there. There's no, like, technical issue that's completely blocking my index. So, okay, I know where I'm at, right? Okay, great. We already know that Google knows the page exists. We know that Google knows what the page is about, and it- we already know that it considers it relevant enough to show, right? And that's very, very different. You're starting on the front foot. Many people will look at an 8 to 20 and go, "That piece of content's a write-off. I'm out [00:19:00] of here." That's a mistake because look at all the information that you can get from this. know, you know, you know a whole bunch of stuff about it, and you know that Google is actually indexing it, right? So let- I'll give... Let's throw an example together. So imagine that you run a landscaping company. Now, you already have a page that's about backyard landscaping. Search Console shows that the term, the search term, when people type this in, backyard landscaping Hamilton, you're getting 1,800 impressions, and your average position, position, excuse me, is 12.4, and you're getting 14 clicks.

So for every 1800, 1,800 impressions, you're getting 14 clicks. Now, that's interesting, right? Now, instead of cr- in create- instead of creating another, you know, complete landscaping article, what we should be actually doing is investigating that page. Does it properly answer the search? Is the information current? Ask yourself these questions. Could you, could you better add... Like, or excuse me. Could you add better examples or photos? Is the title compelling? 'Cause there's a little bit of [00:20:00] salesmanship on that Google SERP. Even though Google can change that title, there's a little bit of that salesmanship there, right?

Do relevant, do relevant pages internally link to it, right? Does the page actually have enough local relevance to Hamilton? Did you just take a generic template and put Hamilton in a couple of spots and it's not actually, you know, really Hamilton related, right? what... Now that you've asked yourself those questions, y- you're probably gonna see some red flags, And there's another low-hanging fruit that we're gonna be, which I'll talk about now, uh, but it'll be covered kind of more in depth later on, is- What you need to do is you need to start taking a look at, at the people that are above your position. So what you need to do is you, you know, you can go in and, like, literally do a Google search yourself incognito.

If you're not in that area, you can even, like, VPN as close as you can, and then, like, try to get as close to what an actual user in Hamilton looking up that search term would search to try to get the same, as close to, and it's not gonna be perfect [00:21:00] because it's algorithmic, as close to the same SERP as them. take a look and say, "Okay, what do these other guys do? What's number one doing? What's number two? What's number three? What's number four? What's number five?" I like to do five, and I like to take a look at their commonalities, but I also take a look at the uniqueness of them. 'Cause sometimes it's like, oh, they're all doing... They're all showing pricing. They're all showing pictures. They're all showing YouTube, and I don't have those. Okay, those are probably great things to add. But what's

number one doing? Does number

Mikhail: just ju-

Matt: thing?

Yeah, sorry, Mike, go ahead.

Mikhail: just to d- just to define, SERP is search engine results page, just for people that are, uh- Yeah, yeah ... that are on, on the fly and being like, "Oh, what's SERP?" Yeah. Keep going.

Matt: No, it's a good, that's a good, yeah, that's a good call. So, so, like, but you, you, you see where, you see how this is... Look at all the data and things that we're discussing. We didn't talk about creating a new article. We're not creating anything new right now. Maybe you need to write a new paragraph, but that's a heck of a lot better than writing a whole new thing and figuring out [00:22:00] what to write and everything else. Let's take a look at low-hanging fruit number two, lots of impressions, very few clicks. So another opportunity to look for in your Google Search Console is gonna be high impressions and a very, very low click rate. So the first one, the first one is trying to improve getting up on the Google pages, right?

Like, your actual position. This one here, you're taking a look and you're going, "Okay, I have a lot of impressions and I have a low click-through rate." Now, that sounds similar to the previous example, but again, like, different goals here, right? So Google is already showing your page, right? So let's just say this i- this thing is ranking, right?

So let's just say you've worked on that landscaping page and now you're no longer on position 12. You're position... You're in the top five. You're in position one hopefully, but you're in the top five. But let's say you still have that issue, 1,800 impressions, 14 clicks, Lots of impressions, very few clicks. So people are sh- so Google's happy with the, with the page, clearly. Google's happy with it for that search term. What the heck is going on? We need to do an investigation again, and now we need to start looking at some other stuff. our page title look [00:23:00] like, right? How accurately does the title represent the content? Was it a little clickbaity and you just kinda almost tricked Google into getting you there, right? But people pick up on it and they're like, "The heck with this." Then maybe they're bouncing away or they're not clicking at all, right? Not clicking at all in this case, very few clicks. Does it match the search intent? This is a big one that people miss. So the thing is, is that somebody, let's say, that looks up, uh, like bird watching. I wanna do bird watching in my backyard. A search term might be like bird watching backyard Ontario, Canada. The search might be for that person that they wanna buy some birdhouses for bird watching in their backyard. the search intent might also be they're just trying to look up and see what birds they could potentially see. So the information-heavy websites might win there, or the AI overview might win there, right? So you need to, you need to kinda get into the mind and, like, think it through a little bit and say, like, "Okay, what's the search [00:24:00] intention here? search..." And there's some keywords that you can use and, like, we don't-- it's, you know, kinda going beyond the scope of this episode, but things like if you say the best laptop, the best birdhouse, the best landscaping company. When you start using terms like best, it usually, it usually signifies that someone's ready to buy, like they need a landscaper, and so they're looking for the best one.

They need a birdhouse, so they're looking for the best one, right? And there's other little terms and stuff that we can go through here. So let's go through an example for this low-hanging fruit number two, lots of impressions, very few clicks. Let's just say your result appears ten thousand times. percent of searchers click it, which means that you're getting one hundred clicks. what we wanna do is we want to compete with ourselves. So you ask yourself all these questions. You do your investigation in your page title. You try to, you know, match your search intent, right? And how it compares to... I me- I forgot to mention that earlier. How to compare, uh, how your result compares to others around it.

So even if you're at position one, you're getting very few clicks. It's like, okay, [00:25:00] what are the other guys doing? Like, is their search intent all different? Are we all kind of, like, on wobbly ground, or is everyone else selling, is everyone else, like, selling services and I'm just telling you about a service?

Like, you know, is something, you know, something wishy-washy here, right? So the thing is, is that you wanna constantly compete with yourself. if you do some improvements and you improve from one percent of searchers click it to two percent, that's two hundred visits. This is the same number of impressions 'cause

Mikhail: Mhm

Matt: search term is, let's just say it stays the same. Obviously, users can, you know, stop searching for that. same number of impressions, potentially similar ranking, but potentially double the traffic. For a small business, that could be three, four, five, ten, fifteen, twenty leads, depending on your niche, depending on the season, depending on whatever it is you're making, right? The thing is, is don't... You don't wanna get obsessed here. You don't wanna get obsessed with, you know, g- having a good s- a g- a good universal CTR or click-through rate, right? [00:26:00] CTR, again, or click-through rate, varies enormously depending on position, query, SERP features, et cetera. Something like an AI overview comes in. We had an article on HTML of the things that was getting twenty-six hundred, I think it was a month or twenty-six hundred a week. I don't remember. It's still ranking as number one. It now gets twenty-three a month after the AI overview showed up. So you don't want to get, like, super obsessed with this, and that's why I mentioned the one to- the 1% to the 2%. You're kind of, like, fighting yourself, right? You're competing with yourself. Let's try to improve ourselves. Let's try to expose our, like, expose our, like, contact form and our, our website and our service offering or our products to more people because that might be more people that are gonna bite. And even just one or two more customers are extremely valuable to a small business. So instead, you want to look for pages where the numbers suggest there may be an opportunity, right? Don't j- jump in and go crazy and be like, "Oh, my click-through rate across [00:27:00] all my pages is this and that." No, no. Zoom in. Okay, let's try to get this one up by half a percent or 1%. Let's try to get this page up by 1% or half percent. Break that big goal into smaller goals. Don't get obsessed with a really good CTR

Mikhail: And I, I think that's solid advice from the perspective of, like, management of your time, right? Because if you try to jump in and look at all of your pages all at once, you're probably not gonna do a very good job across any of your pages. Whereas if you go in and, like, the mindset should be, "Okay, which page has generated leads for me that actually converted to clients?"

Matt: Right

Mikhail: That's probably only a handful at most pages, maybe one or two, if it's, like, a couple of blogs. If you find a couple blogs that you know have generated you clients, those are the ones you, you should focus on to generate, like, a little bit more. Get a percent up, you know. Get anything that you can to generate more leads on those specific pages, because you have verified [00:28:00] proof that you've generated income from those pages.

And that-- Like, for a small business owner, that's really the most important part. Obviously, you can min/max o- other things like impressions and, you know, getting into the zeitgeist, and maybe that does lead to a trickle-down effect of clients at some point. But y- with a, without a team of marketers working for you, you only have so much attention, so you should be really focused on the more direct lead to actual, like, client pipeline, and this is a way for you to be able to do that w- with the right focus.

Matt: Well, the thing too is you know your business as well, and sometimes your business is gonna be seasonal. So we have a, we have a guy who, you know, really benefits from a simple landing page and a Google My Business card that's well advertised and everything else. the thing is, is you'll see his, his calls drop 900% in the later months of the year, or the earlier months of the year, excuse me, in the [00:29:00] spring, because his business is a more of a cold season thing. Late fall and in the snow, in the winter, that's where his business shines, and then the calls go up. 900% drop for some people would be like, "Oh my God, you know, what are we gonna do?" But it's normal. It's part of his business. But here's the thing, you have the numbers. So maybe next year you go, "Okay, I, I lost 900.

That's fine 'cause, you know, I'm closed for the season. Fair enough. I'm gonna come up to the season soon." Well, let's try to get up back to 900. Let's try to get up back to like 901, 950, 925, whatever's reasonable for your business. Difference- different scopes, different, different scales. And so you might go, "Okay, you know what?

I'm in the off-season right now. Let me go into my articles, let me go into my content, and target and improve my winter, my cold season offerings. Let me go to... Let me go look at them and try to improve them," because if I can improve them now and Google starts to pick it up, because who knows how long Google's gonna take. Google could take two [00:30:00] weeks, could take a day, could take three months to start indexing everything and fixing everything. Get it all ready. Now maybe you've improved in the off-season while all your competitors were hanging out and being like, "Ah, we're number one. Who cares?" And now you've improved the next year.

So now y- now the next, you know, the next cold season comes and goes and now you're down 1,000. That's good 'cause you went up another 100% on when the cold season began. That's what you want, right? You just kinda wanna constantly kinda compete and fight with yourself. Another thing that you're gonna wanna do, number three here, low-hanging fruit number three, is you're gonna wanna look at searches that you're accidentally ranking for.

This is actually my favorite part of Google Search Console because I'll go in there and be like, you know, like, "Apples? Like, we're a web development. You know, what's going on here?" Now, it's obviously usually not that crazy, but it is sometimes c- a little bit. Uh, we, we've shown up in, like, weird news things where it'll be like, you know, such and such politician did this, and I'm like, "This is a CSS article.

Like, what happened?" And just, like, weird little things. But, you know, kind of the funny ones and little, like, weird anomalies that have happened once or twice, uh, [00:31:00] aside, what you can do in Google Search Console, you can open up an individual page, meaning, like, your individual page. You choose a piece of content, right? You can go and you can take a look at the queries that are generating impressions for it. Not clicks, impressions. you'll often discover is the s- there's gonna be searches in there that you never intended to actually target. You're just showing up in these searches potentially thousands of times, right? Now, some will be l- be irrelevant, like the little funny ones or just things that you, like, literally don't care about. There's always gonna be some sort of, like, crossover 'cause all this stuff is sort of malleable, right? But others, other one, like, as you go through these search queries, others can expose information your page is missing. So the thing is, is let's just say, and I have an example. Let's just say you wrote a guide up and it's, and it's titled How Much Does a Small Business Cost? So you go into your Search Console and y- and it shows that you're appearing for maintenance cost, monthly website fees, domain cost for small business, web [00:32:00] hosting cost, how much does it cost to keep a website running? So maybe the page mentions some of these things briefly, but maybe it doesn't actually mention anything at all. Google has that correlation based on user behavior and all the time it's, you know, been in the industry where it goes, okay, people who are looking for how much does a small business cost, they're also interested in web hosting costs and this and that, this and that, right? So now what you can do, and what some SEO people will mention, and sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't They'll say, "Okay, we need to create five thin articles. We need to go in and we need to go, and we need to target, you know, monthly web- monthly website fees, domain costs for small business, website hosting costs, things like that," right?

But again, this is a low-hanging fruit episode, and you're probably, you know, time conscious and everything else. And also thin articles are kind of a little bit fly by night in my opinion. They're great sometimes and not great some other times. now you can ask, ask yourself this question instead. I'm already...

This article that I wrote, how much does a small business website cost? I wrote that already. It's [00:33:00] already done. It doesn't have anything doesn't mention a single thing about hosting, but I'm showing up in these hosting search terms. Could my existing article answer some of these questions better? it answer stuff about hosting? Could it answer stuff about how to keep things running? things running is different than hosting. Hosting's a part of keeping things running, but what about content updates? What about security updates? Do you even need those things? These are questions that people are gonna ask, and you may be in those affiliate searches, right?

So ma- you know, make an assessment there and say, you know, "Should I be writing a thin article, or should I be adding this information into an article, into a piece of content that I'm already showin'... This content is already showing on these search terms." Let's try to get a few more clicks, right? Maybe there's 1,000 impressions, 10,000 impressions on that one search term. I'm not getting barely any clicks. Let's add that in there. You know, let's add that little bit in there. Let's see if we can, let's see if we can't get this, you know, ranking up in those various search terms, right? Google is already, by you, by you seeing this inside a Google Search Console, [00:34:00] Google is already associating your account or your content, excuse me, with these searches. already, it's already affiliating it. So again, take the information and then act upon the information. Act upon the real numbers that you're seeing instead of just shooting into the dark Low-hanging fruit number four. Uh, actually Google the thing that you are trying to work for, that you're trying to rank for. You literally go and Google it. Mentioned this a little bit earlier. Search Console tells you what is happening, right? However, the SERP, the search engine result page, can actually help you investigate why. So take one of those promising queries that you do and actually search for it while you're in incognito mode, right? Go incognito. You don't want your algorithmic results. You want a generic result. Now, you're-- now, you might say, Matt, like everyone, you know, generally, quote-unquote, everyone's just logged in.

Not everyone's incognitoing." But you're trying to, when you're doing SEO, [00:35:00] you're trying to appeal to the widest net, and so when you go incognito, you're not signed into an account and, and whatnot. Google is casting a wide, like a very wide net. Now, I do wanna say something. Google generally knows where you are, so, and knows what device you're using and things like that. So it's not perfect. It's not like it's the most generic. Like they'll know if I type in car mechanic, they'll look in Canada for me. They'll look in Canada. They'll look in Ontario, Canada. Like they'll generally know. So it's not perfect, the thing is, is remove at the, as much as the personal stuff as you can to get that wide net, right? again, take one of those promising queries that you found in Google Search Console and actually search it while you're in the incognito mode. Now, don't obsess over the exact position you see. Instead, at what Google has decided should win. If it isn't you, why are those guys winning? Look at the organic results.

Look right at the, look right at the organic results. Who's beating you Open those pages and investigate them. [00:36:00] And don't just take like generic little things from them. people go in and go, "Oh, I'm writing, you know, 1,500-word articles, and everyone else is writing 2,000. Like, I gotta write 2,000."

Maybe, that might be part of it, 100%. But what do you write in those extra words? Like, what is this, right? my opinion, what you should be doing is you should try to determine why their page is more useful or more useful in the eyes of Google. Ask yourself a bunch of questions again. Do they answer the question faster or better in some way? Do they cover something that you've missed? something where the search intent lines up with that thing that you've missed. Is their information more current? Do they have better examples? Do they have better pictures? pictures, higher definition pictures, whatever. Is it original research or data?

Like, are they citing actual information? Are they like citing, you know, respected statistics places? Like, I don't know, Stats Can is the only one that comes to mind. Are they, are they repor- are they saying, you know, "Based upon this, because of Stats Can, we've come to this, come to this [00:37:00] conclusion"? And like that's a, you know, there's some data there.

There's some like, okay, like a thir- you know, an independent third party, like Stats Can probably isn't helping this website out, right? So they're using like the study from Stats Can to then, to then like, you know, justify whatever it is they're talking about, right? Does the... Is the page better organized? Are they satisfying a slightly different search intent than you assumed, right? And here's the thing is like Google is already making these people beat you. If you're not number one, these people are beating you on that search term And again, the SERP is a bit malleable, so this isn't the end-all be-all, but like, you know, starting to put all this together, like if you don't wanna log into Ser- Google Search Console one day or whatever, like go in and actually look at the real SERP, in my opinion.

I get tons of information from there. Now here's the thing. Don't start plagiarizing and copying your competitors. Based on those questions I mentioned, and probably more will come to your own mind for your own individual industry or your own ideas [00:38:00] over time, diagnose why they are beating you. That's what you want. You don't wanna just say, "Oh, they're doing, you know, more words. I gotta do more words." What are they doing? every single one of the, the pages at the top are the ones that are beating you. Maybe they include pricing or they have a comparison table, or they have original examples. Maybe they answer the page like above, above the fold, like they're right-- Instead of having like a huge like a hundred, you know, a hundred percent height, uh, like hero, and then you have to scroll a bit to see it, you know, like maybe they answer the question right away, right? Maybe they have some sort of interactivity on the page. Maybe there's a calculator or a tool. Something in the landscaping business, you might say, "Oh, you know, maybe there's a little calculator there," where it's like, "Well, how big is your yard? How big is the garden you want? Here's a rough estimate," right then and there. to see ballpark, maybe that's right there, and so people are going to the page, sitting on it, and actually using it, right? This-- All this stuff does not mean that you actually need to copy exactly what they're doing, right? But it does tell you [00:39:00] something deeper about what Google is valuing and what people d- using that search term that you typed in to get to this SERP, what they actually want, what the search intention is. And then you take that information, and you, you skew and you adjust and you change your, uh, articles and your content. Don't copy, don't be plagiarizing, just quite literally, "Oh, okay, Google likes calculators. Maybe we need to look at get- getting a calculator made up. Maybe we need to look at getting a little app made up for our site, a little widget that's interactive or something." Let's not copy their... You know what? Actually, I don't like their calculator. I don't like my competitor's calculator. Well, l- l- it only calculates the top, the top line value. Let me give, let me give you two values. Let me give you, you know, the bronze and the, and the, and the silver package and the gold one maybe or whatever it is, right? Stuff like that. Number five, low-hanging fruit number five. Look at the AI overview too. So we talked a lot about the SERP, and the SERP we're obviously talking about ranking the actual pages, but here's [00:40:00] the thing, it's an elephant in the room. The AI overview is there. It is, it is, uh, taking away clicks. I mean, it just straight up is. And, uh, some people are scared of it, some people have embraced it. Many people are confused by it 'cause it's brand new and they don't really know what to do here. If Google displays an AI overview for the search term that you're te- you're checking on incognito, I encourage you to read it. I would actually like to throw something else here in really quick. If you do a search on Google in incognito you wanna go do another search term later, close the incognito and open a fresh one. That's just my recommendation. That's what I do. Anyway, moving on. done your little search, you know, you've done your search term. An AI overview pops up right at the top, or maybe even down the page rarely, but usually right at the top. Okay. Oh, great, now no one's gonna click on my article, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Possibly, but here's the thing, there might be some rich information here, so I actually read that AI overview. What information did [00:41:00] Google decide to surface, and from where? 'Cause it usually will say, oh, you know, like, card nose will appear in backyards in, in this season.

Well, who, who wrote that? It has a little citation there. What questions does the AI overview answer? 'Cause it's trying to answer the search intent. It has a bunch of information on the search intent, it's trying to answer that. What topics does it emphasize? A long AI overview will have a fold. Like, it'll say like, "Hey," like, "click here to," like, "read more," or whatever. What's, what's the, what's at the top? What is it surfacing? What's it emphasizing? What sources is it referencing? I already mentioned that, a little citation. But take a look a little closer. Is it, you know, quoting this site, and then another site, and then another site? Or is it s- is it doing all the same site, or multiple citations from the same site? 'Cause that, that person has more opportunities to get clicked, right? Check whether your competitors are appearing as sources, and for what information are they showing up? And also take a look at whether it covers information that's [00:42:00] missing from your page So for example, type in, you know, landsca- like backyard landscaping Hamilton. overview suddenly says, "Backyard landscaping typically costs $1,000." Clearly, the search intent, at least the, what, that what Google is trying to come up with or what it thinks is happening, is people wanna know the price, generally speaking, ballpark. Where did it get that $1,000? Did it get it from your competitor and you have no pricing? Maybe you should put some pricing in your, in your article. I have another example here. So for example, let's say you're, you're l- you're targeting how much does a small business website cost? just say the AI overview heavily discusses initial development costs, it talks about hosting, it talks about domains, it talks about maintenance, it talks about ongoing costs, right? maybe your article, your piece of content only discusses the initial cost of building the website. That's a pretty good indication that your [00:43:00] content may not completely satisfy the search intent. And so by you adjusting your content, think about this, it's a double whammy. at an AI overview on the SERP. But what else is on the SERP? The actual pages that are in a rank, that are being ranked. if you adjust your content, you might show up in that AI overview, and you might climb up the search results. You might start getting more impressions. You might start getting more clicks from those impressions. Get a bigger share of those impressions, right? Now, I will say this and I, and I... This, it's a kind of a reiteration, but I do think it's very important. Check the SERP that your a- that your audience actually sees as close as possible, okay? Again, the SERP is, like, very algorithmic. Google has got this down over years and years and decades and decades and things like this. if you, let's say, are selling services primarily in Canada, so, like, you know, you're in, you're in Canada, fantastic. So you can just go incognito and your Google searches as if you're in Canada, and you can kinda figure it out. [00:44:00] But let's just say for this particular product or this particular service you're offering, you are offering it to the United States. I'd open an incognito and also, uh, before I did that, I would make sure that my, I'm VPNed into America, if I can, as close as possible to what the SERP will actually be for your audience. This is an imperfect science. It's, it's, you know, if you search today versus search tomorrow versus search in a month, it's gonna be different. But get as close as you can. Like we're try- we're casting a net here. We're not gonna catch everything, but we wanna catch as many leads and, like, potential customers as possible.

Mikhail: One, one thing I do wanna mention as well, um, that's probably one of the harder things to do in this, is to have patience. A lot of times you'll make a change, and then you'll check tomorrow and be like, "Did that change anything?" It's not gonna work like that pretty much ever. Your-- A change that you made today might have an impact on your business in a month [00:45:00] at probably best case scenario.

Realistically, you're talking months of waiting before you can see a, a decent impact. So that's why you, you kinda have to... It's not one change and then wait six months and then make another change. It's like, okay, let's have a plan for fixing a bunch of these things and then reevaluate in, you know, a month, three weeks, six weeks, whatever you want th-that, that time set.

But you need to do this kind of evaluation on a cadence, and expecting results in a short time window is going to lead you down the path of changing one thing 15 million times and getting no output out, out of that

Matt: It's actually, it's actually like a really good, a very, very, very good point, especially for people who are strapped for time, because we've done this. In the

early days, it's like, "I did this." Like, I'm scared to do another change in case it hurts or helps, you know, when we're just getting into the industry just learning. So I better wait, and then you wait three months, just like, "Oh, that was great. [00:46:00] Okay, now let's do one more." When in the meantime, I could've had maybe eight changes or 10 changes that were good and... Or, or at least get the data, right? Like, maybe I did 10 changes and 2 were good and 8 were bad, or hopefully 8 were good and 2 were bad. Um, and then you can, you can see that a, like an extremely, extremely good point. Uh, the-- I, I always tell clients, especially if they do a major, uh, like a site overhaul, it really depends on how much Google like indexes and crawls and yada, yada your site. I say three months.

Mikhail: Yeah.

Matt: minimum, three

months is like long, and like you said, Mike, like a month is probably your sweet spot, and that changes.

Like, you might be listening to this in the future, and like Google completely changed what they do. It, it, it's variable, but generally speaking, in the last like five, six years, that's what I've generally told clients, and I've-- We, we recently had a client do a major renovation. Three months later, traffic up thirty-three percent. it, it, it still holds. The timeline still holds.

But they were doing improvements the entire time is the point of me mentioning that. They were doing [00:47:00] improvements constantly, constantly, constantly, and there was a couple things where it's like, eh, probably actually kinda sucked. It's like, okay, well now we know.

We need the data. I mean, now we

Mikhail: Exactly.

Mm-hmm

Matt: And obviously don't be doing stupid things like, "Let's just delete the site and rebuild." It's like, hang on, hold up. Number six Update old content that is still performing. It's probably the most pure version of this episode, I guess, like go back and, and fix things up, right? assume every old article needs to be replaced with something new. Now, I know that some people will say, "Well, no, I don't do that. I just replace the whole thing with the same URL or the same slug." That's, you know, that's a, that's a strategy that sometimes you can work if you need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But, um, I think what you should do is you should this first. Look for old content that is still getting clicks, it's still getting impressions, it's ranking reasonably well, it's attracting backlinks, et cetera, right? And then ask yourself, "Okay, what do I need to maintain here? You know, is there anything outdated? Are the examples still relevant? Have products or tools [00:48:00] changed? Are there any new questions that we should answer? Um, have competitors, you know, created significantly better resources in, you know, the months or the years since this thing was written?"

Right? Sometimes you have an article that you've already invested in, you've spent all the time and money and et cetera making the thing, it just needs maintenance instead of replacement. I've seen people just rip out a whole page and then put it in and be like, "Oh, no, no, I, like it's just, I just did some maintenance on it 'cause I kept the URL the same."

Yeah, but you rewrote the whole dang thing. You know? Now all the data is all messed up. Like, if you didn't take a look at what, what, like how that old article was doing in, in ranks and why, and like try to determine why it was doing that, now you've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and the only commonality we have is the general topic and the URL. I mean, that's great way, great, great place to start, but we had way more data points before. have to do some maintenance here. You already did the hard part by having the content created. It, it was created, you got it indexed, it has some sort of [00:49:00] search visibility. Why would you abandon the investment? if you were investing in the stock market and you wanted 10% and you got 7% instead, I mean, maybe you would abandon those things and go somewhere else. But if, uh, the whole market took a huge dump and everyone else is getting 6% and you're getting 7%, does it suck that you're 3% below what you wanted?

Yeah. But I'm gonna keep my 7% 'cause I'm, I'm a percent above you So, you know, it's kind of the same, the same idea there. Low-hanging fruit number seven. low-hanging. hate doing this, but it has to be done. It is look at the pages that are already performing well because you want to improve your internal linking. look at those pages that are already performing well, and you look and you say, "Are there relevant opportunities to link from those pages that are doing well to other important content?" want to look for is you want to look for orphaned pages, you want to look for important pages with very few internal links, you want to look for related articles that do not link to each other, you want to look for generic anchor text like [00:50:00] "link here" and make that more descriptive.

That's good for accessibility, but also for SEO as well. And then you want to do some internal linking, right? You want to start linking your articles together. An example would be, just say, for example, um, Mike and I have done a podcast on CSS and the basics around CSS. So CSS basics, simple enough. There's some show notes there. Okay? There's a page for that on htmlallthethings.com. If I write a blog post that's about CSS basics, those pages should link to each other. Makes sense. Makes sense. It's easy. I hate doing it. I hate going back and being like, "Well, it relates to this," and then, "Oh, great, I have too many links," and I just don't like doing it.

It's a personal thing, but it is absolutely extremely valuable

Mikhail: So something that AI could probably handle pretty easily, just like finding relationships between stuff.

Matt: I would say, yeah. I would

Mikhail: Yeah,

I,

yeah, I think, I think you can get some of this at least done by AI, which could be nice 'cause this is a pain in the ass. This is a big pain in [00:51:00] the butt

Matt: Especially for bigger sites. Like the thing with, with small businesses is I've been doing interlinking for so long now that, you know, some of these small businesses will have, you know, 10, maybe

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: 12 articles. And so, like I kinda do it in the first pass I've interlinked them. Like, like I've done them.

Mikhail: Угу

Matt: uh, uh, as, as needed just 'cause it's kinda second nature. But like in terms of going back, like, oh yeah, like... And, and HTMLAllTheThings.com, like it's-- I'm currently kind of like playing with like renovating it and like there's probably a bunch of interlinking things that are missing 'cause we have

Mikhail: Oh yeah

Matt: and people have sent us things and we've like put it up.

It's been up there for years and, you know, it's, it's a bigger website in terms of the amount of pages than many of the websites that we build for people just because like we are-- we do help a lot of small businesses and they don't need... You know, we m- we make what they need. We don't make things that are, you know, superfluous for them Now the thing, the thing with interlinking, you might think like, "Well, who cares?"

Like, you know, "No one's gonna click these links," and whatever. That's not true, you know? Interlinking absolutely helps users discover relevant information, keeps them on your website, which is great, right? It helps [00:52:00] Google itself, so this is an SEO thing, it helps Google understand relationships between your pages. So something like you do a beginner guide and then maybe a, an advanced guide. There's literally a por- portion there maybe where you write, "Hey, if you're ready and you're, you're confident with these basics, there's-- we have an advanced CSS guide here," and you link to it. Now Google goes, "Oh, okay. have some CSS, good, like beginner and advanced. If they're both good, cool." You know? There's some-- there's a relationship built there. It helps communicate, interlinking helps communicate which pages on your website are important and related. It's really im- it is really important. Google is not just like eating up websites and like looking at URL individually.

They are looking at the interlinking. They are looking at who's linking, and this is proven not just with interlinking, but also with backlinks. Backlinks are a pain to get, but backlinks are very valuable. If you're into SEO, you know that they're, it's very valuable, and I don't really talk about backlinks barely at all in this episode because it's not a low-hanging fruit.

They're usually a pain to get. But that's a relationship. My point is that it's [00:53:00] a relationship. And so could you imagine like the interlinking of like someone backlinks to your article, Google hops from their thing to there, so their thing to your website, now there's a backlink, and then you're interlinking? Now Google's figuring out like, "Oh yeah, okay," like, you know, "This is like a, this is a big topic. This is a big thing," and th- like, you know, "Maybe we should rank these pages higher. Maybe we should show them in AI overviews. I understand what's going on on this website. Maybe I need to index this more, 'cause this page is updated frequently." You're showing Google that there's a relationship there, and you're also getting people to click it that, you know, you have some, you have some a- additional traffic through that means as well. Only, uh, only a few more here. I guess we might as well rip through them. Number eight, fix search intent mismatches.

So sometimes you're ranking, but your page isn't quite sure what the searcher wants. means that that's another reason to actually inspect the SERP. So maybe you created a blog article, but Google overwhelmingly ranks product pages and service pages. So this number [00:54:00] eight kinda sounds similar to like a previous example, but this is like a categorical issue is what I'm identifying here, okay? Maybe you created a service page, but Google wants tutorials and guides and information, right? You might be optimizing literally the wrong type of page categorically for the entire query. So before you start creating content, I say actually go in, and like I mentioned, go and SER- like actually look at the SERP itself.

This is what I like to do for this. Go look at the actual SERP in your incognitos and things that we already mentioned, and go and you take a look. And get at least a broad, you know, insight on like, okay, like, what are we doing here? Because it'd, it'd be like you were at like a charity event and everyone's handing out pamphlets, but you're the one fool that's selling pamphlets.

It's like, dude, it's a charity event. Like, this is... Like, why are you, why are you selling pamphlets while everyone else is just giving out information for free, right? So you don't-- You wanna, like, kind of fit in in the proper places y- and, and categorically you could misfire in that way. And so and check it out, like I just mentioned there. [00:55:00] Low-hanging fruit number nine: consolidate content that is competing with itself. You have multiple pages, you have lots of... maybe even lots of pages. Your

Mikhail: Yeah.

Matt: could be fighting each other. One blog post could be fighting another, right? More content is not automatically better. We've already kind of touched on that by talking about the thin, the thin articles, the thin pages, where it's like, let's have little, like, have a thin page here, a thin page here, a thin page here, or we could kind of consolidate it depending on the search query in that. More content isn't always better, right? Over time, over time, and especially as we start getting more and more content on our pages, we can start accumulating things like similar blog posts, maybe old landing pages, things that we forgot, multiple pages targeting almost the same topic. And so instead of creating yet another page, could take-- start taking a look at some stuff, and we could go, "Hey, could two older articles actually become one stronger resource? This one has a lot of great pricing information. This one has a lot of great pictures." [00:56:00] Uh, okay, where do we wanna go with this, right? Now, it is a bit of a dance. It is difficult because you're gonna get... You're gonna kinda give up one of the pages and com- comp- like, put them together. But if you look at your Google Analytics, so this is a, a place where Google Analytics is helpful, you look at your Google Search Console, and you use k- some of the tips that we've mentioned in this episode already, if you start, you know, try to make an informed decision on which one should consolidate into the other.

If one's getting 100 clicks and one's getting two, the one that gets two is getting, you know, two because it has a really great calculator widget, move the calculator widget onto the 100. Like, it just, it just makes sense. S- Try to make informed decisions, and it's gonna be different for everybody.

Like, a- and you're gonna make... I think this is a good kinda point just to briefly mention, that you're gonna make mistakes doing this stuff, and some of it isn't even mistakes. It might be the right answer today. Google publishes a, a change tomorrow, and then it's the wrong decision now. All you're kinda doing here is you're just trying to... You're constantly trying to keep things clean. You're kinda trying to keep things oiled. You're trying to keep things [00:57:00] polished. That's basically what you're trying to do here. You're always running a race, and you're not always gonna be the winner. Like, it's just, you're just, you're just trying to, like, "Hey," like, "I, I wanna be a respective, a respected candidate here."

That's what you're really trying to do, especially at the small b- in, in the small business size of things. Getting to number one is, is, is amazing, but, know, it's not always gonna happen. And th- this is, I would say, the low-hanging fruit number nine, is r- one of the scarier ones, one of the scarier moments, where you're like, "If I delete this page, like, I lose all my, you know, my link equity in this page.

Like, what do I do? What if I consolidate and it doesn't work out?" It, you know, it could not. But try to use as much information the back catalog, from the Google Search Console, from Google Analytics if you have it, from another analytics platform if you have it, and make an informed decision. I would say this is absolutely a low-hanging fruit. would almost say that it's kind of an advanced hanging fruit, low-hanging fruit, just as an FYI. So if you're, like, brand new to SEO, you're brand new to this stuff, and you're scared [00:58:00] to remove pages, unless, like, one is absolutely drastically destroying another and, like, it's causing a problem, I think you could potentially maybe leave this one just until you get a little bit more of a feel your tools and making SEO decisions.

That's my, that's my opinion And the same kinda goes for this next one here, and it's the last one here, which is n- low-hanging fruit number 10, which is fix the basic technical problems. Even though they're basic, they're still technical. The thing here is, is technical SEO can get extremely complicated, so I wanna be clear. I'm not saying that tech- technical SEO is easy. can be very, very difficult, 100%. I'm not suggesting that everyone, you know, go in and do a massive t- SEO audit and get all your technical, you know, ducks in a row and everything else, but you can look for very obvious problems. One obvious problem is you might go into your WordPress, and you might be-- have accidentally clicked on the checkbox that says Discourage search engines. I had a client do that accidentally, and boy, oh boy, did their ranking go away, [00:59:00] and for good reason, 'cause they basically told Google and everyone else to go away. Uh, the same goes for custom, uh, sites as well or other sites that allow you to discourage. You know, you can take a look for no index, no follow in the metadata and try to fix that, right? of your Google Search Console, you can take a look and take a look at what, what pages Google isn't indexing. That might indicate that there is a no index or something like that, or there might indicate that there's an issue with the page. Maybe it takes forever to load, or there's something going on there. Take a look for broken internal links. Doesn't really sound all that technical, but it is. Part of technical SEO is going in and i- if you, let's say in number nine, you deleted one of your articles, and something was interlinking to it, now that's a broken link. So you should go in, and you should fix that. Uh, broken redirects, of course. If for some reason you do to change your page URL, but you want the, the people who maybe have bookmarked or ha- or are going to go to that old URL to redirect to the new one, make sure your redirects, you know, work. All this stuff sounds easy until your website's 10, 15 [01:00:00] years old and you have 1,000 pages.

Then you're like, "Uh-oh, I got a bunch of stale stuff on here." We see this even with big enterprises. If you've ever Google searched something that's extremely niche on a big enterprise site, and you click it, and you're like, "Whoa, what's going on here?" And the whole site looks different. Like, it's like it loaded, like, an old version of their template.

It has their old logo. The nav bar is all messed up. The CSS is all everywhere, and it's like the... You know, you can barely read the thing, and it's just, like, super old, and it's just, like, a different style, and you're like, "What is this?" It's like an orphaned, random, old article that they've, that they've, like, failed to update or they forgot existed or, or, or accidentally redirecting to or something like that. So, you know, things like that fall through the cracks extremely easily Look for other problems too, other technical issues. Important content that's buried deep within the website, that is part of technical SEO. Try to, like, surface that stuff. If you run a podcast and you only mention pod- uh, that you run a podcast in the footer, good.

You know? Ma- make sure you, make sure you fix that. Duplicate or [01:01:00] canonical problems. I've had people mess this up. Uh, I've had... I've seen people and, and assisted people where they've messed up the canonical implementation via their CMS. So they've wanted to make a feature where they would repost maybe their friend's article, and then they would say the canonical URL is their friend's page.

Now, I know that there's some argument there for SEO purposes, but that's what people do, right? That, that happens a lot, especially if you repost. If you write on your own site and you repost on things like Medium and Dev and, and things like that. this is something that happens. I've had people mess up the canonical where canonical is, like, just incorrect, and so then Google comes in and goes like, "Oh, this isn't the canonical, so I won't rank it." And they've lost tons of rankings, like 20 of their most valuable pages just, like, wiped off the map in terms of ranking. Not good, but we fixed it up and thankfully, it recovered re- relatively quick. And another one is sitemap problems. Now, I'm just touching on these, again, like I'm not getting super into it because you can really get into a rat's nest, especially with sitemaps.

Like, the idea of a sitemap's [01:02:00] really easy, especially if the site's relatively small, but if the sitemap's auto-generated by a CMS, some of this stuff you might need a technician. You might need a technician, you might need a tool. I'm gonna say this, take backups, man. Take freaking backups, especially you start, you know, messing around inside of technical stuff. Take backups, call a, call a friend, ask... You know, ask an expert. Get in there. But... And this is why it's number 10, is because it can be low-hanging if it's something silly like, dang, I forgot to, you know, uncheck maintenance mode or I forgot to uncheck discourage, uh, search engines in WordPress.

But if it's something really bad like, oh my God, like I... my re- like I have, uh, all these interlinks that go to this URL, and all that, that URL is now being redirected, and now there's this chain of like nonsense, like what do I do? And it's all auto-generated by some CMS or whatever. Maybe you need an expert.

You know, you can see how this can unravel quickly. So I, I think, I think honestly, uh, with the technical, just as a, a final little send-off of the technical SEO, uh, [01:03:00] part, I don't want you to like obsess over things. Like, if you're doing page speed insights and, and you know, you're getting a, a 97 and you want 100, know, strive for the 100, great.

But That's a less, much lesser problem than, hey, one of my service pages or my main service page isn't being indexed. Like, you do need to triage a bit here and, like, be like, "Okay, do I really wanna mess with the technical SEO and, like, get my performance up as well?" Like, so other technical things, maybe hosting and other things are involved then. Do I really wanna mess with all this technical garbage try to get three points on page speed? Or do I want people to know where my freaking search page is or my service page is? And the answer is, you better have that service page visible and ranking, I would hope. So prioritize is my point.

Prioritize problems based on their actual impact, and then you can get nitty-gritty if you have the time or if you care But that's it. I know I've talked a whole bunch, but this is, uh, this is how I help clients. This is how I help [01:04:00] clients, especially small businesses, small to medium businesses. This is absolutely how I assist them with their existing websites, especially if they have a portfolio of content. They have a portfolio of content, lots and lots of pages, lots and lots of blog posts, lots and lots of landing pages. It's like, all right, let's get in here and start cleaning this stuff up. Landing pages for an old Christmas thing from 2019, out. Out, right? You know, get that out of here. Oh, we're-- we, we clicked the wrong button in WordPress.

Let's uncheck that. your URLs are redirecting for some reason. Fix that. Like, that's a mess. What are we ranking for? We're ranking for bird food, and we actually sell birdhouses. Okay, what are we doing here? We gotta fix that, right? This is how I help. And you notice all of it's with their existing... I'm not coming in and being like, "Let's write all new birdhouse content." That comes after

Mikhail: I like it. I, I, I think this is a good baseline episode for someone that's like, "Okay, w- I, I have nothing. I've done nothing pretty much for the past little while. [01:05:00] Where should I start?" Um, one thing I will say for the people out there is if you find yourself just not having the time to do this, right? Like, if it's, if it's a situation of, like, you know, you're a plumber and you're doing the plumbing and you're like-- And Matt's telling you to focus on SEO for a little while here, um, I think it's still valuable for you to learn some of this stuff as a business owner.

But once you understand what you need, which hopefully this episode gives you, it's okay to start reaching out to contract this stuff out. So if you had your website built out 10 years ago, and you haven't touched it since then, and you are, you know, booked up all the time, but you, you know, you know you need to compete with your, with your local businesses that are trying to, you know, outgun you, it's probably a good time to invest a little bit in this stuff.

So it's okay to, to delegate this thing, um, but I do think [01:06:00] it's a good idea to at least understand what you're delegating. So it might be worthwhile to try some of these things yourself before taking that step to delegate. Exactly, yeah. Otherwise, you can get taken. Like, it, it's quite easy for someone to come in and be like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do all this," and then all they do is just, like, turn on pages to be indexed and, and screw off.

But if you can go in and actually validate that the Search Console's looking good, everything, you know, th- there are actual, like, structured data and stuff like that. Like, you can validate some of these things, then you're at least getting the right service

Matt: I, I 100% agree, 'cause some places are gonna, like, promise you the moon and, and barely deliver. Other places are gonna, you know... Uh, some places, like, meaning the actual clients themselves, they just want a little boost. I, I'm doing, you know, I'm doing 40 clients right now, I really need 50." Okay, well, we don't need to go in and, you know, spend $7,000 a month and do, like, SEO massive, you know, overhauls and things like that.

It's like, let's, let's target some of these low-hanging fruits, see if we can get another five, 10 clicks per page. Maybe there's your extra 10, [01:07:00] 15 clients, whatever it is you need, that's it. Absolutely. I do wanna mention that in the show notes, I have three related episodes. Uh, there are past episodes if you're, if you're, you know, if you're interested in SEO, um, and they're all linked there. First one is, Is SEO Dead? SEO in 2026. The next one is Small Business Websites Need to Do More Than Exist, so that's interesting for small business owners or people who help small business websites. And then also, Are Websites Dead? Dev Agency Owner Answers. That's actually an interview with Nat Miletic.

He is absolutely a website expert, an SEO expert, and a WordPress expert, so that, that, th- that was a great little interview that we had, and, uh, all linked in the show notes on htmlallthethings.com. Show notes, there's a link to the show notes, um, in the RSS feed as well if you want to, uh, you know, go check that out in the episode description. But that's it. Remember, please remember, we are on Patreon. That's [01:08:00] patreon.com/htmlallthethings. Check out the things and give that a go. And many thanks to our $3 tier patrons, Tim from the Web Hacker on thewebhacker.com, Jason from Geek Life Radio via geekliferadio.com, Garrett Seagal, Level Up Financial Planning via www.levelupfinancialplanning.com, Magnus from Yes Web via yesweb.se, Syntaxify from the HTML All The Things Discord server, and Stacy Mosteller from the website swoonworthydesigns.com. And remember that we have a contributing author, and he is a Michael LaRocca. Michael LaRocca is the author of Self-Taught: The X Generation blog at selftaughttxg.com. Feel free to leave a comment or review on the platform that you are listening to this on, and we Are signing off