The WordPress Show replay – with Nick Redding

On the 3rd of July, in our Facebook Group, I had the pleasure of chatting with Nick Redding of Reddico. Nick is a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialist and in this talk, Nick gave a tour-de-force overview of what SEO means to website managers, as well as practical tips that businesses can do themselves…

Before I get to the show notes, may I just give a quick plug for our two remaining events coming up in July. Both events are free and will take place over in the Facebook group:

When you’re a member of the Facebook Group, you should see all our free events listed here.

Nick: 'What's a good trust signal for a user, is also a good trust signal for Google ' Click To Tweet

An overall theme from Nick was very much about doing right by your website visitors in terms of establishing trust, and that that should be your primary focus as doing so will send clear signals to Google that you are trying to do the right thing:

“Nick: If you have a lot of low-quality blog posts that don’t really cover a topic that well….the problem here is that every page you create counts to your overall quality score so the more low-quality pages you add-in, you’re actually bringing down Google’s understanding & perception of your site.’

Nick: 'If you have £500 - £1000 p/m to spend on SEO. Don`t.' Click To Tweet

The Show Notes

Where there are links, I’ll paste them in the list below, and I’ll add interesting time points in [square brackets] in case you want to skip ahead.

  1. Here is a copy of Nick’s awesome, fact-packed slides
  2. Tip 1 ‘Get the basics set up for free[06:00]
  3. Google Search Console
  4. Goole Local Business
  5. Google Analytics
  6. Google Trends
  7. Google Alerts
  8. Google’ mobile-friendly test
  9. Tip 2 ‘Your reputation matters to Google and can impact your rankings’ [14:40]
  10. Nick mentions Lets Encrypt for SSL (we typically get clients to use the CloudFlare service).
  11. Awards? Recommendations? Link to them! [18:00]
  12. Looking for company reviews on Google [22:00]
  13. Run a survey to see if people would buy from you? If there are issues, get them fixed [23:30]
  14. Tip 3 ‘Avoid the meta keywords tag in your CMS[25:00]
  15. Nick talks about the Yoast SEO plugin [26:00]
  16. Nick mentioned the following two tools to help spot where you have META KEYWORDS and they should be removed:
    Screaming Frog
    Site Bulb
  17. Tip 4 – ‘Be careful if you are building your site using a JavaScript framework [27:30]
  18. Tip 5 – ‘Pop-ups (also known as interstitials) can annoy users and Google.’ [30:00]
  19. When testing your site, always use the private or incognito mode [31:00]
  20. Tip 6 – ‘If you have £500 – £1000 p/m to spend on SEO. Dont.[31:30]
  21. Tip 7 – ‘Don’t add content for the sake of it’ [34:20]
    You don’t need to consistently add content: it’s quality over quantity.
  22. The problem of low-quality pages [36:30]
  23. Tip – in Google Analytics set your date range for the last 6 months and see which pages have hardly had any traffic and question those pages – put them under the microscope.
  24. Tip 8 – ‘User Intent matters to Google for rankings in 2020[37:30]
  25. Tip 9 – ‘Anchor text is important so think about the words you use[39:00]
    Look at the terms you are using in your website main menu – that is anchor text – can you improve on it?
  26. Tip 10 – ‘Be careful with Google crawling and indexing your Dev site it can hurt rankings[41:00]
    Use “site:[your domain]” to check in google for what pages it indexes for you (helps you spot issues – does that number seem right for the size of my site?)
  27. New Factors coming in 2021
    Read our blog on this. Oh, actually, I can do better anchor text than that! Read our post on Google’s Core Web Vitals – how SEO is changing in 2021 (too much?).
  28. Google’s Page Speed Insights
  29. Sneakers & Trainers – we return to a point Nick made earlier for Nick to add some more wisdom (this is a really important point for how you understand SEO, and how you write your content) [47:00]
  30. Nick shares a great strategy on how to research and create niche SEO content [48:30]
  31. What are Google’s Rich Snippets? [49:30]

Phew! Didn’t he pack a lot in!?

Thanks again for Nick for coming on and you’ll be glad to hear that Nick will come on again in the autumn – I don’t know the topic yet, let’s have a chat over in the Facebook group and decide :)

Joel

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