hi welcome back I’m super excited to be joining you yet again for this wonderful preath on day um we have a phenomenal session for you I will tell you some of my favorite sessions at events our live side site audit panels we’re not doing a panel you’re actually getting a one-on-one with an expert here um I have Carolyn Shelby with us today I’m so excited Carolyn is absolutely absolutely brilliant um you may know her from Yos but Carolyn has a wonderful wonderful history very long like mine as well but hers is so fun you’ve had the opportunity to work for ESPN and Disney and the Chicago Tribune as well as Yos not to mention a wonderful background as consultant as well so Carolyn welcome thank you for joining us today I’m very excited to hear what you planned thank you for having me um let’s see we need to there we go okay awesome um boy I know I’ve only got 30 minutes and I wanted to do like some intro stuff but it doesn’t matter because it what matters is that we have time to focus on on these sites so without any further Ado I want to jump in I do want to say that this is a little different than I normally do live site reviews because when we’re in person I can I make the the the the victims stand up I make them answer my questions when I I need clarification and I don’t have that luxury here so um you will have to forgive me if I make some assumptions I’m doing the best I can because I don’t have the the submitters here to tell me what it was they met so the first site we’re going to do is visz Asal live.com the reason I think this was submitted is because they’ve been seeing a decline in traffic and a decline in um in the keywords that are indexed it looks like they peaked around January of 2021 uh the peak for you know what and I think that that Peak matches know the peak for traffic was January of 2020 I think that says sorry hard to read um so I went in and I looked at a number of things some of the things I found in terms of SEO were some Global issues there’s a lot of alt attributes missing and you would say Caroline alt attributes are not a big deal everything in SEO is like death by a Thousand Cuts so the the more you can stop the bleeding the better you’re going to be and when you’re in a news environment like Biz Asia live is it’s a news site they’re looking at ranking on Google News they’re looking at getting traffic from top stories and they’ve got a lot of very buttoned up competition so what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to overlook any opportunities for additional optimization up to 40% of the alts missing on some pages is a lot on some of the articles that I spot checked there was no alt attribute on the hero image literally the first thing that the search engine is going to encounter huge missed opportunity as far as dialing in the relevancy of the article so need to need to get those things cleaned up that being said there’s too much information in the alt on the logo which appears at the top of every single page the logo has the name of the site and then it also has all of the things that they cover so it’ be like having your your slogan built into the name of your company that’s not what you want to rank for that’s not important really um and you don’t want to you don’t want to set the stage that you’re that the page is going to be about all those broad things when the page in question might only be about Media or it might only be about a particular TV show by setting that at the top you’re kind of sending some mixed signals so I would tone that down a little another thing that I saw that I I wasn’t a huge fan of is the anchor Tech Choice anchor text choices throughout the site are a little vague there’s a lot of read more um having home in the top MAV not actually necessary the the logo is the universally recognized symbol for if I click on this it’s going to take me to the homepage you don’t need home after that because now you’ve got two links to the homepage and one of them has anger text that’s bad and you say well home is not bad home is descriptive yes and no home tells Google what you’re going to find at the end but within context you understand that that means you’re going to the homepage in the vacuum of space home means something different so it would be better off I would recommend not having that that link there period the logo the logo link is perfectly sufficient I wouldn’t bother with that home link so that’s going to trim down that top nav a little bit I would also take contact us out contact us doesn’t need to be there it’s already in the footer it’s on every single page of the site 90% of the people coming to the page don’t care they’re they’re not interested in contacting you right now if they’re interested in contacting you they will either search for how to contact you and go directly into that page or they’re going to scroll down to the footer where they expect to find that kind of Link this is not necessary this is not a sales um you don’t sell things directly because you’re not selling things directly you’re not trying to get people to hire you this is a new site that contact us button is much less important and doesn’t need to be taking up space in that top nav so I’d go through and make sure you’re cleaning up anything that’s unimportant or redundant the home button clearly redundant the contact us not really important and that Gallery link that Gallery link really only exists there it’s yeah it goes to photo galleries but how much traffic are you getting from those photo galleries I feel feel like the galleries would be something that you could link to from within the Articles um the back to toop Link in the footer the back to top link and I don’t have a picture of it is the logo of the business but for some reason it links back to the top of the page that makes no sense if you’re going to have a back totop link a jump link that goes back to the top of the page it should say back to top or return to top or something that indicates that’s what you’re doing it’s confusing the search engines when you have your company logo just jump back to the top of the page people see the logo they expect to go to the homepage that’s the behavior they’re expecting don’t deviate from the expected Behavior there are no tags on this new site and that confused me a little and I’ll get into that a a little bit more but the the lack of tags I think could explain the noticeable decrease in keywords that are that you’re ranking for and have rankings for in the search engines I went back to the Wayback machine and I looked at the design of the site in the month before everything started sliding there were tags then there were tag pages and there were tags and I would bet a dollar to a donut that is why you had a lot more things ranking then I would consider re read addding the tags but that’s just me the the flat URL structure I expect to find more hierarchy in a new site having everything off hanging off the root is not going to make things rank better I there there’s that’s a misunderstanding of the advice the simplified URL doesn’t matter when your url is still 8,000 words long so going forward if it’s possible but this is a very old site so it may not be possible I like to have the category or some some means of chunking the the URLs in those together so have slash media slash something have slash history slash something right part of the reason that you want to do this is because of it also makes it easier in your analytics to group stories by other like stories and see if any particular type of article or type of page is getting more traffic or less traffic than the others when everything’s all in that flat architecture it’s very difficult to group things together by Channel let’s see on the article Pages The Meta title so the SEO title I hate calling it that because it’s it’s the meta title The Meta tile does not include the name of the site it’s literally just the title of the article I think that’s a style preference maybe on my part but every website I’ve ever worked for including all of the news sites like the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune we put the brand at the end ESPN puts the brand at the end you want to know what the what the title of the story is the headline but you also want to know who the outlet is is that’s putting that story out the breadcrumbs include a home link I don’t know why that bothers me but it does um the the big thing though is there’s no internal links within the article body that go to other articles or tag aggregation pages I think that’s a huge missed opportunity to spread the love around the site to help create links for other articles because the sample scan I did said that the none of the Articles have more than one incoming link not necessarily great for for rankings I would I would add internal links maybe some external links definitely some internal links though the missing author link is also something that is different today than it was when the site was at its peak for traffic and indexation and I think that might have something to do with it we know that in news they do really like to have they want to know that your writers are real writers they want to they want to see that your writers have written about that topic before it’s necessary for your expertise and your um your authenticity your trustworthiness it’s it’s a good thing to to have in there I would really consider adding that and then in on a new specific item the date is published in a non-text format I don’t see any indications that it’s a huge problem but I would keep an eye on that my experience in the past at the newspapers was that when we tried to get clever about how we delivered the date it invited Google to mess things up and it just it was it was an opportunity for things to get messed up that we didn’t need to create the other thing I noticed about the news articles I already said the hero image has no alt attribute it really should the captions for the hero images could be far more descript Ive um in this particular one it’s just SM SMA I think Roy joins swasti as head um and that’s word ended I added as had digital operations which I grabbed from the story makes it just makes the caption a little bit more interesting adds some more keywords to it increases the relevancy of that caption to the rest of the story the lead set apart stylistically but not within the code I’d consider making that in H2 to emphas its importance and then I boxed around some of the some of the words that I thought would either make good tags or be opportunities for linking there’s a lot of internal linking opportunities that I really think are being missed out on one of the reasons that I would like to see tags reinstated on the site is I think it’s going to help the rankings I looked at the what keyword phrases what what queries are pulling in the most traffic right now for this site and it’s difficult for me to read I’m I’m not going to try to say that name because I’m sure I’ll butcher it and I don’t want to offend anyone but her name just her name alone if you made that a tag and then linked to the tag aggregation page from each of the Articles it would dramatically increase the the authority and the juice for that term that tag page then might rank for her name the search volume for just her name is over 240,000 searches per month whereas the search volume for this really longtail term that you’ve got is what a little under 2,000 imagine if you were getting if you were ranking number one for her name with that number of searches the amount of traffic would go up crazy and this is just one example so we repeat that a number of times with all these different tags that we could create and the traffic is going to go up the visibility is going to go up I think this is a I think this is a great opportunity so I would definitely investigate that so the tldr is tags and tag Pages could help you rank for people businesses and shows that you write the most about consistent internal linking practices are going to help those pages Rank and it’s going to help you elevate the expertise not only on the subjects because you write about them often but it’s going to help your authors Elevate their expertise and their their recognition within Google and within Google News you should take advantage of those image alts as opportunities to expand the context of those pictures and then clean up the navigation and anchor text optimization so that is that’s this one normally I would expect Applause now Applause now but can’t hear anyone so I’m just going to go with uh that’s where we’re at with that okay the next site is key ivr so again I don’t know why they why they volunteered but my guess is going to be because of this drop right here and this drop I would I would not say that this is necessarily A a helpful content drop it could be but I’m not I’m not 100% sure on that because I didn’t see a corresponding drop in keyword rankings so the the traffic could be it could be something else the things I noticed about key.com the sliders at the top of the page are huge and they’re pretty but they’re not really adding value because you can’t all the text is like image bound so the the Crawlers aren’t going to be able to read any of that text it’s just it’s useless stuff that’s there there’s no alts for any of those so that that that content even if it’s good doesn’t exist to the Crawlers I know the crawlers are getting better about things but they are still not to the point where they’re going to read the text in those images if they can avoid it you don’t need to add the word logo speaking of alss to every single image of a client logo I know that they’re logos I get that but if you think think about it in terms of a screen reader you’re not repeating in the text the name of the company all you’ve got to see is that logo so as the screen readers going through and reading it do you really want them to say Bob Smith logo Tom Smith logo it’s it’s not a great experience for people that need those screen readers and it adds the word logo a lot to the content on that page and you don’t you’re not about logos you’re about about ivr which is apparently some kind of payment system a lot of the other anchor text I found is very non-specific find out more not nearly as helpful as call center sector Solutions I would go through and see if you can do anything about making the anchor text for the links more specific to what you want the destination page to rank for that destination page you want to rank for Call Center sector Solutions or call center Solutions or call center ivr Solutions you do not want it to rank for find out more so what you want that destination page to rank for should be ideally in the anchor text in the link that points to it there was some other minor SEO issues found I ran a site bulb scan the site bulb scan was 84 solid B um so I wouldn’t I wouldn’t freak out about any of that um but it again Death By A Thousand Cuts the more bleeding we can stop the healthier we’re going to be again I found this on some of the Interior Pages this is an H1 all it says is our guides not super specific they are very specific guides they’re guides to how to use the software their guides to education about the the subject in general I think if you were again a little bit more specific and keyword rich in your anchor text and in your headings you’re going to find greater success in ranking this site has internationalization so it has HF Lang declarations at the top while it is valid it is missing the region independent declaration for English so you can have an X default which you’re required to have but the X default does not take the place of a default for English or a default for Spanish es when the only other links you have for English are English us and English Great Britain you also need to have a default for English that being said I noticed that when I flipped between American and British on the version of the site nothing changed so I don’t understand why that’s necessary because what this is doing is it’s creating when when the h Lang doesn’t work right it creates duplicate Pages effectively with slightly different URLs that is not what we want to have happen here if there is not going to be another language that is actually different from the English version and if your English versions are going to be identical all the time anyway I would get rid of the internationalization it’s not necessary it’s it’s dividing it’s dividing things unne necessarily when you divide things unnecessarily sometimes you can thin out and Spread spread to thin The Authority that you’ve accumulated so I would consider maybe not doing that and I know that’s a plugin that you’ve got so uninstall wpml and just embrace the fact that you’ve got a single International site now unlike the other site we just did where I said tags and tag pages are a good thing and they should reinstate them I don’t think tags on this site are a good idea the purpose of the tags is to facilitate the discovery of Articles it helps the crawler crawl through deeper articles that maybe got pushed off the homepage or pushed off the top page the blog right the mechanism that this site is providing to sort through the different articles they’re tabs basically and and there it’s a JavaScript and you can’t the Crawlers can’t see that they cannot manipulate like a person can those tabs they are never going to see the articles that are underneath each of those so the well and even if they could the tag Pages have been no indexed so completely negating any value that this could have created and all this is doing is making hundreds of pages now that can’t be crawler indexed it’s it it’s not helpful and I would I think I would I would get rid of those personally if if you if you’re not going to provide a means of those being crawled and indexed they’re serving no purpose I would I would think about getting rid of that I don’t think that was a Taylor Swift reference because I’m not a Swifty and I don’t know what I said that caused that comment so probably not um let’s go ahead and move on to the next one because I know I’ve only got 30 minutes total bensa bacon lovers I love I love the domain it just bacon everybody loves bacon right Bacon’s great so Bena bacon lovers this is legitimately the the first sighting in the wild I’ve seen of a site that has definitely recovered from the hcu this is clearly a helpful content update hit and recovery so congrat congratulations I’m super happy for you because I know that that hcu was devastating for a lot of companies and I’m I’m glad to see you pulled through so good job on that the minor SEO issues that were uncovered um the the site bulb score was a 92 which is a low a excellent work um your internal linking and external linking unlike some of the other sites that I’ve looked at this is very very good I mean again good job no issues with phrasing I did have a question the uh the bacon recipe index redirects back to the bacon recipes page which contains a link back to the recipe index which redirects I mean it creates a little loop I don’t are there backlinks you’re worried about with that there are ways that we can fix that problem without doing what you’re doing because what you’re doing is creating a loop and you don’t want the Crawlers to get caught in a a circular pattern where they can’t get out of it so I would um I have some suggestions on doing that I think just a 301 redirect in whatever tool it is you’re using for those to force bacon recipe or the bacon recipe index to the bacon recipes page but then take that link off of that page the link is what’s causing the loop so just get rid of the link and problem solved the other thing that really FES me is that the homepage doesn’t have any Evergreen content or intro text so I think that you will you’re going to have an easier time ranking your not homepage pages and maybe not so great of a Time ranking at least consistently maintaining ranks for your I got a hustle um for your homepage so I would I’d add some Evergreen content to that and then finally we’ve got dec.com now this is a new site so it it it seems brand new very few backlinks um but there are some you know some pretty standard SEO things that I I think could use some work you use targeted keywords more frequently throughout your text especially in your headings the alt for your logo is the domain name and you that’s not what you want to rank for you’re going to rank for your domain name anyway why don’t you change it to Deb M ux designer because that seems to be what you want to rank for I think that would be a much better alternative um the only way to contact you is from a button on the homepage add contact to the menu in your case based on what you’re selling unlike that other site where I said take contact off the menu you need contact in a menu you probably also need it in the footer the but and that reminds me I saw you’re using divy pixel nice footer option available there you might want to consider trying that it has a contact Link in the footer you need more links to the contact page other than only on the homepage it’s um you know people will people won’t know how to get a hold of you you have too many headings on your homepage you have 23 h3s part of the problem there is you’ve got some kind of slider that said oh this breaks a little in Safari here here’s the fix for it that fix is causing duplicates so that fix is basically restating everything only for the eyes of safari but the Crawlers read everything anyway so now you’ve got a duplicate of that entire section and that’s what’s causing so many h3s and then as far as your backlink profile goes I I checked your LinkedIn LinkedIn looks great you don’t have a link to your to your website on there you have to put you have to Avail yourself of every opportunity to link back to your website so that you’ve got good authority ative links that are followed you do have some links but almost exclusively user user generated content and no followed you need followed links preferably where you control the anchor text because just linking to check out my website vague we don’t like vague right only got a couple more and then I’m done so you want to use more descriptive anchor text for your links there’s a lot of you know link to case study link to project project information that’s vague learn more vague use the keyword you want to rank for also all of these links on your portfolio page link out of your site to things that I can’t even necessarily open unless I create an account there that’s no bueno if you want Google to index it and if you want the the content there to be associated with your site there has to be text that can be read and it has to live on your website I would create Pages within your site one for each of the portfolio examples and even if the bulk of the content that you’re trying to show them lives in a prey or lives in a PDF you can summarize that and write some text around it and make value for that um and that was actually my last slide so good timing Carolyn wonderful job auditing I know the comments a lot of compliments no surprise um I think the biggest question that’s most important since we are out as time is where can we get a copy of your deck I will um I’ll send it to you guys I guess and you can disseminate it or if somebody wants to hit me up on X is that what we’re calling it now X um who knows tweet at me um no I hit me up on X or um LinkedIn or I will also share it with cloudways and you guys can can disseminate as desired thank thank you so much I know we appreciate it I was definitely making notes um I totally appreciate everyone sticking around I want to give props to our next session that is coming up because it is specific to WordPress security practices so fortifying our WordPress site um if you’ve been in the WordPress ecosystem for a long time you understand how important security is so please stick around there thank you for joining us Carolyn I hope you have a great day thank you