Transcript:
Host: Good morning, everyone. Lovely to have you here. Thank you all so much for taking the time. It’s a real joy. I can see folks already popping in. Where are you watching from? Saying good morning to each other. The exclamation mark game in the chat this morning is strong. Thank you all so much for being completely lovely and for being here. If you haven’t already, do pop in the chat feature where you’re watching from. Don’t forget to switch your messages to everyone, so everyone can see your messages.
The way you do that is you head into your chat feature. There’s a little toggle. If it presently says “To: Hosts and panelists,” just need to tick that and switch it to everyone so everyone can see. As I can see, Alison in Switzerland, Josie in Glasgow, Philippa in Southampton. Okay, it’s going too quick now for me to read. It’s so lovely to have you all. Thank you all so much. Andy from Daventry, which is where I’m from as well, which is very important.
Today, our guest is the legend that is Areej AbuAli of Women in Tech SEO, the community for, well, women in tech in SEO. Areej runs conferences around the world. On 8th of March, they have a London event, which is actually sold out. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s in London or not. The thing that they do have is a recording ticket available, which The Marketing Meetup has 50% off, which I’ll share after today’s session. If you like Areej, which of course you will after today’s session, then do take time to check out Women in Tech SEO. It’s wicked. Areej is just fab.
Today, we’re focusing on technical SEO, which is something, to be honest, I know very little about. I’m going to be sat here learning with you, which is really, really cool. Today we’ll function like an interview-esque type thing. Areej has lined up some tabs and some explainers for us to walk through some of the basics on the journey of understanding technical SEO, which I think will be brilliant.
We’ll also be taking your questions in. If you want to use the Q&A feature, which is found down below in the little window, you can get your questions in and we’ll try and make sure that we answer as many of those as possible towards the end of the session.
Before we get started, I want to say a big thank you to today’s featured sponsor, who are Redgate Software. Redgate are lovely. I used to work in their building a long time ago. Presently, they’re hiring a director of portfolio marketing and one of the marketing role on an absolute just rocket ship of a software company. If you want to check out those roles, then please do at Redgate Software. They’re a really great company on a really great journey as well. Well worth checking out those open roles at Redgate0.
Also, a big thank you to our other sponsors, Frontify, Exclaimer, Klaviyo, Cambridge Marketing College. We’ll be speaking about all of those on rotation throughout the rest of the weeks that are coming. I can see Laura in Colchester, Annie, my daughter’s name is Annie, in Falmouth, so extra points there, Annie. I can see Alex in Guildford. We are primed, we’re ready. Let’s get going with today’s session. Thank you so much for being here, Areej. Let’s start with the obvious question, which is what is technical SEO? How is this different to what people would think about as SEO?
Areej AbuAli: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I love joining these webinars. Thank you everyone for tuning in bright and early to learn and talk about all things technical SEO. I’ve been doing tech SEO for a little bit over a decade now. I think the first thing to start off by saying is I wasn’t even sure what it was before I actually got into it. That’s the very cool thing about getting into SEO is that the barrier to entry is very, very small. There’s a lot that you end up learning on the job.
SEO as a whole is this concept of, well, how do we rank best on search engines? There’s usually three different elements to it. One being technical, the second being content, and the third being links. The way I like to think about technical SEO is it’s like your foundation. It’s your basis. It’s the backbone of your website. You need to get that right before you start thinking about any of the other metrics or concepts because if your site isn’t set up technically in a correct way, then Google will struggle to even understand any of the very awesome content that might be living on it. Yes, it’s a nice foundational concept that comes to SEO.
Host: Nice. I love that. I’m learning already. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone put it that way in those three ways. Maybe I’ll show my SEO ignorance, but I find that really useful to think about those three ways. Thank you very much for the idea, Areej. You’ve probably already answered this, but you and I agreed some questions upfront so that we made sure we covered a fuller basis. At what point do we need to think about technical SEO specifically? Is there a point where it becomes especially useful? Because presumably there will be different parts on the journey, perhaps.
Areej: Yes, I think that’s a really good question. I’m just going to keep popping in and out of different share screens with stuff if that’s okay. I think it would be really helpful maybe if I just start off by showing this diagram. I love this diagram because it’s one of those, and there’s a lot of different examples of those that you can find on the internet, but this is one of the most helpful ways to kickstart your thinking about what technical SEO is and what it means.
If we start with how Google works, there’s this concept of you have your spider bots or you have these different bots that are walking around, understanding the internet, and how it’s connected with one another. What they do when they land on any website is this concept called crawling. They would crawl a website, they would go through the different web pages to try to understand and analyze what the page content is.
Once they’ve done this crawling, let’s say you have a website that’s 100 pages, they’ve went in and they’ve crawled every single one of those 100 pages. They’ve analyzed what the content is. They then decide that they want to store it in their index. If you think about anything that you search on Google, you always come back with tens of thousands of links. These links have been indexed on Google. Once they are stored, then if a user is then searching for a specific term, these pages are then ranked in that way.
If we, let’s say, do something really simple, which is search The Marketing Meetup, for example, what I’ve done here is I’ve entered a specific search term and then I have all of these different websites coming up on the SERP, which is your search engine ranking page. The way that these have come is because Google has crawled their pages, have analyzed their content, have stored it in the index, have then decided that these specific pages are deemed worthy of ranking for a term like Marketing Meetup, for example.
The best way to– they call it the– and we can look at it together, the crawl index rank. That’s the best way to understand technical SEO is these three concepts. With anything that we do with technical SEO, we always make sure, is my site crawlable? Can Google actually crawl it properly? Is my site indexable? Can Google actually index what it crawls? Then is it deemed worthy of ranking? Every single technical SEO audit you go through or you look at, front of mind, these are the three things that we are trying to tackle.
Host: That’s so good. The clarity is off the charts here, which is so useful. Thank you very much, Areej, and thank you for sharing those. I always get so nervous whenever people start pulling up The Marketing Meetup website. [unintelligible 00:08:54]. [chuckles]
Areej: I’ve still got other bits with The Marketing Meetup lined up. [laughter]
Host: I feel like it was a threat before we started, where you were like, “Do a live audit on TMM.” It’s like, “Oh, God.” Anyway, having established the three elements of SEO and then three elements of technical SEO, what are the key things that you think of when you’re approaching a web page for the first time from a technical SEO perspective?
Areej: Yes, perfect. I think that’s also a really good question. Maybe what we can do here is– let me just– I’ll share our Women in Tech SEO website as an example to start off with.
Host: I feel safer. That doesn’t make my heart palpitate quite as much for the meantime.
Areej: I’ve got The Marketing Meetup lined up here. [laughs]
Host: I know it’s coming. [laughs]
Areej: If I were to open a website for the first time, the thing is a lot of people might– and we’ll talk about tools in a little bit, but there’s this overwhelming idea of, “Oh, there are all these tools. Let me run the website through these different tools and get all this data and stuff.” What tends to happen is you get really overwhelmed at that point because you have all of this data come back.
For me, even 10 years down the line, what I love to do initially is literally just go on a website and treat it as a user and see what works and what breaks and understand the template and the structure of it. When I say template and structure, you usually have your navigation up here with all the different links. You then usually have different subcategories within that. You have your homepage.
Everything here is called internal links. Internal links are– again, try to put yourself in Google bot shoes when they’re crawling the website. What they do is they land on your homepage, for example, and then they end up going to one link after the other. Once they go in one, they then follow another link, and so forth. It’s this idea of going through this journey of one link to the other. If we go to The Marketing Meetups, for example, it’s very similar again. You have your navigation here, and then you have your different templates. You have a website, a page that has content, and then has a table, and then has more content. That’s your template or the structure of how the website is set up.
Now, a few things that would make or break a site is this concept of, well, are all of these internal links actually working properly? Or do some of them end up redirecting elsewhere? Do some of them end up going to a broken page, for example? Are all of these different internal links actually proper– what they call a 200-status code page, which means that this page is actually alive and well and functioning fine and not a broken page? Are we making sure that we are allowing Google to index all of those?
Now, a few key things we have in technical SEO is something called robots.txt and something called a sitemap.xml. These are basically things that help a website– help Google understand where they can find all of the links because if you think of– Google normally wouldn’t– they’re trying to save money as well, right? They’re not going to load a page that looks– with all the imagery and with all the different functionalities. They just want nice plain pages where they can see and understand the text and see and follow the links.
For that reason, a lot of the times when you’re trying to put yourself in Google’s shoes and understand how could they technically comprehend the website, you get rid of all of this fancy stuff. What you do instead is you try to look at it from– let’s kill our JavaScript or our CSS or whatever stuff is making this page very– let’s just focus on, is our content readable and are our links readable? Because these are the two most important things that we want to make sure can be crawled and indexed.
There’s an example of this concept of simple websites. I would say The Marketing Meetup or the Women in Tech SEO are fairly simple websites because first of all, they’re not large in nature. They’re not considered enterprise. A big portion of them don’t even really sell something. They’re mainly there for content and amplification and the sharing of different links and resources.
If we were to look at an example of an e-commerce website, this is Papier, I worked in-house for them from an SEO perspective for a few years. They have a lot more reliance on ensuring that their technical SEO works well because they are literally selling stuff through their website as an e-commerce site.
When you get into these larger type of e-commerce or enterprise sites, this is when technical SEO starts to differ a little bit because every single thing here, you have all of these things such as your filter system, which could make or break a website because let’s say, for example, if we haven’t set some of this stuff up technically well, we might not end up ranking for all of these different filters as an example. Now that’s something that can make or lose money for an e-commerce company. I’ll just stop right here in case I’ve been talking a little bit too much before we get into, yes, difference with larger websites or so on.
Host: No, that’s perfect. Thank you, Areej. it was really bang on. There’s Azeem in the chat who I saw is a mutual friend. I saw that he, first of all, acknowledged that he’s in the intro video today. Congratulations. Also said that you’re explaining it in a way that anyone can understand. I’m loving this so far. I just wanted to pick up on the robot.txt point because that feels important so that Google can understand how you pull your page and stuff like that. How do you know whether you’ve got that sorted or not? You’ve got a robot.txt file. I seem to remember that you do themarketingmeetup.com/robots.txt, but maybe that’s wrong. Is that right?
Areej: Yes, excellent question. I think robots.txt and sitemap.xml, I would say these are the two of the main things that we set up at the forefront. These are pages that Google visits at the very beginning to understand what– it’s almost like, this is the way you can set certain rules for your website. I’ll give an example of a very simple robots.txt and then a little bit complicated one.
Let me just share screens again. Great. Here is your very simple one, which is basically empty, which is fine, right? Because what this means is it means, “Oh, Google, do your thing. We’re not setting any rules for you. We actually want you to go through our entire website. There is nothing on there that we want to block access from.” This is as simple as it gets. Here’s an example of the Papier one where we are setting certain rules and we are blocking Google from visiting stuff.
We have done that for a reason. We’ve done that because think about your search of any e-commerce site. I can go in and just say, “Blah, blah, blah,” right? There isn’t anything that’s blah, blah, blah. I can say, “Oh, I want to look at specific notebooks.” You see what happens here. You can get tens of hundreds of thousands variation created on your website because anyone and anything can go in and decide to use your search functionality for something.
A good example of e-commerce sites when they set rules of what Google can crawl and cannot crawl, one of the first things they say is, “We don’t want Google crawling our search functionality because we know that this might end up creating or generating tens or hundreds of thousands of pages that we– those are all user-generated. We don’t care about Google actually finding those and storing them in their index and so forth.”
Another good example is with customization, an e-commerce website that allows you to customize its different products and add your names to it or so forth. Same idea exactly. This is for users to do, but I don’t want Google indexing any of this. The reason is websites in general, whether they’re enterprise or e-commerce or so forth, let’s say they have, I don’t know, a good 10,000 number of pages, there’s a certain caveat.
They call it a crawl budget, but the purpose is we want to make sure that the pages that we care about, our important pages, like the pages in our navigation, our different journals that we sell, our different notebooks that we sell, these are the ones that we want appearing on Google. We don’t want to distract from the things that aren’t important like our search passages or our customization or so forth. For that reason, we will define these rules and we will put them upfront in robots.txt.
Now, the same thing also can be said about the sitemap. The whole purpose of having a sitemap is this list of different URLs. We’re basically telling Google, “These are the URLs that matter the most. These are the ones that we want you to spend time on. We don’t care about anything else.” That’s why from a technical SEO perspective, we tend to spend a good amount of time auditing our list, all of our URLs that are in the sitemap and deeming whether these are worthy of being in there or whether they need a little bit of cleanup and we don’t need them in there exactly.
Everything we’re doing, we’re doing front of mind just to make sure this is the stuff that we want Google to crawl, index, and then hopefully, rank. Taking it back to those initial three points again.
Host: That’s brilliant. Thank you so much. That is just brilliant. Super clear, super useful. One follow-up question before we move on from sitemaps and that part of it, Helen in the chat has asked, is there anything that will help you generate a sitemap if there isn’t one?
Areej: Yes, that’s a really good question. This is dependent on the CMS you’re using. There are a lot of helpful plugins. For example, if you’re on a WordPress site, which I know Marketing Meetup is on, there tends to be a sitemap generator plugins that simply just like that, it understands your website, it understands all of your– I can see Michelle, yes, suggested the Yoast one. That’s a very popular one. A lot of people use it as a sitemap generator.
You may have noticed in some of the screen shares I’ve shown, it’s best practice to include the URL of your sitemap in the robots.txt file because we know this is the first place that Google visits. You’re making their life a little bit easier and you’re telling them, “Oh, by the way, you can see my sitemap here, which includes all of the URLs. There you go. These are the pages I care about. These are the ones I want you to crawl.” That’s actually something for you on The Marketing Meetup, you should add. [laughs] I’ll send you an email later. It’s best practice if you add your sitemap in your robots.txt and it’s currently not there.
Host: I love that. [laughs]
Areej: He’s taking notes.
Host: I’ve literally got my pad here.
Areej: I’ve had Joe WhatsApp me before. Was it like a random Search Console question?
Host: Probably.
Areej: He was like, “Is this page broken? What do I do about this? You’re my tech SEO friend.”
Host: 100%, yes. [laughs] [unintelligible 00:22:04]. I love it. I’m not great at that sort of stuff, plainly. I do want to move past the sitemap because I feel like there’ll be a lot of other features and stuff like that we need to discuss, not least 30 and open really great questions in the Q&A as well. Laura has put, “My company site is disallowing the sitemap. That doesn’t seem right.”
Areej: Oh, that’s not right.
Host: Cool. I feel like in this week’s newsletter, maybe we’ll share a bunch of SEO resources on technical SEO to help folks get through because I suspect there’ll be lots of unique situations, not least with The Marketing Meetup to be improved. Let’s circle back to that same question. We’ve spoken about robots.txt. We’ve spoken about sitemaps. We’ve spoken about landing on a site and just doing an intuitive sort of journey through the page. Are there any other elements that you’re looking at when you’re going through these, a technical SEO audit that would be helpful to folks to know about?
Areej: Yes, I can just share screens for a second because I’ll just address one thing because I know a few people have asked this question. Just in case anyone is worried that their sitemap is being disallowed, it may not be disallowed because you might be thinking because it’s mentioned in the robots.txt, then it is, but just take a look at it and check because it might simply be that your robots.txt is saying, “I’m not disallowing anything. By the way, here’s my sitemap URL.” If that’s the case, then that’s fine. That’s not a problem. If not– also, feel free to send me screenshots and stuff directly. I’d be happy to say, “Oh, no, that’s a problem,” or it’s not.
Jumping back again, I think Papier again would be a good example to look at further things because with it being an e-commerce site, there’s a lot more that potentially might be working or might not. Again, when we go back to this concept, I love thinking of any website as a set of templates. Right away I land on a website and I would know what are my different templates.
The reason this is helpful is because you might feel very overwhelmed on a website where it’s, I don’t know, over 100,000 pages, for example, and you might be like, “Oh, no, how many pages am I supposed to fix?” Actually, it’s not the 100,000 pages, it’s the different templates. When there’s a problem in a template, if you fix it in that template, then it’s fixed site-wide, right?
Let’s just together see, okay, what are the different templates that I would have on a typical e-commerce site? Your homepage is a template because that’s fairly unique in nature. When you visit your different– what you would call maybe a product listing page, here’s all of the different products listed for a specific category. There really isn’t much difference between your Notebooks page and your Journals page.
If we find that there’s an error or something that’s not working here, I’m pretty sure I can bet that the same error will probably be happening on your notebooks page as well because this as a template is built in a way, your developers or your tech team tend to build every single page and then just make different copies of it. The difference that ends up happening is your content or your copy, but the actual technical setup tends to be the same. This is an example of your second template.
Your third template, this is a good example here, which is your actual product detail page. Usually, with any e-commerce site, you have that. You have a homepage, you have a listing page, and then you have a detail page as an example. Then you might have your typical type of stuff, which is like, I don’t know, your content pieces. That type of stuff.
It’s probably the same as well for a website like The Marketing Meetup, where you have your homepage, then you have your different pages that list your events, and then you have different standalone pages, “Oh, sign up to the newsletter,” or, “Check out our jobs,” or so on. Then you have your like blogs or your guides, where they actually have content pieces written.
Don’t feel overwhelmed when you initially step on a new website and you want to understand what’s working from a technical perspective. Instead, spend a few minutes understanding what are the different templates on this website, and then auditing your website on a template-by-template basis, as opposed to checking it on a page-by-page basis, which can feel extremely overwhelming, but also would not really be helpful at the end of the day because from a technical perspective, you always approach things from a template basis.
Then I would say, and I know we’re going to be talking about tools in a little bit, but I think this actually might be the perfect time to explain a little bit about, well, what are some of the– “Here I am, I’m stood on this page, Areej how do I know if there’s a problem with it or not?” I absolutely love this Chrome extension. It’s called SEO Chrome extension. It’s done by the brilliant Kristina Azarenko, who does tons of technical SEO courses, beginner guides to technical SEO. I’ll definitely check her out. If Azeem is still on the call, I’m sure he’ll type out her name now on the chat.
The lovely thing about this Chrome extension is, even I, as someone who’s been doing tech SEO for over 10 years, I love to open it up right away when I’m stood on a new page to know, is there something wrong with this page or this template or not? It’s almost like this lovely audit assistant for you, where you just simply– you’re stood on a page, you click on it, and then you start understanding some of the basics of that page.
What’s my title tag? What’s my meta description? A canonical tag is, again, a technical element that basically means this is where– am I referring to– am I telling Google to crawl the page that matters or not? It tells you the different headings that you have. It most importantly tells you whether you have a 200 status code page or you could be stood on a page that’s a redirect or a page that’s broken or so on, so you know there’s an issue. It tells you exactly what we were just talking about, how many internal links you have to this page. It tells you whether your page has schema. All of this lovely stuff.
Now, we’re stood right now on a page that works. I want to think about something that might be broken. I’ll have to think about it when we run a crawl together. A great example, if I’m stood on a problematic page or something that’s broken and I click on this extension, right away, for example, the status code would let me know, “Oh, there’s an issue here. This page is not working, this page is broken, or this is actually redirecting to this and so on.”
For someone starting off at technical SEO, I would say having a free helpful Chrome extension like this can really go a long way and can help you understand some of the initial basics and can also just help you dive in because right away you might be like, “Whoa, what’s a canonical tag,” right? You can then go in, do a Google search what this is, understand whether it’s something important or not.
Host: That’s absolutely fabulous. I wanted to pick up on– We’ve got Sally with plenty of exclamation marks again, picking up on those who says, “Areej, oh, my goodness, that plugin, thank you,” with a heart emoji. I just wanted to pick up very quickly and I appreciate this could be a deep question. but on a schema because this was something I was really unfamiliar with quite recently, really in the past couple of years. Would you be able to speak to that if you can in the quickest possible way?
Areej: Yes, I think schema is a very good example of something that’s– it’s a nice-to-have, but then when you have it, it really makes a massive difference to how you rank and how you appear in the SERP. Schema is in very simple terms, it’s this way of, “Well, how do I define the different– how do I add some code around the different elements of my website so that they can appear and show nicely in the SERP?” The SERP is your search engine ranking page.
A good example of that and a really simple example actually of that is when we just searched Marketing Meetup, all of these beautiful different elements of, “Here are all of our different pages, and here’s the more results that you can have.” Another good example as well, and I wonder whether I would be able to see it here, they’re not appearing here, but you know sometimes when you search something and right away you get these– Here’s a good example of schema right there. The fact that it shows you the price right away of what a notebook is.
Another good example as well is when you search something and you see the different reviews, so you can see right away that something is a five-star review, let’s say, or so on. Think about these elements and how much they help with click-through rate. Having those images pop up here, that’s schema as well. This is specific product image schema that has been added. This makes it so much better. It’s almost like you’re playing on human psychology in a way because it’s this trigger of, “Whoa, this looks beautiful, so I’m going to click on it,” as opposed to just searching notebooks.
Google isn’t even– they’re not even playing around anymore. Almost everything appearing has actual product image schema to it because it’s going to be so rare that you search something anymore and this type of imagery doesn’t show because they know that the click-through rate is so low for things that might just have text and don’t actually appeal to people. Right away, your brain gravitates to, “I really like the way this looks, so this is what I want to go in and this is what I want to search.”
The reason that schema is really, really important is because it helps elevate a lot of that stuff in the SERP and it shows your different elements and it makes it a lot easier for then people to decide, “Oh, this is what I want to go for or not.” Again, using Kristina’s– let’s go in a specific– we’re on this specific product and right away it tells me, “Oh, you’ve got–” yes, this product has product schema, this is what it looks like and this product also has– this page in general has a different breadcrumb listing schema which is literally this. You schema up your different internal links here, making it much easier to look up on the SERP.
Again, don’t feel overwhelmed because it’s code. There are schema generators out there where you literally say, “This is my URL, I want to make sure these images, please help me generate that schema and then it gets added.” Again, with a lot of people who might be using things like WordPress or so on, there’s tons of plugins that literally just help provide the schema for you. Yes, you may need to work with a technical SEO or a developer to make sure that there are no errors in there and they’re correct, but just start off by understanding some of these concepts and why they are important.
Host: That’s perfect. Thank you so much, Areej. Helen’s asking in the chat about a good example of a schema generator. If we can’t provide one right now, it would be the type of thing that we can–
Areej: Yes, I personally love– let me just add it here. This website was created by an agency called Merkle. They’re a massive agency specifically in the US. I think I’ve been using their schema. I’m a tech SEO for 10 years and I don’t even write schema by hand. I literally use generators as well. That website is an example, but there’s a lot of really good schema markup testers. After you write it, you can use a tester, you can make sure it’s correct or not. Yes, all that stuff helps.
Host: That’s perfect. Thank you so much, Areej. Was there anything else that we wanted to cover off on this particular question or should we move on to the next one?
Areej: Yes, I think we can move on.
Host: Cool, all right, sounds good. The next one was about whether anything has changed in technical SEO in the past few years. Is there anything that feels particularly relevant? There’s a question in the Q&A right now about like ChatGPT and stuff like that, which of course is changing some of the game, but if we take ChatGPT out of it for the moment and just ask about SEO.
Areej: I have an interesting answer to this that maybe not a lot of people might agree with, but I’m always one of those people who goes around everywhere with everything that’s happening right now with the world and ChatGPT and AI and so on, saying, the basics and the foundations are still important. Never mind all this fancy, shiny stuff. We still need to make sure our websites have good, solid technical SEO.
I’ve done a talk in Brighton SEO last year where that’s the summary of what I was saying. I shared my slides across with John Mueller who’s– he looks after like Google Search Liaison. I was like, “John, do you agree with the stuff I say here before I present it to a thousand people?” He told me something very interesting. He said he doesn’t feel that technical SEO will continue being such a big deal in the future because a lot of these websites and CMSs and third-party generators, they’re all getting so much better at what they do.
If you think about your typical WordPress or Shopify or Squarespace, they all still have their issues, but they are all being built with SEO in mind and they’re constantly being improved. The reason we feel that maybe technical SEO will not continue being this massive maze or this thing that we need to spend and invest a large amount of time on is because all of these website generators, all of these CMSs, they are continually improving more and more and more that a lot of this stuff will already be baked in and we might not need to worry about it.
Yes, it will continue to be a big hinder and a big problem for massive legacy websites. The likes of websites that have been around for a decade or two decades and they have all of these legacy code and they’re a complete mess and they’re massively enterprise, but for brand new websites that you’re building today and now, my advice is, yes, it might feel very overwhelming, but you will be surprised by how much the stuff is already baked in and thought of using the CMS that you’re potentially using or having all of these different tools that we can potentially use to help us understand how to generate the stuff best.
Host: I love that. Thank you very much. It’s always good to have that grounded reality check. We’ll come back round to the big large pages thing because it’s the top question presently from Simon. Folks, I’ve got one question left about tools and then we’re going to go into the Q&A section. If you see a question that you like in the Q&A, give it a thumbs up, so we can prioritize it. I can see there’s 15 open questions right now. We’ve got about 19 minutes left plus the tools questions.
Areej: We’ve got this.
Host: We’ve got it. Areej, everyone loves to know about tools and you’ve already given an amazing one. Genuinely, I’ve never heard of it before and I’m going to be installing it straight after today’s session, but what other tools are you using day-to-day?
Areej: I’ll keep it really, really simple. The SEO Pro extension was the first one I was going to suggest purely because it’s there, it’s free, and absolutely everyone can use it, and I think those tools are best. The second tool I’m going to suggest is also a very straightforward one and I’m sure a lot of us are aware of, and it’s your Google Search Console. Google Search Console is there, it’s free. When you set up a website, the first thing you should do is make sure you add Google Search Console to it.
A lot of people forget to do that and then they might end up losing some of their historical data. The reason I think Google Search Console is the most important tool out there is because it’s straight from Google. It’s telling you exactly what you need to know. It’s telling you, “Here are all the different pages that you have. Here are any issues that might potentially be there. This is what’s indexed. This is what’s not indexed. These are the ones that are broken and not found. This is the stuff we crawled, but we decided it’s not deemed to index.”
Every single thing we’re talking about from a technical SEO perspective is already– Google Search Console, a free tool that you have simply connected to your website already has told you what are the issues and what are not the issues. If you look at– it also explains to you the performance of certain things. I’m not looking at anything. This is just the WTS site, so I don’t care. People can see the stuff, but right away it tells you, this is how people land on it. These were the queries they did and they ended up finding it. You can see the different pages on your site and know how many clicks, how many impressions, what are the ones that are performing well.
You can change things around based on date ranges as well. You can do comparison to understand how did the clicks differ from a certain month to another. There is so much stuff in there. We haven’t even touched on things like your speed and page experience. All of these metrics are very, very important for technical SEO, but again, they’re not really the ones that we need to start focusing on. These are all great to have in addition, but the main thing, we just need to go back to the foundational of crawl, rank, index.
Always think about those three before you then move on to, do I have a good mobile site? Do I have good speed? How are my different scorings going and so on? Definitely, Google Search Console extremely important.
If you want to then start to get a little bit more techie and get all excited about actually analyzing the website on a page-by-page basis, Screaming Frog is the most popular crawler. We call it a crawler because it basically tries to mimic what Google does, which is go through a website page by page. First of all, up to a hundred pages can be done for free. I think, no, actually, 500 pages can be crawled for free. You’ll be surprised how many of– if you’re working on a fairly small website, you can actually use Screaming Frog for free.
If you pay for it, even that, it’s super cheap. I think it’s £100 a year or something for unlimited number of crawls. It looks something like this. You literally just add a website to it. Is it showing the crawler?
Host: Yes, it is.
Areej: You just add the website URL to it. It literally starts scrolling it URL by URL. It tells you then all of the– you can export stuff. You can understand, “Oh, do I have anything blocked? Do I have anything redirected? Do I have anything broken? Do I have any–” It’s as helpful as it gets when you want to understand on a page-by-page basis, what’s working, what’s not working.
I would say the SEO Pro extension, Screaming Frog, and Google Search Console, they’re probably the top three. There’s so many other fancy tools and crawlers, but these are the three that I use day in, day out for, for working on technical SEO stuff.
Host: That’s really perfect. Thank you so much. Again, it’s just so lovely to have a few simple things. We’ve got Kim in the chat saying, “I actually just got a little bit excited about Screaming Frog,” which is great. You’re amongst friends. It’s okay to get excited about marketing things. Good on you, Kim. Right, Areej, we’ve got 14 minutes left of advertised time and 21 open questions to ask.
Areej: We can answer them all. We’ve got this. [laughter] It’s a challenge.
Host: It’s a challenge. Let’s go for it. The first one comes from Sarah and Sarah asks, “Coming from someone that is a one-person band, managing all the marketing communications for a charity, someone who doesn’t have a lot of time to spend on SEO, but knows the importance of it, what would be your number one do’s and don’ts?”
Areej: Yes. You’re working on a– That’s what I love most about The Marketing Meetup webinars is a lot of them are targeted and trying to be very, very helpful for folks who have little time and little resources and little money for this stuff. I would say if we’re thinking about it from a technical SEO perspective, make sure your site is crawlable and indexable by Google. Just make sure there’s nothing that’s blocked. There are no pages that are broken and everything is visible.
If you look up your brand, is it appearing? Are the pages actually appearing on Google? Are the pages that matter actually ranking? Are there any big errors or flags that are showing up on your Search Console? Just making sure that the foundations are there and are set up is probably as important as it gets for a very small, resource-budget website.
Host: Love it. To loop back around to your recommendation of Google Search Console, it is remarkable, A, the amount of folks who don’t have it installed, but also B, how vehemently every SEO I ever speak to endorses it and says how important it is. Thank you for reiterating that as well.
Let’s go to the next question from Simon. You spoke earlier about enterprise sites and bigger sites and stuff like that. Simon asks, “As a website evolves, old pages and content rules get taken down from time to time, but the references are still out there on the internet. Any suggestions on how to manage this?”
Areej: Yes, beautiful. That’s a beautiful question. There is so much out there about how to specifically deal with old pages or ones you don’t care about. There is best practice and non-best practice. There’s this concept of, we don’t want to just kill a page. We want to redirect it instead to a page that’s relevant, so we pass that authority through. Google Search Console also has removal tools where we can go in and say, “We want those links removed from the index. We don’t want them there anymore,” but there’s a lot of different steps and thought that go into, “How do we deal with these pages best? How do we make sure we don’t just kill them and kill their authority?”
Instead, if we’re not able to refresh them, maybe what we should be doing is redirecting them and bringing people to another page that’s more recent or relevant or so forth. In general, yes, it might take even a few months for larger websites for pages that don’t matter anymore to drop out of the index, but it will happen eventually. Let’s just make sure– and that’s probably something I should have said an hour ago, which is with all of this stuff, let’s make sure we’re prioritizing the user experience over Google. If we’re thinking about the user front of mind for a lot of this stuff, then we’re usually doing it right. Google’s just going to follow through.
Host: Nice. I love that. Thank you. Just to reiterate what I heard because I’m coming in as a layperson here as well, it is almost on a page-by-page basis, but almost that just idea of, well, definitely prioritizing the folks, but just giving some thoughtfulness to it. There isn’t a catch-all, like do a 301 redirect or something like that. It may be a different piece of advice for every page.
Areej: Yes. With all migration work and with migration projects, we do think about them on a one-to-one basis where we’re like, “Okay, this page needs to go to this page. This page needs to go to this page.” We always recommend to simply not do a catch-all and throw everything back to the homepage because that’s like, “Whoa, why are you giving all this irrelevant authority back to the homepage?”
You should be linking it back to pages that are relevant or pages that are helpful in a way. You don’t want people to simply keep falling back to the homepage and getting frustrated and being like, “This isn’t where I want it to go. I wanted to learn about X, Y, or Z,” or so forth.
Host: Perfect. I love that. Thank you very much. That’s really, really useful. That’s useful advice. This question comes from Fiona. While I’m speaking through this, I’m going to put this screen back up because Fiona asks, “What sources, publications, or websites do you follow to keep up with everything SEO?”
Areej: Yes. In general, definitely, anyone and everyone who wants to learn about SEO and wants to join a free community around it, all women, gender non-conforming folks, and non-binary folks are more than welcome to join Women in Tech SEO. We’ve got tons of beginners and experts there. I do also have my absolute favorite, which I use all the time. Let me just share screen super quickly. If anyone has not come across this website, ah, bookmark it.
Learningseo.io, the brilliant Aleyda Solis, who is– I’m just going to search it right now, who is the queen of SEO. This woman is brilliant. This is the best website ever because it gives you almost a roadmap in how to learn about SEO. It takes you step by step, all of the different steps of learning about it. I specifically opened the technical optimization one for this webinar. Everything on there is free.
These are all different guides and stuff that will help teach you, “Oh, how do we go about understanding technical SEO? What are the different–” it gives you tons of different extensions and tools as well that you can use. That’s the wonderful thing. There’s a lot of publications and stuff out there, but I love this website because anything and everything that you want to learn about, it’s all there. It has the most resources and everything that’s linked from tools to podcasts, to guides, to everything on there is free.
Definitely give it a checkout. When I used to work with a team before, I would advise them, you want to learn something new? Just spend 15 minutes reading a new article every day. Every day in the morning before you kick off the day, just open up a new article from here, give it a read, a new guide, and share with someone else what you’ve learned because that really, really helps.
Host: That’s ridiculous. I’ve never heard of that before, but that’s an amazing resource. [laughs] We’ve got Sarah in the chat saying, “So much great actionable info in this webinar. Thank you, Areej.”
Areej: Yay.
Host: Another one from Talia, “Thank you. Bookmarked it now, never heard of it before.” That’s fabulous. You’re doing good work here, Areej.
Areej: Yay.
Host: Let’s take the next question from Azeem, the amazing Azeem. Azeem asks, “If you could give one piece of advice to junior/people new in the industry who want to pick up tech SEO, what would that be?”
Areej: Yes, I love, I love, I love this advice. I think my main thing, and I know I’ve used the word overwhelming a lot because the thing is, that’s the thing with technical SEO. I think a lot of people feel very like, “Whoa, I’m not a technical person, why should I get into technical SEO?” That’s just so incorrect. Every single brilliant technical SEO I’ve ever met, they learned it on the job.
What I love about technical SEO, it’s almost like, if you ever wanted to be a detective in a past life, this is the best way. It’s like the detective of being in search or marketing or tech because that’s literally what you’re doing. You’re putting your detective hat on and you’re going on a website and you’re trying to see, “Oh, what’s broken and what works and what doesn’t work,” and so forth.
That’s such a human thing to do, right? It’s so easy to learn, and there’s tons– the industry is massive, and a lot of free resources and free tools and free guides on how to do it. Don’t feel overwhelmed by the idea that, “Oh, this is technical and I’m not a technical person.” You will be surprised by how easy it will be to grasp the concepts of it once you get into it and you start asking the right questions and you just start looking at the right things.
Host: There’s this thing which people will be very bored of me speaking about if they come to TMM webinars regularly. I think you’ve been insane today, actually, just at how clear and accessible you’ve made everything. I call it my shoulders relaxing moment, which is just a thing where you sort of go into something that feels so fearful, but you come out and you’re like, “Actually, I can do this, it’s cool.” You’ve done that for me. I can see in the chat just so many people really singing your praises, Areej, so you absolutely deserve this. We’ve got a question here from Joanna, who simply says, “Can we have Areej do a technical SEO teaching on a monthly basis?” [laughter]
Areej: Yes. Oh, I’d love to do that.
Host: Honestly, I’m getting you on the hook for this. If you’re in, then we’re doing it.
Areej: I’m trying to join the TMM crew permanently. If that gets me there, that’s it.
Host: [laughs] I’m so game for that. I’m trying to work through the questions in a way where we hopefully don’t hover ground that’s already been focused on over the course of the session already today. Let’s have a look from a question from anonymous. It might be quite specific, but maybe we can broaden it out to our viewers.
The question is, “We are currently running a website that’s not really fit for purpose. It’s a legacy site, it’s a bit of a mishmash and hard-coded. We’re having to use HubSpot landing pages and linking to them at the moment from the website. The question is, will this have a big impact on SEO?” I guess the broader question is, what do you even start to do in those– Because I’ve worked on websites in the past where I’ve literally had to build it with HTML and all sorts of stuff. What do we start to do in those kinds of situations or this specific one?
Areej: I think in some cases, you need– it’s almost like you have your short-term plan and you have your long-term plan. If your short-term plan and what’s making it work at the minute is to have a bunch of random HubSpot landing pages here and there because you need to get people through the door and you need to actually get your content somewhere, then that’s okay, that can be your short-term plan.
Your long-term plan definitely needs to be taking a look at that legacy website, taking a look at that legacy code, and starting to put a proper plan in place for, well, should we just redesign this from scratch? How should we migrate this? Where should this live? Should we bring this to another CMS? Hopefully, you have a tech team who’s helping or supporting with some of this.
I would actually even prioritize having a proper dev in place before having a technical SEO coming in and making sure everything is working, just to put a proper– it’s almost like your architecture plan of how we can link up this site properly before– yes, but it’s okay to have a short-term plan in the meantime, just to get people through the door, but I’ve worked on my fair share of legacy hard-coded websites and they can be really, really scary to work on. Yes, I feel you there.
Host: Yes, it’s hard, so many of us walk into these jobs where we’re just given a site, right? To go through that is really tricky. Honestly, I’m just looking at this chat and people are– your ego is going to be massively inflated.
Areej: You need to save the chat and send it to me. When I feel bad, I’m going to go through it. [chuckles]
Host: I absolutely will. [chuckles] This is not necessarily a technical SEO question, but it’s one I haven’t focused on so far. I don’t even know if it will go into your world, but Ashlin asks, “Do you know of any tools that will help us understand our Google Analytics form?” I’ve heard there’s new tools that will make it easier to understand new Google Analytics, but maybe–
Areej: Oh, new Google Analytics. I’ve been avoiding it, GA4. I don’t know if you’ve had recent webinars or you have upcoming webinars about it, but that’s definitely a good one. I know it’s scaring a lot of people, the way it’s set up. Personally, I’m not an analytics pro and I’ve been avoiding it. Whenever I work on a project, I’m like, “You have someone good with analytics, right?” Because I don’t want to have to deal with that.
I know like with GA4 and the way it’s been set up and if it hasn’t been set up correctly, then you might be losing on a lot of really important data. definitely not one where I’m personally an expert on, but I completely feel you on how frustrating it’s been having a massive overhaul and change to a tool that used to be so simple and straightforward. Yes.
Host: That’s wonderful. We have a couple. The one I’d recommend folks to check out is one by Mary Owusu, which we find in our previous talks session. Mary speaks through Google Analytics 4 just when it was coming out and she did a brilliant session. Likewise, someone gifted with clarity and just being an amazing person.
Areej, that’s our hour. Thank you so much. We’ve got this comment here from Ben who says, “This has been amazing. So insightful and reassuring. Can’t wait to explore the recommended tools.” I would widen that out just to say, thank you so much on everything because we’ve got Helen saying, “OMG, thank you so much.”
Areej: Yay. If we didn’t manage to answer anyone’s question, feel free to shoot them directly to me. I just added my LinkedIn to the chat and I’m always happy to answer as many questions as I can. Thank you so much, Joel and the team, for having me. I love being on these webinars and everyone’s energy is so contagious. Thank you.
Host: It’s wicked. Thank you very much. Before we go, I just want to say a big thank you to our sponsors once again because they enable us to do these sessions. What you’ll see in the follow-up email is the bunch of human beings who are behind these sponsors. If you don’t mind shooting them a message just to say thank you for supporting the community. It’s the type of thing that really goes a long way.
With all that said, we’ll be here next week for another session, actually on Google on reviews and getting more reviews, which is one of those fundamental things which people just don’t think about. I’m really excited for that session. Hopefully, you can join it. Thank you, Areej. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time.
Areej: Thank you.
Host: Absolutely incredible. Take care, everyone. Have a lovely week. Bye now.
Host: Good morning, everyone. Lovely to have you here. Thank you all so much for taking the time. It’s a real joy. I can see folks already popping in. Where are you watching from? Saying good morning to each other. The exclamation mark game in the chat this morning is strong. Thank you all so much for being completely lovely and for being here. If you haven’t already, do pop in the chat feature where you’re watching from. Don’t forget to switch your messages to everyone, so everyone can see your messages.
The way you do that is you head into your chat feature. There’s a little toggle. If it presently says “To: Hosts and panelists,” just need to tick that and switch it to everyone so everyone can see. As I can see, Alison in Switzerland, Josie in Glasgow, Philippa in Southampton. Okay, it’s going too quick now for me to read. It’s so lovely to have you all. Thank you all so much. Andy from Daventry, which is where I’m from as well, which is very important.
Today, our guest is the legend that is Areej AbuAli of Women in Tech SEO, the community for, well, women in tech in SEO. Areej runs conferences around the world. On 8th of March, they have a London event, which is actually sold out. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s in London or not. The thing that they do have is a recording ticket available, which The Marketing Meetup has 50% off, which I’ll share after today’s session. If you like Areej, which of course you will after today’s session, then do take time to check out Women in Tech SEO. It’s wicked. Areej is just fab.
Today, we’re focusing on technical SEO, which is something, to be honest, I know very little about. I’m going to be sat here learning with you, which is really, really cool. Today we’ll function like an interview-esque type thing. Areej has lined up some tabs and some explainers for us to walk through some of the basics on the journey of understanding technical SEO, which I think will be brilliant.
We’ll also be taking your questions in. If you want to use the Q&A feature, which is found down below in the little window, you can get your questions in and we’ll try and make sure that we answer as many of those as possible towards the end of the session.
Before we get started, I want to say a big thank you to today’s featured sponsor, who are Redgate Software. Redgate are lovely. I used to work in their building a long time ago. Presently, they’re hiring a director of portfolio marketing and one of the marketing role on an absolute just rocket ship of a software company. If you want to check out those roles, then please do at Redgate Software. They’re a really great company on a really great journey as well. Well worth checking out those open roles at Redgate0.
Also, a big thank you to our other sponsors, Frontify, Exclaimer, Klaviyo, Cambridge Marketing College. We’ll be speaking about all of those on rotation throughout the rest of the weeks that are coming. I can see Laura in Colchester, Annie, my daughter’s name is Annie, in Falmouth, so extra points there, Annie. I can see Alex in Guildford. We are primed, we’re ready. Let’s get going with today’s session. Thank you so much for being here, Areej. Let’s start with the obvious question, which is what is technical SEO? How is this different to what people would think about as SEO?
Areej AbuAli: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I love joining these webinars. Thank you everyone for tuning in bright and early to learn and talk about all things technical SEO. I’ve been doing tech SEO for a little bit over a decade now. I think the first thing to start off by saying is I wasn’t even sure what it was before I actually got into it. That’s the very cool thing about getting into SEO is that the barrier to entry is very, very small. There’s a lot that you end up learning on the job.
SEO as a whole is this concept of, well, how do we rank best on search engines? There’s usually three different elements to it. One being technical, the second being content, and the third being links. The way I like to think about technical SEO is it’s like your foundation. It’s your basis. It’s the backbone of your website. You need to get that right before you start thinking about any of the other metrics or concepts because if your site isn’t set up technically in a correct way, then Google will struggle to even understand any of the very awesome content that might be living on it. Yes, it’s a nice foundational concept that comes to SEO.
Host: Nice. I love that. I’m learning already. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone put it that way in those three ways. Maybe I’ll show my SEO ignorance, but I find that really useful to think about those three ways. Thank you very much for the idea, Areej. You’ve probably already answered this, but you and I agreed some questions upfront so that we made sure we covered a fuller basis. At what point do we need to think about technical SEO specifically? Is there a point where it becomes especially useful? Because presumably there will be different parts on the journey, perhaps.
Areej: Yes, I think that’s a really good question. I’m just going to keep popping in and out of different share screens with stuff if that’s okay. I think it would be really helpful maybe if I just start off by showing this diagram. I love this diagram because it’s one of those, and there’s a lot of different examples of those that you can find on the internet, but this is one of the most helpful ways to kickstart your thinking about what technical SEO is and what it means.
If we start with how Google works, there’s this concept of you have your spider bots or you have these different bots that are walking around, understanding the internet, and how it’s connected with one another. What they do when they land on any website is this concept called crawling. They would crawl a website, they would go through the different web pages to try to understand and analyze what the page content is.
Once they’ve done this crawling, let’s say you have a website that’s 100 pages, they’ve went in and they’ve crawled every single one of those 100 pages. They’ve analyzed what the content is. They then decide that they want to store it in their index. If you think about anything that you search on Google, you always come back with tens of thousands of links. These links have been indexed on Google. Once they are stored, then if a user is then searching for a specific term, these pages are then ranked in that way.
If we, let’s say, do something really simple, which is search The Marketing Meetup, for example, what I’ve done here is I’ve entered a specific search term and then I have all of these different websites coming up on the SERP, which is your search engine ranking page. The way that these have come is because Google has crawled their pages, have analyzed their content, have stored it in the index, have then decided that these specific pages are deemed worthy of ranking for a term like Marketing Meetup, for example.
The best way to– they call it the– and we can look at it together, the crawl index rank. That’s the best way to understand technical SEO is these three concepts. With anything that we do with technical SEO, we always make sure, is my site crawlable? Can Google actually crawl it properly? Is my site indexable? Can Google actually index what it crawls? Then is it deemed worthy of ranking? Every single technical SEO audit you go through or you look at, front of mind, these are the three things that we are trying to tackle.
Host: That’s so good. The clarity is off the charts here, which is so useful. Thank you very much, Areej, and thank you for sharing those. I always get so nervous whenever people start pulling up The Marketing Meetup website. [unintelligible 00:08:54]. [chuckles]
Areej: I’ve still got other bits with The Marketing Meetup lined up. [laughter]
Host: I feel like it was a threat before we started, where you were like, “Do a live audit on TMM.” It’s like, “Oh, God.” Anyway, having established the three elements of SEO and then three elements of technical SEO, what are the key things that you think of when you’re approaching a web page for the first time from a technical SEO perspective?
Areej: Yes, perfect. I think that’s also a really good question. Maybe what we can do here is– let me just– I’ll share our Women in Tech SEO website as an example to start off with.
Host: I feel safer. That doesn’t make my heart palpitate quite as much for the meantime.
Areej: I’ve got The Marketing Meetup lined up here. [laughs]
Host: I know it’s coming. [laughs]
Areej: If I were to open a website for the first time, the thing is a lot of people might– and we’ll talk about tools in a little bit, but there’s this overwhelming idea of, “Oh, there are all these tools. Let me run the website through these different tools and get all this data and stuff.” What tends to happen is you get really overwhelmed at that point because you have all of this data come back.
For me, even 10 years down the line, what I love to do initially is literally just go on a website and treat it as a user and see what works and what breaks and understand the template and the structure of it. When I say template and structure, you usually have your navigation up here with all the different links. You then usually have different subcategories within that. You have your homepage.
Everything here is called internal links. Internal links are– again, try to put yourself in Google bot shoes when they’re crawling the website. What they do is they land on your homepage, for example, and then they end up going to one link after the other. Once they go in one, they then follow another link, and so forth. It’s this idea of going through this journey of one link to the other. If we go to The Marketing Meetups, for example, it’s very similar again. You have your navigation here, and then you have your different templates. You have a website, a page that has content, and then has a table, and then has more content. That’s your template or the structure of how the website is set up.
Now, a few things that would make or break a site is this concept of, well, are all of these internal links actually working properly? Or do some of them end up redirecting elsewhere? Do some of them end up going to a broken page, for example? Are all of these different internal links actually proper– what they call a 200-status code page, which means that this page is actually alive and well and functioning fine and not a broken page? Are we making sure that we are allowing Google to index all of those?
Now, a few key things we have in technical SEO is something called robots.txt and something called a sitemap.xml. These are basically things that help a website– help Google understand where they can find all of the links because if you think of– Google normally wouldn’t– they’re trying to save money as well, right? They’re not going to load a page that looks– with all the imagery and with all the different functionalities. They just want nice plain pages where they can see and understand the text and see and follow the links.
For that reason, a lot of the times when you’re trying to put yourself in Google’s shoes and understand how could they technically comprehend the website, you get rid of all of this fancy stuff. What you do instead is you try to look at it from– let’s kill our JavaScript or our CSS or whatever stuff is making this page very– let’s just focus on, is our content readable and are our links readable? Because these are the two most important things that we want to make sure can be crawled and indexed.
There’s an example of this concept of simple websites. I would say The Marketing Meetup or the Women in Tech SEO are fairly simple websites because first of all, they’re not large in nature. They’re not considered enterprise. A big portion of them don’t even really sell something. They’re mainly there for content and amplification and the sharing of different links and resources.
If we were to look at an example of an e-commerce website, this is Papier, I worked in-house for them from an SEO perspective for a few years. They have a lot more reliance on ensuring that their technical SEO works well because they are literally selling stuff through their website as an e-commerce site.
When you get into these larger type of e-commerce or enterprise sites, this is when technical SEO starts to differ a little bit because every single thing here, you have all of these things such as your filter system, which could make or break a website because let’s say, for example, if we haven’t set some of this stuff up technically well, we might not end up ranking for all of these different filters as an example. Now that’s something that can make or lose money for an e-commerce company. I’ll just stop right here in case I’ve been talking a little bit too much before we get into, yes, difference with larger websites or so on.
Host: No, that’s perfect. Thank you, Areej. it was really bang on. There’s Azeem in the chat who I saw is a mutual friend. I saw that he, first of all, acknowledged that he’s in the intro video today. Congratulations. Also said that you’re explaining it in a way that anyone can understand. I’m loving this so far. I just wanted to pick up on the robot.txt point because that feels important so that Google can understand how you pull your page and stuff like that. How do you know whether you’ve got that sorted or not? You’ve got a robot.txt file. I seem to remember that you do themarketingmeetup.com/robots.txt, but maybe that’s wrong. Is that right?
Areej: Yes, excellent question. I think robots.txt and sitemap.xml, I would say these are the two of the main things that we set up at the forefront. These are pages that Google visits at the very beginning to understand what– it’s almost like, this is the way you can set certain rules for your website. I’ll give an example of a very simple robots.txt and then a little bit complicated one.
Let me just share screens again. Great. Here is your very simple one, which is basically empty, which is fine, right? Because what this means is it means, “Oh, Google, do your thing. We’re not setting any rules for you. We actually want you to go through our entire website. There is nothing on there that we want to block access from.” This is as simple as it gets. Here’s an example of the Papier one where we are setting certain rules and we are blocking Google from visiting stuff.
We have done that for a reason. We’ve done that because think about your search of any e-commerce site. I can go in and just say, “Blah, blah, blah,” right? There isn’t anything that’s blah, blah, blah. I can say, “Oh, I want to look at specific notebooks.” You see what happens here. You can get tens of hundreds of thousands variation created on your website because anyone and anything can go in and decide to use your search functionality for something.
A good example of e-commerce sites when they set rules of what Google can crawl and cannot crawl, one of the first things they say is, “We don’t want Google crawling our search functionality because we know that this might end up creating or generating tens or hundreds of thousands of pages that we– those are all user-generated. We don’t care about Google actually finding those and storing them in their index and so forth.”
Another good example is with customization, an e-commerce website that allows you to customize its different products and add your names to it or so forth. Same idea exactly. This is for users to do, but I don’t want Google indexing any of this. The reason is websites in general, whether they’re enterprise or e-commerce or so forth, let’s say they have, I don’t know, a good 10,000 number of pages, there’s a certain caveat.
They call it a crawl budget, but the purpose is we want to make sure that the pages that we care about, our important pages, like the pages in our navigation, our different journals that we sell, our different notebooks that we sell, these are the ones that we want appearing on Google. We don’t want to distract from the things that aren’t important like our search passages or our customization or so forth. For that reason, we will define these rules and we will put them upfront in robots.txt.
Now, the same thing also can be said about the sitemap. The whole purpose of having a sitemap is this list of different URLs. We’re basically telling Google, “These are the URLs that matter the most. These are the ones that we want you to spend time on. We don’t care about anything else.” That’s why from a technical SEO perspective, we tend to spend a good amount of time auditing our list, all of our URLs that are in the sitemap and deeming whether these are worthy of being in there or whether they need a little bit of cleanup and we don’t need them in there exactly.
Everything we’re doing, we’re doing front of mind just to make sure this is the stuff that we want Google to crawl, index, and then hopefully, rank. Taking it back to those initial three points again.
Host: That’s brilliant. Thank you so much. That is just brilliant. Super clear, super useful. One follow-up question before we move on from sitemaps and that part of it, Helen in the chat has asked, is there anything that will help you generate a sitemap if there isn’t one?
Areej: Yes, that’s a really good question. This is dependent on the CMS you’re using. There are a lot of helpful plugins. For example, if you’re on a WordPress site, which I know Marketing Meetup is on, there tends to be a sitemap generator plugins that simply just like that, it understands your website, it understands all of your– I can see Michelle, yes, suggested the Yoast one. That’s a very popular one. A lot of people use it as a sitemap generator.
You may have noticed in some of the screen shares I’ve shown, it’s best practice to include the URL of your sitemap in the robots.txt file because we know this is the first place that Google visits. You’re making their life a little bit easier and you’re telling them, “Oh, by the way, you can see my sitemap here, which includes all of the URLs. There you go. These are the pages I care about. These are the ones I want you to crawl.” That’s actually something for you on The Marketing Meetup, you should add. [laughs] I’ll send you an email later. It’s best practice if you add your sitemap in your robots.txt and it’s currently not there.
Host: I love that. [laughs]
Areej: He’s taking notes.
Host: I’ve literally got my pad here.
Areej: I’ve had Joe WhatsApp me before. Was it like a random Search Console question?
Host: Probably.
Areej: He was like, “Is this page broken? What do I do about this? You’re my tech SEO friend.”
Host: 100%, yes. [laughs] [unintelligible 00:22:04]. I love it. I’m not great at that sort of stuff, plainly. I do want to move past the sitemap because I feel like there’ll be a lot of other features and stuff like that we need to discuss, not least 30 and open really great questions in the Q&A as well. Laura has put, “My company site is disallowing the sitemap. That doesn’t seem right.”
Areej: Oh, that’s not right.
Host: Cool. I feel like in this week’s newsletter, maybe we’ll share a bunch of SEO resources on technical SEO to help folks get through because I suspect there’ll be lots of unique situations, not least with The Marketing Meetup to be improved. Let’s circle back to that same question. We’ve spoken about robots.txt. We’ve spoken about sitemaps. We’ve spoken about landing on a site and just doing an intuitive sort of journey through the page. Are there any other elements that you’re looking at when you’re going through these, a technical SEO audit that would be helpful to folks to know about?
Areej: Yes, I can just share screens for a second because I’ll just address one thing because I know a few people have asked this question. Just in case anyone is worried that their sitemap is being disallowed, it may not be disallowed because you might be thinking because it’s mentioned in the robots.txt, then it is, but just take a look at it and check because it might simply be that your robots.txt is saying, “I’m not disallowing anything. By the way, here’s my sitemap URL.” If that’s the case, then that’s fine. That’s not a problem. If not– also, feel free to send me screenshots and stuff directly. I’d be happy to say, “Oh, no, that’s a problem,” or it’s not.
Jumping back again, I think Papier again would be a good example to look at further things because with it being an e-commerce site, there’s a lot more that potentially might be working or might not. Again, when we go back to this concept, I love thinking of any website as a set of templates. Right away I land on a website and I would know what are my different templates.
The reason this is helpful is because you might feel very overwhelmed on a website where it’s, I don’t know, over 100,000 pages, for example, and you might be like, “Oh, no, how many pages am I supposed to fix?” Actually, it’s not the 100,000 pages, it’s the different templates. When there’s a problem in a template, if you fix it in that template, then it’s fixed site-wide, right?
Let’s just together see, okay, what are the different templates that I would have on a typical e-commerce site? Your homepage is a template because that’s fairly unique in nature. When you visit your different– what you would call maybe a product listing page, here’s all of the different products listed for a specific category. There really isn’t much difference between your Notebooks page and your Journals page.
If we find that there’s an error or something that’s not working here, I’m pretty sure I can bet that the same error will probably be happening on your notebooks page as well because this as a template is built in a way, your developers or your tech team tend to build every single page and then just make different copies of it. The difference that ends up happening is your content or your copy, but the actual technical setup tends to be the same. This is an example of your second template.
Your third template, this is a good example here, which is your actual product detail page. Usually, with any e-commerce site, you have that. You have a homepage, you have a listing page, and then you have a detail page as an example. Then you might have your typical type of stuff, which is like, I don’t know, your content pieces. That type of stuff.
It’s probably the same as well for a website like The Marketing Meetup, where you have your homepage, then you have your different pages that list your events, and then you have different standalone pages, “Oh, sign up to the newsletter,” or, “Check out our jobs,” or so on. Then you have your like blogs or your guides, where they actually have content pieces written.
Don’t feel overwhelmed when you initially step on a new website and you want to understand what’s working from a technical perspective. Instead, spend a few minutes understanding what are the different templates on this website, and then auditing your website on a template-by-template basis, as opposed to checking it on a page-by-page basis, which can feel extremely overwhelming, but also would not really be helpful at the end of the day because from a technical perspective, you always approach things from a template basis.
Then I would say, and I know we’re going to be talking about tools in a little bit, but I think this actually might be the perfect time to explain a little bit about, well, what are some of the– “Here I am, I’m stood on this page, Areej how do I know if there’s a problem with it or not?” I absolutely love this Chrome extension. It’s called SEO Chrome extension. It’s done by the brilliant Kristina Azarenko, who does tons of technical SEO courses, beginner guides to technical SEO. I’ll definitely check her out. If Azeem is still on the call, I’m sure he’ll type out her name now on the chat.
The lovely thing about this Chrome extension is, even I, as someone who’s been doing tech SEO for over 10 years, I love to open it up right away when I’m stood on a new page to know, is there something wrong with this page or this template or not? It’s almost like this lovely audit assistant for you, where you just simply– you’re stood on a page, you click on it, and then you start understanding some of the basics of that page.
What’s my title tag? What’s my meta description? A canonical tag is, again, a technical element that basically means this is where– am I referring to– am I telling Google to crawl the page that matters or not? It tells you the different headings that you have. It most importantly tells you whether you have a 200 status code page or you could be stood on a page that’s a redirect or a page that’s broken or so on, so you know there’s an issue. It tells you exactly what we were just talking about, how many internal links you have to this page. It tells you whether your page has schema. All of this lovely stuff.
Now, we’re stood right now on a page that works. I want to think about something that might be broken. I’ll have to think about it when we run a crawl together. A great example, if I’m stood on a problematic page or something that’s broken and I click on this extension, right away, for example, the status code would let me know, “Oh, there’s an issue here. This page is not working, this page is broken, or this is actually redirecting to this and so on.”
For someone starting off at technical SEO, I would say having a free helpful Chrome extension like this can really go a long way and can help you understand some of the initial basics and can also just help you dive in because right away you might be like, “Whoa, what’s a canonical tag,” right? You can then go in, do a Google search what this is, understand whether it’s something important or not.
Host: That’s absolutely fabulous. I wanted to pick up on– We’ve got Sally with plenty of exclamation marks again, picking up on those who says, “Areej, oh, my goodness, that plugin, thank you,” with a heart emoji. I just wanted to pick up very quickly and I appreciate this could be a deep question. but on a schema because this was something I was really unfamiliar with quite recently, really in the past couple of years. Would you be able to speak to that if you can in the quickest possible way?
Areej: Yes, I think schema is a very good example of something that’s– it’s a nice-to-have, but then when you have it, it really makes a massive difference to how you rank and how you appear in the SERP. Schema is in very simple terms, it’s this way of, “Well, how do I define the different– how do I add some code around the different elements of my website so that they can appear and show nicely in the SERP?” The SERP is your search engine ranking page.
A good example of that and a really simple example actually of that is when we just searched Marketing Meetup, all of these beautiful different elements of, “Here are all of our different pages, and here’s the more results that you can have.” Another good example as well, and I wonder whether I would be able to see it here, they’re not appearing here, but you know sometimes when you search something and right away you get these– Here’s a good example of schema right there. The fact that it shows you the price right away of what a notebook is.
Another good example as well is when you search something and you see the different reviews, so you can see right away that something is a five-star review, let’s say, or so on. Think about these elements and how much they help with click-through rate. Having those images pop up here, that’s schema as well. This is specific product image schema that has been added. This makes it so much better. It’s almost like you’re playing on human psychology in a way because it’s this trigger of, “Whoa, this looks beautiful, so I’m going to click on it,” as opposed to just searching notebooks.
Google isn’t even– they’re not even playing around anymore. Almost everything appearing has actual product image schema to it because it’s going to be so rare that you search something anymore and this type of imagery doesn’t show because they know that the click-through rate is so low for things that might just have text and don’t actually appeal to people. Right away, your brain gravitates to, “I really like the way this looks, so this is what I want to go in and this is what I want to search.”
The reason that schema is really, really important is because it helps elevate a lot of that stuff in the SERP and it shows your different elements and it makes it a lot easier for then people to decide, “Oh, this is what I want to go for or not.” Again, using Kristina’s– let’s go in a specific– we’re on this specific product and right away it tells me, “Oh, you’ve got–” yes, this product has product schema, this is what it looks like and this product also has– this page in general has a different breadcrumb listing schema which is literally this. You schema up your different internal links here, making it much easier to look up on the SERP.
Again, don’t feel overwhelmed because it’s code. There are schema generators out there where you literally say, “This is my URL, I want to make sure these images, please help me generate that schema and then it gets added.” Again, with a lot of people who might be using things like WordPress or so on, there’s tons of plugins that literally just help provide the schema for you. Yes, you may need to work with a technical SEO or a developer to make sure that there are no errors in there and they’re correct, but just start off by understanding some of these concepts and why they are important.
Host: That’s perfect. Thank you so much, Areej. Helen’s asking in the chat about a good example of a schema generator. If we can’t provide one right now, it would be the type of thing that we can–
Areej: Yes, I personally love– let me just add it here. This website was created by an agency called Merkle. They’re a massive agency specifically in the US. I think I’ve been using their schema. I’m a tech SEO for 10 years and I don’t even write schema by hand. I literally use generators as well. That website is an example, but there’s a lot of really good schema markup testers. After you write it, you can use a tester, you can make sure it’s correct or not. Yes, all that stuff helps.
Host: That’s perfect. Thank you so much, Areej. Was there anything else that we wanted to cover off on this particular question or should we move on to the next one?
Areej: Yes, I think we can move on.
Host: Cool, all right, sounds good. The next one was about whether anything has changed in technical SEO in the past few years. Is there anything that feels particularly relevant? There’s a question in the Q&A right now about like ChatGPT and stuff like that, which of course is changing some of the game, but if we take ChatGPT out of it for the moment and just ask about SEO.
Areej: I have an interesting answer to this that maybe not a lot of people might agree with, but I’m always one of those people who goes around everywhere with everything that’s happening right now with the world and ChatGPT and AI and so on, saying, the basics and the foundations are still important. Never mind all this fancy, shiny stuff. We still need to make sure our websites have good, solid technical SEO.
I’ve done a talk in Brighton SEO last year where that’s the summary of what I was saying. I shared my slides across with John Mueller who’s– he looks after like Google Search Liaison. I was like, “John, do you agree with the stuff I say here before I present it to a thousand people?” He told me something very interesting. He said he doesn’t feel that technical SEO will continue being such a big deal in the future because a lot of these websites and CMSs and third-party generators, they’re all getting so much better at what they do.
If you think about your typical WordPress or Shopify or Squarespace, they all still have their issues, but they are all being built with SEO in mind and they’re constantly being improved. The reason we feel that maybe technical SEO will not continue being this massive maze or this thing that we need to spend and invest a large amount of time on is because all of these website generators, all of these CMSs, they are continually improving more and more and more that a lot of this stuff will already be baked in and we might not need to worry about it.
Yes, it will continue to be a big hinder and a big problem for massive legacy websites. The likes of websites that have been around for a decade or two decades and they have all of these legacy code and they’re a complete mess and they’re massively enterprise, but for brand new websites that you’re building today and now, my advice is, yes, it might feel very overwhelming, but you will be surprised by how much the stuff is already baked in and thought of using the CMS that you’re potentially using or having all of these different tools that we can potentially use to help us understand how to generate the stuff best.
Host: I love that. Thank you very much. It’s always good to have that grounded reality check. We’ll come back round to the big large pages thing because it’s the top question presently from Simon. Folks, I’ve got one question left about tools and then we’re going to go into the Q&A section. If you see a question that you like in the Q&A, give it a thumbs up, so we can prioritize it. I can see there’s 15 open questions right now. We’ve got about 19 minutes left plus the tools questions.
Areej: We’ve got this.
Host: We’ve got it. Areej, everyone loves to know about tools and you’ve already given an amazing one. Genuinely, I’ve never heard of it before and I’m going to be installing it straight after today’s session, but what other tools are you using day-to-day?
Areej: I’ll keep it really, really simple. The SEO Pro extension was the first one I was going to suggest purely because it’s there, it’s free, and absolutely everyone can use it, and I think those tools are best. The second tool I’m going to suggest is also a very straightforward one and I’m sure a lot of us are aware of, and it’s your Google Search Console. Google Search Console is there, it’s free. When you set up a website, the first thing you should do is make sure you add Google Search Console to it.
A lot of people forget to do that and then they might end up losing some of their historical data. The reason I think Google Search Console is the most important tool out there is because it’s straight from Google. It’s telling you exactly what you need to know. It’s telling you, “Here are all the different pages that you have. Here are any issues that might potentially be there. This is what’s indexed. This is what’s not indexed. These are the ones that are broken and not found. This is the stuff we crawled, but we decided it’s not deemed to index.”
Every single thing we’re talking about from a technical SEO perspective is already– Google Search Console, a free tool that you have simply connected to your website already has told you what are the issues and what are not the issues. If you look at– it also explains to you the performance of certain things. I’m not looking at anything. This is just the WTS site, so I don’t care. People can see the stuff, but right away it tells you, this is how people land on it. These were the queries they did and they ended up finding it. You can see the different pages on your site and know how many clicks, how many impressions, what are the ones that are performing well.
You can change things around based on date ranges as well. You can do comparison to understand how did the clicks differ from a certain month to another. There is so much stuff in there. We haven’t even touched on things like your speed and page experience. All of these metrics are very, very important for technical SEO, but again, they’re not really the ones that we need to start focusing on. These are all great to have in addition, but the main thing, we just need to go back to the foundational of crawl, rank, index.
Always think about those three before you then move on to, do I have a good mobile site? Do I have good speed? How are my different scorings going and so on? Definitely, Google Search Console extremely important.
If you want to then start to get a little bit more techie and get all excited about actually analyzing the website on a page-by-page basis, Screaming Frog is the most popular crawler. We call it a crawler because it basically tries to mimic what Google does, which is go through a website page by page. First of all, up to a hundred pages can be done for free. I think, no, actually, 500 pages can be crawled for free. You’ll be surprised how many of– if you’re working on a fairly small website, you can actually use Screaming Frog for free.
If you pay for it, even that, it’s super cheap. I think it’s £100 a year or something for unlimited number of crawls. It looks something like this. You literally just add a website to it. Is it showing the crawler?
Host: Yes, it is.
Areej: You just add the website URL to it. It literally starts scrolling it URL by URL. It tells you then all of the– you can export stuff. You can understand, “Oh, do I have anything blocked? Do I have anything redirected? Do I have anything broken? Do I have any–” It’s as helpful as it gets when you want to understand on a page-by-page basis, what’s working, what’s not working.
I would say the SEO Pro extension, Screaming Frog, and Google Search Console, they’re probably the top three. There’s so many other fancy tools and crawlers, but these are the three that I use day in, day out for, for working on technical SEO stuff.
Host: That’s really perfect. Thank you so much. Again, it’s just so lovely to have a few simple things. We’ve got Kim in the chat saying, “I actually just got a little bit excited about Screaming Frog,” which is great. You’re amongst friends. It’s okay to get excited about marketing things. Good on you, Kim. Right, Areej, we’ve got 14 minutes left of advertised time and 21 open questions to ask.
Areej: We can answer them all. We’ve got this. [laughter] It’s a challenge.
Host: It’s a challenge. Let’s go for it. The first one comes from Sarah and Sarah asks, “Coming from someone that is a one-person band, managing all the marketing communications for a charity, someone who doesn’t have a lot of time to spend on SEO, but knows the importance of it, what would be your number one do’s and don’ts?”
Areej: Yes. You’re working on a– That’s what I love most about The Marketing Meetup webinars is a lot of them are targeted and trying to be very, very helpful for folks who have little time and little resources and little money for this stuff. I would say if we’re thinking about it from a technical SEO perspective, make sure your site is crawlable and indexable by Google. Just make sure there’s nothing that’s blocked. There are no pages that are broken and everything is visible.
If you look up your brand, is it appearing? Are the pages actually appearing on Google? Are the pages that matter actually ranking? Are there any big errors or flags that are showing up on your Search Console? Just making sure that the foundations are there and are set up is probably as important as it gets for a very small, resource-budget website.
Host: Love it. To loop back around to your recommendation of Google Search Console, it is remarkable, A, the amount of folks who don’t have it installed, but also B, how vehemently every SEO I ever speak to endorses it and says how important it is. Thank you for reiterating that as well.
Let’s go to the next question from Simon. You spoke earlier about enterprise sites and bigger sites and stuff like that. Simon asks, “As a website evolves, old pages and content rules get taken down from time to time, but the references are still out there on the internet. Any suggestions on how to manage this?”
Areej: Yes, beautiful. That’s a beautiful question. There is so much out there about how to specifically deal with old pages or ones you don’t care about. There is best practice and non-best practice. There’s this concept of, we don’t want to just kill a page. We want to redirect it instead to a page that’s relevant, so we pass that authority through. Google Search Console also has removal tools where we can go in and say, “We want those links removed from the index. We don’t want them there anymore,” but there’s a lot of different steps and thought that go into, “How do we deal with these pages best? How do we make sure we don’t just kill them and kill their authority?”
Instead, if we’re not able to refresh them, maybe what we should be doing is redirecting them and bringing people to another page that’s more recent or relevant or so forth. In general, yes, it might take even a few months for larger websites for pages that don’t matter anymore to drop out of the index, but it will happen eventually. Let’s just make sure– and that’s probably something I should have said an hour ago, which is with all of this stuff, let’s make sure we’re prioritizing the user experience over Google. If we’re thinking about the user front of mind for a lot of this stuff, then we’re usually doing it right. Google’s just going to follow through.
Host: Nice. I love that. Thank you. Just to reiterate what I heard because I’m coming in as a layperson here as well, it is almost on a page-by-page basis, but almost that just idea of, well, definitely prioritizing the folks, but just giving some thoughtfulness to it. There isn’t a catch-all, like do a 301 redirect or something like that. It may be a different piece of advice for every page.
Areej: Yes. With all migration work and with migration projects, we do think about them on a one-to-one basis where we’re like, “Okay, this page needs to go to this page. This page needs to go to this page.” We always recommend to simply not do a catch-all and throw everything back to the homepage because that’s like, “Whoa, why are you giving all this irrelevant authority back to the homepage?”
You should be linking it back to pages that are relevant or pages that are helpful in a way. You don’t want people to simply keep falling back to the homepage and getting frustrated and being like, “This isn’t where I want it to go. I wanted to learn about X, Y, or Z,” or so forth.
Host: Perfect. I love that. Thank you very much. That’s really, really useful. That’s useful advice. This question comes from Fiona. While I’m speaking through this, I’m going to put this screen back up because Fiona asks, “What sources, publications, or websites do you follow to keep up with everything SEO?”
Areej: Yes. In general, definitely, anyone and everyone who wants to learn about SEO and wants to join a free community around it, all women, gender non-conforming folks, and non-binary folks are more than welcome to join Women in Tech SEO. We’ve got tons of beginners and experts there. I do also have my absolute favorite, which I use all the time. Let me just share screen super quickly. If anyone has not come across this website, ah, bookmark it.
Learningseo.io, the brilliant Aleyda Solis, who is– I’m just going to search it right now, who is the queen of SEO. This woman is brilliant. This is the best website ever because it gives you almost a roadmap in how to learn about SEO. It takes you step by step, all of the different steps of learning about it. I specifically opened the technical optimization one for this webinar. Everything on there is free.
These are all different guides and stuff that will help teach you, “Oh, how do we go about understanding technical SEO? What are the different–” it gives you tons of different extensions and tools as well that you can use. That’s the wonderful thing. There’s a lot of publications and stuff out there, but I love this website because anything and everything that you want to learn about, it’s all there. It has the most resources and everything that’s linked from tools to podcasts, to guides, to everything on there is free.
Definitely give it a checkout. When I used to work with a team before, I would advise them, you want to learn something new? Just spend 15 minutes reading a new article every day. Every day in the morning before you kick off the day, just open up a new article from here, give it a read, a new guide, and share with someone else what you’ve learned because that really, really helps.
Host: That’s ridiculous. I’ve never heard of that before, but that’s an amazing resource. [laughs] We’ve got Sarah in the chat saying, “So much great actionable info in this webinar. Thank you, Areej.”
Areej: Yay.
Host: Another one from Talia, “Thank you. Bookmarked it now, never heard of it before.” That’s fabulous. You’re doing good work here, Areej.
Areej: Yay.
Host: Let’s take the next question from Azeem, the amazing Azeem. Azeem asks, “If you could give one piece of advice to junior/people new in the industry who want to pick up tech SEO, what would that be?”
Areej: Yes, I love, I love, I love this advice. I think my main thing, and I know I’ve used the word overwhelming a lot because the thing is, that’s the thing with technical SEO. I think a lot of people feel very like, “Whoa, I’m not a technical person, why should I get into technical SEO?” That’s just so incorrect. Every single brilliant technical SEO I’ve ever met, they learned it on the job.
What I love about technical SEO, it’s almost like, if you ever wanted to be a detective in a past life, this is the best way. It’s like the detective of being in search or marketing or tech because that’s literally what you’re doing. You’re putting your detective hat on and you’re going on a website and you’re trying to see, “Oh, what’s broken and what works and what doesn’t work,” and so forth.
That’s such a human thing to do, right? It’s so easy to learn, and there’s tons– the industry is massive, and a lot of free resources and free tools and free guides on how to do it. Don’t feel overwhelmed by the idea that, “Oh, this is technical and I’m not a technical person.” You will be surprised by how easy it will be to grasp the concepts of it once you get into it and you start asking the right questions and you just start looking at the right things.
Host: There’s this thing which people will be very bored of me speaking about if they come to TMM webinars regularly. I think you’ve been insane today, actually, just at how clear and accessible you’ve made everything. I call it my shoulders relaxing moment, which is just a thing where you sort of go into something that feels so fearful, but you come out and you’re like, “Actually, I can do this, it’s cool.” You’ve done that for me. I can see in the chat just so many people really singing your praises, Areej, so you absolutely deserve this. We’ve got a question here from Joanna, who simply says, “Can we have Areej do a technical SEO teaching on a monthly basis?” [laughter]
Areej: Yes. Oh, I’d love to do that.
Host: Honestly, I’m getting you on the hook for this. If you’re in, then we’re doing it.
Areej: I’m trying to join the TMM crew permanently. If that gets me there, that’s it.
Host: [laughs] I’m so game for that. I’m trying to work through the questions in a way where we hopefully don’t hover ground that’s already been focused on over the course of the session already today. Let’s have a look from a question from anonymous. It might be quite specific, but maybe we can broaden it out to our viewers.
The question is, “We are currently running a website that’s not really fit for purpose. It’s a legacy site, it’s a bit of a mishmash and hard-coded. We’re having to use HubSpot landing pages and linking to them at the moment from the website. The question is, will this have a big impact on SEO?” I guess the broader question is, what do you even start to do in those– Because I’ve worked on websites in the past where I’ve literally had to build it with HTML and all sorts of stuff. What do we start to do in those kinds of situations or this specific one?
Areej: I think in some cases, you need– it’s almost like you have your short-term plan and you have your long-term plan. If your short-term plan and what’s making it work at the minute is to have a bunch of random HubSpot landing pages here and there because you need to get people through the door and you need to actually get your content somewhere, then that’s okay, that can be your short-term plan.
Your long-term plan definitely needs to be taking a look at that legacy website, taking a look at that legacy code, and starting to put a proper plan in place for, well, should we just redesign this from scratch? How should we migrate this? Where should this live? Should we bring this to another CMS? Hopefully, you have a tech team who’s helping or supporting with some of this.
I would actually even prioritize having a proper dev in place before having a technical SEO coming in and making sure everything is working, just to put a proper– it’s almost like your architecture plan of how we can link up this site properly before– yes, but it’s okay to have a short-term plan in the meantime, just to get people through the door, but I’ve worked on my fair share of legacy hard-coded websites and they can be really, really scary to work on. Yes, I feel you there.
Host: Yes, it’s hard, so many of us walk into these jobs where we’re just given a site, right? To go through that is really tricky. Honestly, I’m just looking at this chat and people are– your ego is going to be massively inflated.
Areej: You need to save the chat and send it to me. When I feel bad, I’m going to go through it. [chuckles]
Host: I absolutely will. [chuckles] This is not necessarily a technical SEO question, but it’s one I haven’t focused on so far. I don’t even know if it will go into your world, but Ashlin asks, “Do you know of any tools that will help us understand our Google Analytics form?” I’ve heard there’s new tools that will make it easier to understand new Google Analytics, but maybe–
Areej: Oh, new Google Analytics. I’ve been avoiding it, GA4. I don’t know if you’ve had recent webinars or you have upcoming webinars about it, but that’s definitely a good one. I know it’s scaring a lot of people, the way it’s set up. Personally, I’m not an analytics pro and I’ve been avoiding it. Whenever I work on a project, I’m like, “You have someone good with analytics, right?” Because I don’t want to have to deal with that.
I know like with GA4 and the way it’s been set up and if it hasn’t been set up correctly, then you might be losing on a lot of really important data. definitely not one where I’m personally an expert on, but I completely feel you on how frustrating it’s been having a massive overhaul and change to a tool that used to be so simple and straightforward. Yes.
Host: That’s wonderful. We have a couple. The one I’d recommend folks to check out is one by Mary Owusu, which we find in our previous talks session. Mary speaks through Google Analytics 4 just when it was coming out and she did a brilliant session. Likewise, someone gifted with clarity and just being an amazing person.
Areej, that’s our hour. Thank you so much. We’ve got this comment here from Ben who says, “This has been amazing. So insightful and reassuring. Can’t wait to explore the recommended tools.” I would widen that out just to say, thank you so much on everything because we’ve got Helen saying, “OMG, thank you so much.”
Areej: Yay. If we didn’t manage to answer anyone’s question, feel free to shoot them directly to me. I just added my LinkedIn to the chat and I’m always happy to answer as many questions as I can. Thank you so much, Joel and the team, for having me. I love being on these webinars and everyone’s energy is so contagious. Thank you.
Host: It’s wicked. Thank you very much. Before we go, I just want to say a big thank you to our sponsors once again because they enable us to do these sessions. What you’ll see in the follow-up email is the bunch of human beings who are behind these sponsors. If you don’t mind shooting them a message just to say thank you for supporting the community. It’s the type of thing that really goes a long way.
With all that said, we’ll be here next week for another session, actually on Google on reviews and getting more reviews, which is one of those fundamental things which people just don’t think about. I’m really excited for that session. Hopefully, you can join it. Thank you, Areej. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time.
Areej: Thank you.
Host: Absolutely incredible. Take care, everyone. Have a lovely week. Bye now.