214: Optimize - Making Old Content Better, Building Authority, and Understanding the Impact of Your Optimizations

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Welcome, welcome. Welcome to this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I'm Alexa, the general manager here at Food Blogger Pro, and we are just so excited to hop into this new episode of the podcast with you. As you're probably aware, we're experimenting with a new format of the podcast where we focus a few different interviews around one sentence central topic, and today's topic is optimization. And when I hear that word optimization, my mind instantly goes to SEO, or search engine optimization. And that got me thinking. How did SEO get its start and whose idea was it? Well, according to a quick little Google search, Bruce Clay is considered the father of SEO or the CEO of SEO. He started his Internet marketing agency, Bruce Clay Inc. In 1996, and from there he created SEO training courses, developed the first SEO code, Code of ethics, invented a website architecture hierarchy called siloing, and so much more to help others understand SEO. So I thought it would just be fun to start this episode of the podcast with that little bit of information so that you can keep Bruce in your mind as you're listening to all of the optimization advice and tips that we're sharing in this episode. First, you'll hear from our SEO expert, Casey, as he talks about optimizing and republishing old posts. And then you'll hear From Jeff from MarketMuse, a content planning and optimization software, about how you can connect your posts to one another and the tools you can use to optimize your posts. And last, our fearless leader, Bjork, rounds out this episode by talking about how you can track and monitor your optimization efforts to make sure that they're having the impact that you'd hoped. It's a really great episode, and we hope you'll be able to take this advice and apply it to your own blog. So if you're ready, let's chat optimization with Casey.

Casey, welcome back to the podcast.

Hi, Bjork. Very nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's going to be really hard to do a short segment here because you've been on the podcast before, and I feel like when we have you on the podcast, it's easy to talk to you for 60, 90, 120 minutes, and we can go really in depth because you have so much knowledge in the area that we are interested in talking about, which is recipe SEO. This is something that you've worked a lot with. You understand really well. So we're going to be talking about that with you today. So for those that aren't familiar with your work, what's Your quick background. And how did you get into the niche of recipe SEO, but also then recipes.

Gotcha. So, yeah, so I've been doing SEO since about 98. I initially got into the recipe niche in about 2012 when someone needed a last minute speaker for a local conference up here in Big Bear. I think it was called Camp Walkaway. And the problem was that it happened during the wildfire. So I managed to make the trip, but I got horrendous laryngitis. So I had basically yelling at the audience the whole time about basic SEO and things of that nature. And I was just shocked at just the level of, just the low level of knowledge that a lot of these bloggers had. They were not aware of things like, even things like meta descriptions or understanding what schema was, which was still relatively novelty at the time. And that ended up going well. And I ended up booking one audit and then five audits and then 10 audits from that conference. And those bloggers told 10 other people and had incredible success. And here we are literally what, seven years later, 500 plus food blog audits later, and I'm booking nine months in advance. So it is pretty crazy. So I really my hats off to the food blogging niche. I really appreciate the fact that they have found value in the services that I offer.

That's awesome. Yeah. And we've heard from a lot of people who have worked with you before. We have worked with you as well. And the great thing about this podcast is for those that can't work with you, we can get a little sneak peeks, a little inside info on some of the advice that you can give. And today we're talking all about optimization. So first question is, if you have old content on your blog, let's say you've been blogging for a few years, should you be optimizing old posts? Is that something that you should consider? Should you only be new to new posts? What's the balance?

Yeah, well, that's a good question. And literally about 70 to 75% of the content on the typical recipe blog is really generating no traffic. It's just sitting there, it's followed. It's not really generating a lot of signals. We want to audit that content continuously. So one of the best things that users can do is maybe take a step back immediately, not worry so much about publishing new content, but looking initially first and all that old content sitting on your site. I always recommend that we do a content audit a couple times a year. Specifically as part of my audits, I do a Detailed content audit. I teach the users how to go into search console, run a 90 day report, look at all the posts that are literally generating five or less clicks from Google over the last 90 days. And they're always shocked at the just large amount of content there. And then we just go ahead and try to audit that content. I tell bloggers to use buckets. Bucket number one might be content that we know we want to keep. It's clear and has it connected with users. There's no seasonality component there. This is content we can keep. We can update it today, we can update it next week, you can update it in a month. Okay, that might be bucket number one. Bucket number two is seasonal content. It's content that, well, clearly it's a Christmas post, it's August right now, there is no clicks on it. So we're going to come back to that and we're going to update and republish that content when it's seasonally appropriate. We're not going to touch it at all right now. We might go ahead and if we're going to optimize it for Thanksgiving or Christmas or the like, we'll in and we'll revisit that content at that time. And I'll tell people to start making notes on their content calendar, come back, bucket this content, go in and take a look at it. And then we have bucket number three which is content that we're going to know, index or delete. And this is, you know, a lot of content can fall into this. If you've got a lot of personal content, you've got some sponsored content that is no longer a fit with your current niche. Maybe you've got some travel content or content with your family. We don't necessarily need to leave that open to Google and to users because it's just sitting on your site, taking up your crawl budget. We see many times where we have a blog with 400, 8001000 posts and only 250 of those posts might be generating, or about 20, 25% might be generating traffic. And everything else is just kind of setting on the site. And think of your site as a forest. Google's trying to get through this forest to find your best content and they keep running into the trees. And those trees are things like tag pages, author archives, attachment files, outdated travel posts, things of a nature that honestly are not really time valuable to Google currently. So on that bucket number three we would want to initially look at, okay, maybe there's something here that users might find valuable if they Stumble across it on a site.

Sure.

We don't necessarily need to have that in Google. So we're just going to no index that post. We're going to go to the post, we're going to go down to the Yoast plugin, we're going to click the no button there, right there under advanced which says don't show this in search and we're just going to leave the post as it is now. One of the things that blocks bloggers don't understand is that it's imperative that if you're going to decide to no index a piece of content, this is a long term directive. I don't want you to no index something, have a change of heart 30 days later, Re index it and think you're going to have really much success in getting that to rank because it really doesn't. That's a conflicting signal to Google. Very hard to garner future consideration for content, especially if there's a long term no index directive on that. So just make sure that you're looking at it and understand accordingly going forward.

Sure. Can you explain at a high level what it means to noindex if somebody's never done that before? I would imagine it's kind of a scary thing to noindex something. So what is it and then what is happening behind the scenes and why is that a strategy? Why is that important to understand that?

Yeah. So noindex is just a directive that happens at in your robots fault. Well, it doesn't even happen at the robots file anymore. It's page level. So when we choose to know index content, we're putting a nice little meta tag at the top of the post, basically telling Google, hey, you can crawl this, but we do not want it in the Google index. The reason this is the case is that we do not necessarily want this to take up resources on our site. We do not necessarily want this to be counted against us. Content auditing is one of the greatest and quickest ways for you to increase traffic from Google. We don't necessarily need to take a scattergun approach and have 1,000 pages on our site. It used to be in the old pre panda days that you treated your site like a book and you would continue to add pages to your site so you could garner long tail keyword consideration. That really changed post 2012. Now it's more about quality, not quantity. We don't necessarily need eight low quality pages on our site when we have this other one high quality page that we can consolidate signals to. So by no indexing we're basically allowing Google to more easily find and service our best content. Now, related to this, we have deletion. We always want to delete last, but nevertheless, there are things that we're just not going to keep. You might have posts that just do not fit with your niche. If you are a keto blogger and you find that you have specific recipes from years ago that you know that you cannot make work, it's okay to delete those. Don't lose any sleepover. You can delete those. We'll run a broken link checker, download and install a broken link checker. In a couple weeks we'll find the internal links to this old piece of content. We'll remove them or we'll update them to something else. That's really a very easy point to take into consideration is that when we're talking about content auditing, we're thinking, bottom line, does site content as an aggregate whole meet the needs of my users? So we can have a little bit of unrelated or superfluous content as we call it, but the goal is to really, again, think of your site as a garden. We got the flowers which are great content. We have the weeds which are the unrelated, low quality or non visited content. Just like in a garden, if we do not pull those weeds, they will eventually strangle the flowers of our good content. So that's why cultivation, continual content auditing using simple, simple like the buckets we've just discussed is a good long term strategy.

Yeah, that's great. So to apply it to Food Blogger Pro, one of the things that we've been thinking about, we just did this big migration over to WordPress. That was our first step in really optimizing things for Food Blogger Pro. The next step is we're starting to think more strategically about content. And one of the things that we need to do is a content audit. Because as an example, one of the things that we did when we first started is we did little member interviews and it was five members per post. And there's a little Q and A section for that. And we probably have, I don't know, 30, 40 of those pages. And I don't think anybody's visiting them. And if they are, they're not super helpful and they're just kind of sitting there and they don't really help people who are food bloggers. They may be interesting if you stumble across them, but it's one of the ways that we're thinking about auditing. And then we're gonna go really deep and say like, okay, what are the categories that we do want to be known for? Maybe things like food photography or food video and kind of have these pillar pieces of these pillar areas that we are known for creating content around that. So we can see that both on the recipe side and on a non recipe site like Food Blogger Pro, how we're thinking strategically about that. So if you delete a post, let's say you go back and you say, hey, this isn't something I want to improve. This is an old post, it maybe doesn't really apply. It's not getting traffic. I can see that in Google Analytics. I'm just going to delete it. There's two parts that I want to pull apart with that and help explain a little bit. Number one, is it okay to have a 404 page once you delete that? Because there might be links from other blogs pointing to that. Is that okay if it just goes to a 404?

Yeah, sure. And that's, and this is the bottom line situation is if you're, if you're targeting content for deletion, the odds are very highly that you do not have any incoming links. I mean that has always been the case. I mean seriously, when I've done literally hundreds of these audits and we're looking at these old posts, these posts lack, they're not optimized for human readable quality signals. Human readable quality signals was a big theme at recent at the Moscon which just ended. It was all about optimizing for human readable quality signals. Meaning that even if something doesn't turn out to be a ranking factor, you haven't wasted your time optimizing for those human readable quality signals. So if you're going in and you're looking at your posts and you're seeing that these older posts don't have jump recipe buttons, they don't have breadcrumb pass, they don't have maybe table of content jump links to allow you to jump down to most important information. Maybe they don't have published and last modified dates, no author bylines, Maybe there's no FAQs. Maybe you haven't linked internally as much as you should. Those are all human readable quality signals that you want to optimize for whenever possible. So that's what you're looking at when you're going back and you're auditing this content. Not necessarily any of these external factors like incoming links, which I'll be honest with you, is just not something that bloggers do a lot of. If you've got links coming into a page. Hey, maybe we can try to salvage those links by having redirecting that post to something that's close. But what we don't want to do, and I see this unfortunately all the time, is we, we don't want to be afraid of 404s. 404s are not a sign of low quality. 404s are a natural part of the web sphere. That's how Google works. You're using a 404 to tell Google this post is gone, we no longer need this post. And so, sure, if you have the ability to transfer or, I'm sorry, redirect a post to something, feel free. But we never redirect to the homepage. We definitely don't redirect to category pages. We only redirect to something that is literally an exact duplicate. Because if you don't do this, Google ignores the redirect and treats it as a soft 404 anyway. So a lot of bloggers try to like, oh my God, I'm scared of 404s, I'm going to delete all this content, but I'm going to redirect all that stuff to the homepage. Well, you just wasted any chance you had of not only is that a poor user experience, but any chance you thought you were going to recover with regards to outside authority signals has been lost.

Got it. So the only time you should be doing a redirect where redirect, meaning if somebody else has a link on their site and they click on it and it's a page that you've deleted that then redirects to a new page. The only time you should be doing that is when you have a piece of content that is very, very, very similar to the post that you deleted and you had actually set a duplicate of that. So would there be any instance where it's like, hey, it's a chocolate chip cookie recipe, but it's maybe a little bit different, but it's still a chocolate chip cookie recipe in that instance, would that be okay to do a redirect?

I think that'd probably be okay. Like if you had a chocolate chip cookie recipe and you're redirecting to a dark chocolate chip cookie recipe, you'd probably be okay on that. But if you've got a chocolate chip cookie recipe and you're redirecting these users to an oatmeal cookie recipe, that's not good because that is a mismatch in user intent. So that'd be a Wasted redirect. Most redirects happen because users incorrectly or accidentally change URLs. And so a redirect the old post to the new one. That's usually the most common use of redirections on the typical food blocker site.

Great. The other thing that you had mentioned was finding the other places where that is linked on your site. And you had mentioned tools that allow you to do that. Can you talk about why that's important and maybe tips that you'd have for people that have deleted something or even people that want to see. Are there links on my site that are pointing to other places on my site that no longer exist there? How do you go about doing that kind of internal audit using a tool?

Sure. Technical SEO is by far the biggest hurdle that the average food blogger has to overcome. You don't know what you don't know. And when we talk about long term and even quick and short term SEO gains, it really all comes down to technical SEO. You've deleted content, you've changed URLs, you haven't updated internal permalinks. Maybe you have a chain redirect on your server. There are various technical issues that occur, but one of the most important issues that you'd want to of course, audit and correct accordingly is the updating and correction of internal broken links. If you can help that, because internal links are kind of a quality signal. We don't want to have users navigate your site, look in a post and immediately hit a 404. There's no reason for that. So what we want to do is we want to run a crawl. You can run a crawl on your site. You can run a crawl free. A lot of you on the call use Semrush. Maybe some of you are signed up with Moz. You can even use a free crawl program like Screaming Frog. You can run a crawl against your site and see. Okay, well, here are the internal 404s on my site. These are links to my own content that return a server header of 404, meaning that the page is gone. I've linked to something which does not exist anymore. And maybe I've done that accidentally. Maybe I changed URLs previously and didn't update my internal redirects. Something of that nature has occurred. So what we want to do is we want to use a plugin. And there are several options. But Broken Link Checker is a good one. Broken Link Checker allows you to. You would just go ahead and turn it on and it'll run and scan your comments. It'll scram your posts, your pages. Just go ahead and let that run. As I tell bloggers, you want to let that run for about 12 hours. It doesn't take that long, honestly. And you're going to go in and take a look at what it finds. Now, most of the broken internal links on the average food blog, do it yourself or lifestyle blog are comment in nature. As a matter of fact, 80% of all broken links on a site are usually comment based. The good thing about that is that you could go in and use a plugin like Broken Link Checker and you can just do a mass unlink option, meaning I can choose 20, 40, 50 of these comments right away and I can just click one button, unlink, and just remove the link on that. Those are external links. In many cases, most comment links are external links. External links are not really a ranking factor with Google, but they do have a UX component to it. It doesn't make you look good to have dozens, if not hundreds of outbound broken links. So we want to remove those as much as we can.

Got it. So a couple things to pull apart with that. Number one, UX experience, meaning what is the user experience like on your site? The better the user experience it is, the better it is for people to use your site. Essentially that's what user experience is. And that also, also it's kind of this art of SEO which is as your site becomes more usable, it is more search friendly because people are sticking around longer, they're interacting with it longer. All of those are good signals. And even if it's a comment link, like somebody leaves a comment and they leave their URL and then they don't have their blog anymore and then that's expired, so then it goes to 404. Even if it's just a comment link, it's really nice to have a clean, tightly run site, much like you're keeping a clean house. It just, it's a good experience to be a part of that. Using Broken Link Checker as an example to do that. And you had mentioned some other tools. People can hit the backwards 30 seconds if they want to hear those a little bit. Another thing that you mentioned that maybe some people don't fully understand is this idea of technical SEO. And that's a really strategic approach to SEO because it's something that you can control and improve pretty quickly because you own that. So can you explain for those that aren't familiar with what technical SEO is, what it is, and why it's important to optimize Technical SEO.

Sure. So think of your blog as a house. A house is only as strong as the foundation the house is built upon. It's the same with your blog and the concept of technical SEO. We need to have a solid foundation. We need to make sure that our site is crawlable. The easier we can make our site crawlable by Google, the better chance we're going to get the full value of any algorithmic consideration. So that means making sure that we're not using fancy things like Flash, or that we're not using excessive style renderings, style sheets, or cross rendering issues with JavaScript and CSS, which might prevent Google from finding and algorithmically scoring their content. We also want to make sure again that we correct as many internal and external broken links as we can. That we run regular maintenance on not only our our posts themselves and the links that they contain, but also the schema that we're using on our site. Schema is a very, very important component to how Google understands the web, how Google understands your content. It is incredibly important. Schema is something that Google has pushed relentlessly and it's a very big part of long term ranking success for the average food blog. Specifically because the schema is how we're able to present our recipe cards in a way that provides those nice visually enticing rich snippets can increase conversion in the search results with nice pretty stars, top preparation information, cook time, calories, all of that. Those are all rich snippets. Rich snippets are visual representations of structured data or schema. So technical foundation can involve making sure that our site is crawlable, making sure that we're using the correct schema when at all possible, making sure that we correct as many warnings and eliminate all errors completely, and making sure that our site is crawlable, that it loads fast. Various issues go into that. Making sure that our server setup is competent. I know that you recently had Andrew on, you had a great discussion on page speed. Making sure that we're using a competent caching plugin like WP Rocket, that we have our images fully optimized with something like Short Pixel, that we're using a cdn, maybe something like Cloudflare to make sure that we've got this faster response on the server we can, because page speed is a ranking factor. So getting that information dialed in, making sure that technically we have our ducks in a row. Big, big part of long term rankings for Google.

Got it. So technical SEO is essentially all of the things that you can control. Making sure that your links work Making sure that your website is fast, making sure that you've optimized your images. It's all of the things that you as the creator can immediately implement or if you haven't implemented it, you can fix those things. So what is the opposite side of technical SEO? What's on the other side is that links from other sites. And what would that name be? Just so people understand the difference between the two?

Well, when I talk about this, I really talk about, say your site is a stool and the stool has three legs. Leg number one might be the technical SEO. Leg number two is going to be the content and leg number three is going to be off site factors like links. So when we're looking at that, we've kind of talked a little bit about the technical side. Now we've got the content. The content are things like making sure we've optimized for human readable quality signals. We already mentioned that a little previously, things like jump buttons, breadcrumbs, table of content, jump links, published and last modified dates, all of those things that are going to allow your recipes to stand out. What can you do to make sure that your recipe provides all the information the user needs to make it perfectly the first time and the 100th time, detailed process shots, all of that goes into the content presentation. That's the content leg there. And then of course we've got that third leg and you mentioned it a little bit about the links, the off site factors. The third leg is really the hardest part for most bloggers because link building is very, very tough. Links are still by far the top SEO factor for Google. It's why a site like Pinch of Young with literally I don't know what you are up to now, but probably 12 to 15,000 linking root domains, you are going to have a substantial benefit over the average site. It's also why a site like allrecipes, which has really crappy recipes, can jump onto the bottom of page one for anything they publish because they have 99,000 plus linking root domains. It's also why the average blogger that I work with, the average blogger I work with has probably around 1100 linking root domains. So whenever I have a blogger who wants to schedule an audit and they only have 100, 200, 300, 500 linking root domains, it's imperative I tell them upfront. This is a big part of ranking of the ranking algorithms with Google, you do not have a lot of earned link equity. So for us to do well on that third leg in your case, which is not much we can do there. I can't double your link, your incoming link overnight as part of this audit. It's not going to happen. So in your case, we need to focus on legs one and two. We need to dial in the technical SEO and we need to get you on a content template that's going to allow you to leverage your built in strengths because we can't compete. You're not a pinch of yum. You're not in all recipes. We can't get that that link value to move. I will provide you strategies and you can leverage those strategies long term. And I'll tell you, of course, more importantly, what not to do, which is of paramount importance. But we need to focus on the first two lakes, not the third.

Yeah.

And like you said, what that allows you to do is if you're going to be building a house, you want to have that foundation set right. So you don't get to the point where three years down the line you're like, hey, we finally finished our house. And then somebody comes by and they're like, ooh, this foundation is pretty terrible. And it's like, you can still fix it, but it's better to have that strong foundation to build your house on from the start. So a great thing about both the content side of things, to be strategic about that, but also lay that foundation for the technical SEO. So, Kasey, if people want to understand how to do that better, that is what you do. That what that's what your business is. Can you talk a little bit about how people can reach out to you and connect if they want to have an audit and work with you?

Sure. So you can go ahead and contact me through my website, MediaWise. That's M E D I A W yisityellowse.com, mediaWise.com just go to the Contact Us page. There's a nice little intake form there. You can go ahead and submit your information and drop me a note. You can also find me on Facebook, facebook.com mediawise Read the 80 plus reviews there. Go ahead and submit a question. Happy to provide some free insight. I probably answer 1000 to 2000 plus on site questions on Facebook a year. Probably in Food Blogger central. I'm also in the Nerdpress group. Many of you know Andrew Wilder well. He runs nerdpress.net, great guy. I provide some SEO support for him and his current private Facebook community. So happy to do that. If you have some specific questions, you're like, oh my gosh, Casey, I've heard this Is it true? Most likely it's not. And I'll provide you a link to where Google actually publishes a comment on that answer or topic, if it exists.

That's awesome. Thanks, Casey. It's one of the things that you're so good at is providing in depth information for people. And we see that in all different examples and also really valuable to provide the context around that. And it's not like Google is a black box. They are in some cases, but a lot of times they provide contextual information to say here are best practices. And you know that stuff so in depth. So it's one of the reasons why we love having you on the podcast. So thanks for coming on and really appreciate your insights.

Kasey, pleasure's entirely mine. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.

All right, one more big thank you to Casey for coming on and sharing his insights after looking at thousands, literally thousands of food and recipe sites. So he knows this space really well. Really appreciate him and his advice, both on the podcast as well as on the forums. He is a Food Blogger Pro expert. So as you know Food Blogger Pro members, you see him around there occasionally sharing his insights, which he is so generous in doing. So next up, we're going to be talking to Jeff from Market Muse. And Jeff is somebody who has also spent a lot of time in SEO and he's going to be talking, talking about optimization as well. And that is what his company does. Market Muse is known for optimization and he's going to have some great insights. So let's talk to Jeff. Jeff, welcome back to the podcast.

Hi Bjork, how is your. And thanks for having me again.

Yeah, it's fun to have you on. This is a new format as we talked about, so if people want to listen and dive a little bit deeper, they can go back to the previous episode that you were on where we talked in depth about a lot of this stuff and search optimization and things like that. Today we're focusing on optimization and specifically I wanted to talk to you about finding blog posts to optimize is something that people are talking more about and spending more time thinking about the company that you work for and co founded. Market Muse really helps people with that. So you have a lot of expertise in this area, but let's cover some of the basic questions. So first of all, if you have a bunch of content, Pinch of Yum as an example, we have thousands of posts. How do you know which post to focus on? If you're interested in optimizing your content, where do you start?

No, that's a great question, Bjork. And there's a number of ways that you can identify candidates for optimization, and the ways that I would catalog them would be where you see an area of opportunity. So if you're thinking about where you are already strong, maybe where you've recently gained strength and have become more successful on a particular topic or in a particular area than you were when this post released, and I can get into more details on that, or maybe where there's been a lot of competitive pressure so more pages are being published by competition. Maybe your rank has heavily fluctuated, not just not necessarily only up and down, not necessarily only down, but potentially up and down where you're bouncing around because there's a lot of content being published or that's one area. But that flux doesn't just need to be on rankings going up and down, but it could be just from organic search. The world changes. Maybe the meaning of the word is changing, the intent behind the word is changing. Or even the search engine results page features are changing often. So you've got news coming in, you've got a sidebar, you've got product features, you got more or less ads happening. So whenever you're seeing change in who's in play from an organic side, the real estate on the search engine results page is changing. Maybe you were number seven ranking and that used to be on page one. Now you might be on page two. So that's going to be another candidate where you have, where you have something that you know didn't perform as well as you might wanted it to in the past and there's, you know, or there's a situation where you've evaluated your content just isn't as good as the items that are out there in the mix.

The other items that are outranking it.

Potentially, potentially outranking it, or even items that are not, that are just really solid and you're looking at and you're going, ooh, that seems to be, that seems to be. Maybe they're not as strong of a site as mine, but they are. They're publishing against this topic. I need to take notice. I need to make sure I'm putting my best foot forward. And this page I wrote two years ago on the topic isn't and for so many reasons, not up to date. Obviously, keeping things up to date is always key. Not only because it's out of date, potentially out of date content or not the best content, it's your competitors might have been using you to research and you might have published new content on similar topics and you haven't linked it because who goes? Who? You know, this one process you got to really enable is going back to your old posts and linking them to the new related posts. That has to be part of your process. And a lot of times it's not.

Point being, and that's an interesting takeaway. One of the ways that you can be optimizing your content isn't necessarily going back to and just updating a post, but when you publish a new post, going back to old content that relates to that new piece of content and linking to that new piece of content. So being intentional, not just about thinking about your content as a silo, but also thinking about how the entire makeup of your site is interconnected. Is that what you're saying with that?

Yeah, absolutely, Bert. You don't want to publish a page on an island and not have gone back to your powerful pages that get recurring traffic or even ones that are just about similar things and make sure they're all connected. It's a way to get give those new pages a quick boost as well. It's just if it's related, if these things are truly related. If you've got a page about A and then you've got a page about A that targets a different audience, you know, those things need to be connected. And there's natural ways to do that, where you just pop and pop that link in somewhere. But there's also things that, where they require a little bit of creativity. You might go back and update the page, adding to the narrative editorially, appropriately, of course, where you add some commentary and link to that new page so that it weaves into the old page naturally, because you got people reading that one too. You want to make sure that it's a fit. It's not just plopping a link in there.

Yeah, that's great. So I know that one of the things that will come up, a lot of people that are listening to this will think, okay, I understand that conceptually and understand kind of the idea of going back and making a piece of content better. But how do you know? Like the actual numbers side of it and the Super 101, maybe it's 001 version of doing that is like just googling yourself and seeing where content comes up. But that's not a great way to do it because Google changes based on user behavior. Would you have tiers in terms of ways that people can start to understand their website and how their content ranks to get a better idea of what they could be focusing on when they're looking to optimize content. And we could start with like a free, easy to use tool, maybe a mid level tool. And then Market Muse is a great example of for people who really want to dive deep, understand how to do that. That could be kind of the premium tool. But what would your advice be maybe at the beginning level or intermediate level for people who are just starting out.

With this, I think a really great free option is using Google Search Console. So Google Search Console will provide you with all of your URLs. It'll provide you with how their average ranking is for a particular topics. You can find pages that get a lot of clicks. You can get find pages that have over time gotten clicks and maybe they're not or they fluctuate a lot. And that's, you know, it's completely free, just a validated search console. So what you'd be looking for some quick plans. So this is the kind of like that practitioner's view is, would be pages that like I mentioned, fluctuate a lot. You'd be looking at pages who, you know, you haven't touched in a bit and they're within, you know, the old adage is, is striking distance. Right. So you have to imagine that if you're on the cusp of page one in organic search or you're not number one, there's going to be the potential to move however small, maybe one position, maybe five positions, maybe not. But you have to always imagine that you're not. Your page isn't perfect. It's not perfect. You're making that assumption if you're taking this leap of faith. So you've got and then your stuff that just didn't perform at all like for one reason or another. So what you can do there is look for particular topics that you care about, see what pages are associated. But Search Console can start you on your path. So does that make sense? I know you're familiar with that.

Yeah, for sure. So I actually just pulled up Google Search Console as you were talking about this and, and maybe, maybe an example that we could use would be a post from Pinch of Yum. And the great thing is, so I'm looking at Google Search Console and if you sign up, do you know, Jeff, there's the old version that looked really outdated but had more information. Now there's this new version which looks a lot better but maybe doesn't have as much information. Is everybody running on the updated version at this point? The new version of Google Search, they.

Basically are and so basically what you're doing is you're looking in the performance tab and you've got your queries and pages tabs that you'd be primarily working with in this component. So queries, you can find stuff on topics you're really interested in. Going back on pages is going to give you all your pages sorted by serp, impressions and clicks and. And like, yeah, I wish we got more data. You can also, though, add to the tabs to get things like you can filter by positions, you can filter by impressions, click through rates and position averages, and you can do some interesting things. But like I mentioned it, only because you kind of mentioned it was, what are we looking for from a free side? Would this be a good place to start to say, oh, yeah, I haven't touched that one in a while. It's my 15th highest impressions page or clicks page. Let me dive deeper. It's really giving me an access point to, like I said, dive deeper. When you click on pages, you can look at that and look at all of the queries that are associated with the page. It's not perfect, but it's giving you a little bit of information.

Yeah, that's great. So it's actually really interesting to see here. Even just spending two minutes with it while also recording a podcast, I feel like I'm learning things. So I'm in Google Search console and I'm looking at Pinch of Yum. And then I say search results under performance. So if you are listening to this podcast, you can, you can stop, you can rewind 15 seconds, I'll talk you through this console. It's under performance search results. And then I click on queries and then it shows me total clicks, impressions and then positions. And the thing that I found really interesting was this. Tell me if this is what you mean by striking distance. I found something, a keyword, a query that has really high impressions but a low position. And that is chili recipe and it has 301,000 impressions and the position is nine. So if I'm looking at this, would that be something that you'd consider within striking distance? And can you.

That's a cool example that I might want to dig into that. So even in just in the keyword list where you're not filtered by page, the interesting thing is you can be in pages and click on the page and it'll filter for you, or you can just type in the page. But yes, positions where you're getting a lot of impressions, but not as many clicks as you'd expect. Maybe your click through rates are off, maybe the page isn't satisfying the user need and make sure your click through rates are off and or positions that fit. So the things to look for would be lower than expected clicks per impressions click through rates that are low are indicator that what is appearing in the Google search results page. The snippet either isn't impressive, it's not differentiated, it's not meeting those user needs or just the oldest SEO kind of trick in the book, right, Is to say check the stuff that's on, you know, at the bottom of page one or second page and if you improve that stuff, you have a chance to put some wins on the board and that's one.

Would, would position kind of 7 to 10 be what you'd consider? Like what, what is it? How many results are there are they showing on Google? And I know that's always changing.

It changes every time. For me it's, for me it's a not. I'm a not one person. I want one, I want one or two, right? So I'm a not one person. If I'm not one, I want to be one or not two. It's not always going to be that way.

It's four. If it's five, those are all. You're not number one. And so you want to think about how do you be, how do you take steps to improve that content?

Right. Why is it, why is this happening the way that it's happening? What's the dynamic of. And that's when I'm going to be able to dive deeper because we're talking about using a free tool and then manually researching competition and that or manually researching your site to see maybe you have a better page, it's just not linked to. Maybe you've got a cluster of content you've written. It's just not interconnected. Maybe you don't have. Maybe you've got a lot of these disparate posts, you've got a lot of the arms of the octopus, but you don't have the body yet written. So this is like, oh wow, I need to write. I've written 85 chili recipes, but I have never really gotten into the art of chili generally or the overall, you know, the different types of chili or you know, what makes, you know, chili hot. I'm just, you know, intent, research, generalizing. But so that's where this is for inspiration. Got it.

And point being for that is in our world, which is recipe content, we often think about an individual recipe publishing that, trying to get it to rank what you're saying is also think about holistically your site and how do the different parts of your site connect together? So if you have a lot of like healthy vegan salads, what are the parts that kind of round that out? So it's not just individual recipes, but there's additional contextual information that helps to make that, make your site an authority for that piece of content. Is that kind of what you're getting at with that?

Yes, it certainly. So if you have a moderate ranking for a general topic where there's a lot of different ways people might be researching it, that's an indicator that there's opportunity there. You could double down and invest in that and you're not that far off. That's the concept of striking distances. It's not out of the question that if I did focus and get really tight with the structure of my pages, the structure of my collection, of my inventory, that I can move the needle quicker than any old random content or any old random topic. And that's, that's the idea. It's then the random, you know, then the random is what you're trying to beat when you do research. So.

Got it. And to explain that point a little bit further, what you're saying with that is the potential for a site like Pinch of Yum, even if there's a site with equal amount of authority or traffic or it's been around everything else being equal except for the authority in a certain area. Let's say if it was a race car blog and it was just as all the same credentials as a blog like Pinch of Yum, if they published a zucchini muffins recipe at the same time we did, we would have more potential to rank for that because we are known as a site that is authoritative in this way, much like a NASCAR blog, race blog. If they published or if we published something around race cars, like we wouldn't be able to rank as quickly for that because of the holistic makeup of our site. Is that what you're saying?

Absolutely. And that's.

And then that level as well.

Yeah, exactly. It gets really deep. So and, and that is the reason why a brand new blog that publishes one article, even if it's the best article ever written, is going to still need to build a foundation. So we need to take time. You still need to acquire all cage factors versus if you go write that same blog on a Pinch of Yum and it's going to do well. And then if you're going to branch out into race cars you know, you've got to have a strategy to build that authority and even figure out what's the connection between what's the connected bridge concepts between the recipes that I've covered historically, currently, and this. And that's where, you know, sometimes it will happen naturally, but sometimes it won't. And there could be some false positives in the data. If you wrote an article that was off topic and for some reason it was popular, that's something to be wary of. Because you see, you do have to have an understanding of what your breadth of coverage is, how much coverage you've done, how many items you have that represent this authority on this topic, and then how well you've covered it so that you don't make those questions. But I will mention, however you were looking at it, your chili stuff is a big area of opportunity because I'm.

Actually looking at it.

I'm looking at my back end to say that too. So whatever you did, I can validate that. Yes, yes, yes.

And so in that instance, and this is, this is interesting because it's not just optimizing individual content, it's also bringing those things together. Would your recommendation in this niche, or we could even use Pinch of Yama example be to start like when you create that content, that body of the octopus as you were talking about that literally just saying, here's my top 10 chili recipes and then linking out to that content, what does that look like in terms of a successful octopus body?

So that's interesting. So that's a roundup approach is what they reference. And roundup approach isn't it's providing primarily accessibility or wayfinding site wayfinding from an IA perspective of like finding your stuff, it isn't tremendously providing a huge amount of value. So that's a potential thing. I like to say if I'm going to do a roundup, I want to provide additional unique perspective why it's target, you know, something special about how I've curated this add value to each item that I'm referencing. So that's only part of the possibility. I also want to see should I be going deeper on any of these things or should I be going higher up or with different angles for different target audiences? So if it's chilly, I might be If I have 15 chili recipes, but nothing else, I might be just talking about how chili recipes are developed. I might look at chili that's appropriate for a competition or how people compete with chilies and, you know, how to make chili hotter, colder. You know, I'm just making these. But I want to think of those intent profiles and I need that big, those pillar pages that like the overall guide to making a great chili recipe. And then, you know, so I want to really weave that in to tell that story. And I might, I might find out I've done all these like general ones. They need to be spruced up and I need to go like laser focused on the arms and say I want to get into, you know, the different types of peppers with in detail. Bam, bam, bang, bang, bang. It's not long tail targeting. Like that's a misnomer there. It's really just forming the collective of content that tells the story that I actually know everything about this. And that's where, you know, I think that there's. It's not really about the keywords that live within. And so you've got, you know, 18 pages about chili and how many of them are kill it for their specific niche? How many of them kind of never achieved and could they be interconnected in a way that would make chilly. And you know, you'll find sometimes it's a misplay too. Like misintent inaccurate. Intent is winning. So I always use the E commerce example of if someone types in red dress or red dresses and the collective of really authoritative sites have a category page or something to find what they can offer for all the red dresses they have. If your page, if your site has like red dress SKU 1462, it means something's up with your architecture. Like why? Because like the odds that that red dress is like the thing someone wants is weird. So like the same thing goes for. Same thing goes for. It's really understanding the serp, the types of stuff that's in the serpent, understanding if your architecture is just not clean compared to what you're seeing out there, that's great.

And I think a takeaway for me not only the importance of finding those opportunities to improve a singular piece of content. So kind of using Google Search Console as an example. Hey, for us we could optimize around chili recipes, but then also thinking about holistically, how do you approach your content and your site in a way where that's all connected and you can think strategically about your authority and that's why niche is so important. So we talked about Google Search Console. Let's talk about Market Muse. What is Market Muse? Who'd be a good fit for it? And that would be a good way to wrap up this segment of the podcast.

Sure. So Market Muse is so like I mentioned with that Workflow, you're trying to find that one thing to make you want to dig deeper and say, oh yeah, okay, so this is an area I think is going to be worthy of my deep dive research. So Market Muse takes that a step further from a content auditing, content inventory perspective so that you can have an always on demand availability to look at any individual page, to look at all of your pages about chili, understand the dynamic, every word that they are associated with. So for example, your easy chili lime fish tacos recipe is a monster. It's associated with so many topics that is one of your core power pages. Marketing surfaces those types of observations so that you can form content plans very quickly. And so we will manage and monitor thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of topics that associate with your site, no matter how large or how small it is, so that you can go in confidently, build content plans that outline what should I create, what should I update? And then the next level with Market Muse is we produce content briefs and topic reports. We'll actually build a source of truth report that outlines where you sit currently, how strong are you? How weak are you? What are your biggest gaps, what's your competition look like on any topic? And you can have those on a recurring manner or for your, you know, for that optimization effort that we're talking about, or to create a new page. We'll build out automated deliverables that are outlines. So our technology actually will build content briefs which are blueprints so that your writer can effectively knock that article out. And you can both be confident or you can be confident that it has a. It's putting your site's best foot forward as far as comprehensiveness goes, or quality. And so who is marketing is a great fit for. It's anyone who's publishing, let's say three, four articles or more per month, or updating about that or updating and improving. They have a culture of content within their organization. They really know that they've got to build content that's equal to or better than their competitors every time consistently from the standpoint of quality and expertise, that type of group, if you're that or more, if you're owning multiple sites, you know the value of content. You're going to be able to justify and have a return on investment that is going to be easy, easy story to tell.

Awesome. That's great. It's a tool we've used, we've loved using it. And I know that for people who are really intentional about their content and want to level up their site, it's a great tool for those people as well. A lot of people listening to the podcast can maybe fall in that bucket. Marketmuse.com would be the best place to check that out.

Yeah. Marketmuse.com and if you reach out to me, jeffarketmuse.com I can shoot you some potentially a free sample topic report to see where you sit for a particular thing that you're focused on. So, yeah, take advantage of that for sure.

Awesome. Jeff, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks, Georg. See you. Bye.

Next, I'm going to be talking through some of the ways that we are tracking these optimizations for Pinch of Yam. When we are going in and we are updating post, how do we know if it's actually working? So I'm going to be talking about that a little bit. All right. We are wrapping up the podcast. We are at the end, it is just me by my lonesome chatting with you about how we track all of this stuff. So you've gone through the process of listening to this podcast. You have some ideas about how you actually want to optimize the content that you have either published already or even how you want to think about strategically creating new content. But how do you go about tracking to see if that stuff that you're doing is actually working? I wanted to share just real quick about a little tool that's going to be super helpful foundationally as you grow your site. And what I mean by foundationally is this is going to be part of the rhythm that you have as you go through the optimization process. And if you do this, your future self will be very, very grateful. I know that's been true for me and for our businesses as we've gone through the process of making little changes and updates as it relates to the content that we're creating. And the good news is it's a very, very simple thing. And the simple thing is an annotation in Google Analytics. This is something that we have used for a long time, and it's really valuable because it allows you to look back historically at the changes you've made, the optimizations that you've made, to see the impact that those have as it relates to your analytics. And I'll share a really concrete example of one of those things and how it's been really helpful to see the impact that that has had. So if you've listened to the Food Blogger Pro podcast for a while, you know that one of the episodes episodes we did was interviewing one of the founders of Short Pixel and Short pixel goes through the process of compressing your images so they don't lose a lot of the look. So you're not degrading the actual quality of the image in the sense of what you see, but it's compressing them so they're not as big, so they don't take as long to download. And that was something we had put off for a really long time on Pinch of Yum, which is a very big no, no. But we went through the process of fixing that in December of 2018, and that was an optimization step that had a really big impact on the blog. Now, we wouldn't have known that unless we could go back and say, when was it that we actually did it? And you might think, oh, I'll just remember, I know when that will happen. But inevitably, at least for me, I think, oh, was that December 18th or December 17th? Or did we do that this year? Or you do, did we do that last year? And the way that I can see when we did that is by looking at Google Analytics and then finding the annotation that we have created. Now, what is an annotation? It's simply just a note that you leave in Google Analytics so you can record when something was changed. And when I pull up the Google Analytics for Pinch of Yum, I can see that December 17th of 2018, I left a little note, an annotation that said used short pixels bulk image optimization process to create glossy versions of all previously uploaded Pinch of Yum images and all images moving forward. Now, how do you use this? Well, in this specific example, one of the things that I did was it was like April or May of this year. I thought, hey, I wonder what the impact was on making that update with short pixel. And so what I did is I went into Google Analytics and I first I found the annotation and I found that that happened on December 17, 2018. When I went in, I didn't remember, I said, when was that? That that actually happened? Oh, it was December of 2018. And then what I did is I can look and see in Google Analytics. You can go to Behavior, Site speed and Overview. And then what I can do is I can can set the date range to compare the period before we had that change to the period after we made that change. So in my case, I'm looking at December 17th through January 18th compared to November 14th through December 16th. And what I can see is, hey, I found this annotation. I know when this change happened. I'm kind of interested to see the impact I can look and see. Hey, page views. The load time was actually reduced by over 17%. It had a really big impact in terms of the time that it took to download the entire page just by making this one simple change. With optimizing our images, which we talked about today in the podcast, is one of the things that you can do as a technical SEO optimization. So as you're going through these changes, as you're making these updates, make sure that you are tracking and a simple way to do it. One of the ways that we do it is using annotations in Google Analytics. That's a wrap for this episode. Thanks so much for tuning in. As we talked about optimization, our hope for this podcast is that we are creating content that helps you figure out ways to get a tiny bit better every day, forever. We call that 1% infinity. And I hope today's podcast did that for you. If you haven't yet, make sure to subscribe in itunes or on the podcast app or in Stitcher wherever you listen to the podcast. And we would also love it if you leave a review. That's the one thing that we really push for on this podcast because it helps us to show up in search results. It's an important measure, and it's important part of the algorithm as different podcast apps think about, hey, which podcast do we show first? One of the ways that they think about that is how many reviews and ratings it has. And that's kind of fuel for our fire. It keeps us going. So thanks for listening. Thanks for tuning in, thanks for leaving a review. If you have time to do that. We really appreciate you and we're excited to continue to find ways to bring value via this podcast. All right, make it a great week. Thanks.

Sa.