How to Master SERP and On Page SEO - Setting Your Site Up for the Future (2020 SEO Guide)

In this clip, we're gonna talk about setting up your site for the future. So how you can master the aspects around the search engine result pages and on-site SEO. This is part of a 5-part video series on YouTube, and if you're on YouTube, don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell button, and if you're on other channels, don't forget to subscribe as well. So when it comes to thinking about the, well, on-site SEO, so I remember there's a period of time where the one, one of the biggest impact things that I could do when it came to SEO was, well, looking at what are the links that I can put on the homepage, okay? So what do I mean by that? A lot of people, what happens is you have a homepage, and from the homepage, you can have these links in the footer. The homepage has the most equity, right? So a lot of the websites where I actually had control of when I worked at other places, what I would do is I would add these links in the footer. So I might add like, you know, interior design, or, you know, Los Angeles interior design, like these exact match keywords into the footer. And lo and behold, the next day I'll be ranking maybe top 5 for those keywords because I was taking the equity from the homepage and then driving that equity through these links in the footer, and then I would rank really highly. And believe it or not, we're approaching 2020 now, and what's going on now with 2020 is, you know what, that stuff still works. So every single time that I've done that at a company that has worked, But, you know, that's just one lesson around on-site SEO where, you know, if you take lessons and you build this into your foundation, like the lessons that we're gonna talk about in, well, the next clip that I'm gonna show you, this little side clip, you take these little lessons and you build it into your foundation, you're gonna have a very solid house foundation and you're gonna be able to build your traffic on top of that. So what we got next for you is a clip from our marketing training called Leveling Up. You can go to singlegrain.com/leveling-up. to learn more about our individual and team training. But this is a clip from inside, it's just a little snippet from the courses themselves, and hopefully it's gonna show you a little more, not hopefully, like I know it's gonna show you more in terms of how you can master the SERPs and how you can master on-site SEO, 'cause the piece that I little— the little piece that I gave right now, that's just a small piece of what is in the repertoire. When it comes back to SEO, just backing up for a second, SEO, The 2 most important factors are content and links, okay? There's over 200 variables when it comes to the search engines, and we're talking Google here, and they're constantly making changes, things are always in flux, but what's really important to understand, if we look at my screen really quick, is you have to have a really good site structure. So think about it this way, let's say you're trying to feed a bunch of people water. Let's say you have the king first, and then you have the princes, the princesses, and then you have the peasants, the workers, whatever. You want to be able to feed everyone. So what is the ideal structure for you to be able to pass that water, you know, or that food down a chain? It's not just putting it into one concentrated area. You want to make sure that you open things up and pass things down like a hierarchy. So we're looking at the screen right here. You're basically— your homepage is your most powerful page for the most part. Most people are linking to your homepage. I think you have a good site structure that says, okay, maybe you have a blog, maybe you have the awards section, maybe you have a contact us section. But the way it works is it's very logical. It starts from the top, and then you have these other side pages. Top page 1, 2, 3, 4, the secondary pages, and then you have pages that link to those as well, and it just keeps going down. So an easy way to think about it might be Zappos, for example. So Zappos sells a bunch of different things. They sell shoes, they sell dresses, they sell so many different things. Okay, so the way it might work is zappos.com homepage, zappos.com/shoes category page, zappos.com /shoes/Nike, for example, okay? Then you're getting a little more granular. Then you have, you know, Nike running shoes, and it just keeps going down. That way it's very logical because it's, it's pointing search engines down and they can go down a path, and you're kind of unclogging the gateways for them to find the pages that they need. Oftentimes what happens is when you don't have a good site structure, the search engines can't get around and they're just gonna start to give up, and then they're gonna start to move on to something else. So, sometimes people refer to that as, you know, optimizing your crawl budget, and part of that is making sure that you have a good site structure. So, that's the first thing, okay? So, I'm not gonna beat a dead horse with that. What you can do ideally, if you're trying to work off of free tools, you don't wanna pay for anything, is we talked about Google Search Console, but using a tool like Google Search Console to find your crawl errors on your websites, making sure that you have your sitemap set up correctly, so that helps a lot. Sometimes, what I found in the past is when I don't have a sitemap, I add a sitemap, my traffic might jump up. 5, 10, 15% or so, sometimes even more than that. Google Search Console, they're trying to unclog your website, trying to find issues for you, trying to find optimizations that you can make, point them out for you so you can, well, go on with your day and grow your search traffic. Also, you want to make sure that you have Google Analytics installed, and Google Analytics is actually getting better and better using a lot of kind of, you know, you can call artificial intelligence. They literally have a tool called Intelligence that will tell you changes that have happened to your site and maybe suggesting things that you should do around that. So it provides insights for you without you having to go in and dig for them. So Google has 2 really good tools for you there. The other thing I'm gonna recommend for you is Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO, if you're using WordPress, for example, a lot of sites are using WordPress, it allows you to optimize your site without having to be techie. You can set up redirects, for example, you can set up breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs might be like, you know, when you go visit a blog post, it might say home, blog post, title of the blog post. So breadcrumbs are those things that you can kind of click back and then it'll lead you back to kind of where you came from. So breadcrumbs, breadcrumbs, you can turn on taxonomies, media content types, um, how you want your SEO to, to look. Um, it can even sync up with your Google Search Console as well. So keeping things simple, those are 3 simple tools to use: Yoast SEO, Google Search Console, Google Analytics. If you look at a site like Wikipedia, Yelp, or TripAdvisor, These sites spend millions of dollars a year on SEO, and it's really important because they want to make sure that they have hundreds of thousands, millions of pages. They want to make sure they make it as easy as possible for the user and for the search engines to find the most important pages. So you can see right here with TripAdvisor, let's say I want to go to like flights, restaurants. I can go to, I can go to this hotel over here and we'll see how that looks. And up here you can see the breadcrumbs. Okay, that's a really good example of on-page SEO. You can go back to the city itself, you can go to Europe. It's really easy to navigate, and these pages work out really well because there's a lot of user-generated content. There's people writing stuff all the time, and search engines will eat that stuff all the time. So, making sure you have a good site structure, making sure you have good content coming all the time, making sure you're updating your content, making sure you have links coming, that's a recipe for success when it comes to on-page SEO. We've got a clip for you from Marketing School. And well, without further ado, let's go ahead and check it out.

So adjusting your on-page SEO, you probably should do it at least once a, once a quarter minimum. Let's assume you have some volume going. That should be a cadence that's built into your, your content team or your SEO team and have them take care of it. We just are really controlling, I guess. And we just haven't had the time to get to it.

And not just not getting the time to get to it. You know, I should adjust my on-page SEO more often. I do like the once a quarter number. I wasn't sure what number Eric was going to throw out. I was thinking at least 2 to 3 times a year. So let's go with once a quarter. But the difference between Eric and I and most people is we're SEOs. So we are paranoid, or at least I am.

Mm-hmm.

I'm a control freak. I optimize my own website. I know when things are getting screwed up. When I get those Google Search Console errors of AMP issues or SEO errors or whatever it may be, I go and I fix them right then and there. So I don't typically set a date to be like, oh, I'm going to optimize my on-page SEO, you know, once a quarter or twice a year or whatever the number is. As I get the Search Console errors, I typically fix them within 2 to 3 days at the latest. I just forward it to the developer and add it into Trello. As for my own on-page SEO, things don't change that much. It's once when you do good, you know, you have clean code, you're using WordPress, you're using plugins like Yoast, you're pretty good to go. Now, the one thing I would recommend to you guys is to look at your on-page SEO. If you're making a ton of changes and you're not on CMSs, you should look at it once a quarter. But on the flip side, if your on-page SEO is pretty good, You don't necessarily need to adjust it on a regular basis, but you should consider running tests. So examples of tests is you can add in your most popular pages in your sidebar and link to them and put in most popular pages as a heading to see if that helps boost their rankings. Eric used to do this below his blog posts, which he had other related blog posts, and the moment that got removed, your traffic dropped how much?

I think it was like 10 or 15%.

And then he added it back in and then boom, within a week his traffic came back. Another test you can do is optimize your title tags to get more clicks? Eric has a product called ClickFlow. And how do you recommend people optimize their title tags?

Yeah. So for us, so what we hear, I guess going into the process a little bit, you can do it manually too using Google Search Console. The issue is when you do it manually, you don't get something that reminds you that you should come back and optimize or you have these tests running. So have some kind of framework, whether it's manual or using a tool like ClickFlow, for example. is going to help you increase your traffic. And it's building— what you're doing is you're building a habit, right? You're building a testing habit and you're continually coming back to it. So it could be you doing it or you could have someone on your team doing it. We have someone on our team doing it.

Yeah. And what we found is with your on-page SEO, typically most people don't look at it until they get slapped with the Google update or their traffic just drastically drops. But what we found is the messiest sites typically have the worst on-page SEO. So if you're doing major changes constantly, like a redesign, optimizing for mobile speed or site speed, whatever it may be, what you'll find is when people are continually changing your site, whether it's design or speed or releasing new features or pages, in many cases it'll mess up your SEO. And if you're continually running new changes every month, then you should double-check your on-page SEO every month. Doesn't mean you need to adjust it, you just need to double-check it to make sure people didn't undo stuff.

To build on that point, what I would say is there's a lot of stuff that algorithm changes, you make someone, maybe someone else like a developer on your site makes a change and then traffic tanks. So what we do, we've built a habit of documenting and annotating every single change, like big or small, it's all in our Google Analytics. So you can see the date that it's happened, you can see every single change that's happened. That way you can roll back. And to build on that too, if you're using a CMS like WordPress, for example, we use WP Engine for our hosting. It makes it really easy. They're backing up all the time. We can roll back anytime. That way you, your, your ass is covered for lack of a better phrase. Um, and you know exactly what's going on. So again, like Neil and I, like when it comes to our websites, at least we're control freaks.

Um, and you gotta know what's going on.

Yeah. Also check out VaultPress. I prefer that over the WP Engine backup. Because if you're a non-techie like me, Eric's probably much more technical than I am.

Yeah.

You log in, you click a button, and you're good to go.

That's what I do with WP Engine.

Really?

Yeah.

Hmm, I just like the VaultPress interface. It's so nice and pretty.

VaultPress is a nice name though.

All right, so that is it for this clip, but there is a next clip. So if you are on YouTube right now, the next video is over there. I'm pointing that way. And don't forget to leave a comment. Let me know what you think. Do you think this is Do you think there's anything that I'm missing in here? And don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe whatever platform that you are coming from. It helps us grow, and we'll see you in the next video.