All right, here we go. So this is Revenue Roadmap, where we talk about sales and marketing for local entrepreneurs. I'm Anthony Karls, president of RocketClicks. And today I'm with Casey Shea, one of our experts here. He's an SEO strategist. He's also a thought leader here at our org related to everything AI. So if we, if you have an AI question Casey's your man to answer it. Casey, thank you. Thank you for joining me today.
Thank you for entertaining us with Your knowledge today we're going to be talking about a topic that isn't super fun or easy to understand technical SEO, something that we do for all of our clients when we bring them on. so we do in technical SEO audit, we're going to talk about a couple of different concepts. What we really want you to take away from this is why is it important as it pertains to driving revenue online and what can you do?
know that this is actually being done because you likely either trying to do this yourself and you may be missing stuff, or you've hired someone to do it and they may not be doing a good job. So we're going to dig into that. So Casey, before we kind of dig into the, what's the technical SEO audit are some of the big pieces that you look for? What is SEO in general? Why is it important? Why should I care? What does it even mean? We'll get from there.
The way that I have always looked at SEO is we are the interpreters with between humans and Google search or not even just Google search, but any search engine in general, there's a certain way that you have to talk to a robot and interpret from the human language. And then there's also a certain way to lay it out on its own. A lot of people in the past, you know, they've looked at it as just it's just magic. It's some voodoo that you guys are doing. You're not really doing anything.
But what it really comes down to is having a really good understanding of what these robots are looking for and what it is that's important to the robots, not just the user. So we bridge that gap between the robots and the humans. The most common
put it. All right. So technical SEO. So a, what is what does that mean? And what are we looking for when we first start working with a client when we do a technical SEO audit? So I'm like, what are the big things that you're looking for? Cause the important question that we want to understand is like, how does this impact revenue? Cause where I'm a local business, what I care about is making sure I can make my payroll. I can fulfill the dream I had when I started this business.
And like this thing, I didn't learn this thing in school. So what is it? Cause it seems important.
The thing that we run up against especially when we're taking on new clients or even doing audits on, on different clients is they just spent like 20 grand on this beautiful website. I mean, it's got all the bells and whistles. It's got all the best content, all the writers. But the problem is the technical side of it is a hot mess. And like Google has no idea what any of this means.
Like they can read certain paragraphs, but if they don't have it structured the right way, it's just a bunch, it's a jumbled mess in its own eyes.
Yeah.
So.
me, what does it, what does that mean? What is it? Technically the technical, it's not set up technically. Right. What does that mean?
As far as like technically, right. So you look at the nerd term for how it's say your content is arranged on a page, it's semantic HTML. So all that's saying is this is the hierarchy of importance. So we got this paragraph. That's the most important thing. We want you to focus on this. This is the highlight. This is what we do. This is our product. The rest of it is just more and more fluff as you go through it. So that's where you'll see things like H1 all the way to an H6.
And then just different paragraphs.
Yeah. So you said the, what is that for? So you said, is, what does that do? You said SEO will take. What a human needs to know and convert it into what a robot needs to know. So tell what is, to know about the semantic HTML that you're talking about.
Imagine you got a book and it, all the chapters were just shuffled around and someone's here you go. This is the greatest book ever. Trust me. You're going to, you're going to buy into whatever they're selling in this book too. You open it up and one page to the other, it makes no sense whatsoever. That's where that structure comes into place, where it creates a structure to each chapter one, followed by chapter two, three, and so on and so forth.
So what are some examples of that? So let's talk about, let's talk about some of that. So like, how do you, where do I start? Like, where do, what is, what are these things and where should I start? What's most important kind of, how does
So one example, the example that I always like to go to, especially when I'm discussing this with clients is I have my Guinness world book of record for H ones, for instance, on a page this company had zero visibility online, like they had a great product, but nobody could see them. They had great content on there describing their product. The problem is they had 77 H1s on their homepage. So basically 77 H1s is saying every single one of these H1s is the most important part of our business.
So Google and Bing and every other search engine look at that and be like, I have no idea we're going to throw a dart at the board and hopefully we pick the right one. And you know what, when we recrawl your site again, we're going to pick a different one because we still have no idea which one is the most important.
Yeah That's super interesting. And you're, why do we think we get that when we get that from our reverse, like what's the cause there? Cause I know I've built a website before and I didn't understand this stuff. And for me, what I was using it for was styling. So I'm like, Oh, look at this fun little thing. I, if I change it to from a, from paragraph to paragraph. To H1, it does this cool thing with the text. So I'm going to use that as a cheat code.
and that's exactly it too. And that's where SEO, you know, like I said earlier we bridge the gap between humans and the robots. Whereas like web developers, they're just focusing on what people like. So they look for that aesthetic look. They're like, Oh, this H one that looks. That's a way better font. It's bold. It's a perfect size. I want to use this. So I'm going to use it 77 times.
All right. So H1s are important. How, so if you had 77 on a page, what's ideal? What is this? What should this have?
You just want one. And that's another common thing that we see as well. Especially just on a recent audit that I did, they had zero. So once again, Google has to figure out which piece of information is most important.
So what, so we talked to, so we talked about H1 tags using them and how that delineates importance. what else on, on the page that should we be looking at?
Another one that really follows into the semantics. that can really help explain to the robots in a more simplified way would be schema markup. Schema markup has been around for a while. It's also called structured data. Some websites when we take them on as a client, they already had some schema in the background. Often what I've found is it's incorrect, whether it's an address is in there. What schema is exactly is it's like the most simplified way to.
Tell the robots what is on this page and what it is. It explains who your company is, the address, your products, just like a quick summary of it so that it can get a really quick, efficient way to understand exactly what it is that you do.
Nice. And that'll, what, so doing that will help me, will help what'll the end result be if I'm leveraging data on my pages?
Especially when you utilize schema data on more of a, if you have a local business, that's just going to increase that signal overall because you are making it so much easier. For Google to understand what your business is and where it's located. So overall, it's just going to give that better interpretation to Google so that it knows, and I say Google, but it's all search engines.
But it just it allows them to better rank you to better position yourself because in the end, search engines are just trying to find a solution for whatever the user's problem is. And if you make it as easy as possible, they're going to be like, Hey. I got this friend over here. He's got the hookup. Just come on over this way and you're good to go because it identified that with all of that structure that you built out.
So that'll help communicate with the search engines better about the whole page. So what what other pieces of the technical SEO audit are we looking at that'll impact our visibility, how we can use Google or Bing or whatever search engine we're using, drive revenue?
Broken pages is probably going to be the next one on the list there.
What does what a broken pages mean?
So broken pages Technically that you're usually going to be a 404 as the most common one. The list goes on, but that's usually where we focus most often. What happens is it will be a page. Say it's a blog that you built out maybe five years ago. And then you're like, Oh, we don't need this information. Or maybe you did a site migration or something and you remove that page, but there's links still established. Within your website somewhere.
So when someone clicks that link, it just goes to a, sorry, this page cannot be found. And I'm sure everyone has come across that before.
Okay. That makes sense. and then I'll, what will that do from impacting my visibility in the search engines perspective? If I don't think so is what happens.
The biggest thing as far as it's going to affect far most your user's experience. So if you think about say you're doing some online shopping and it says, Oh yeah, this is in store ready for pickup, you can purchase this product, it'll be here. You go to the store. It's not there. That's the exact same thing that's happening with these pages. As people are looking for a solution to their problem. And they're like, Oh, there it is. It's on the search results.
Because Google indexes and keeps everything in there forever. So they click it broken page. It's no different than you just went and you got excited that, you know, your product was in stock at your favorite store and you get there and it's not there.
Nice. Makes sense. Okay. So broken pages. It's another one. What else? What are, what's another big one that we, we run into? What about title tags and meta descriptions? How do we get what do we run into there?
So title tags and meta descriptions. Usually I'll see. Title tags, not the best. So with title tags not using their brand name, not using specific keywords, they kind of just throw something out there randomly, or if they don't ever create it, Google will create it for them and it will just pick whatever it feels like on the page. Especially, you know, back to, if you have 77 H ones, it's going to pick one of those H ones.
Even if it has nothing to do with your product, it's still going to take that information and it's going to say, yep, this is what this page is for. So say you sell boilers, but there's something in there that's talking about going green and it's just, well, now it's going to brand your company as like we're green and sustainable, but it talks nothing about your product. So it just goes back to.
Old school billboards, where this is your billboard now in the digital age, which is your title tags and your meta descriptions. Your meta descriptions of course, will be the information right below that. That gives like a quick summary. Do I really want to click this one or do I want to go to the other one that looks more attractive? So
So where do these show up? So like you and I know what a title tag and a meta description is, but what does that actually mean? Cause you're saying, well, this is a billboard. So is this on my website somewhere when I'm on the website and I see it or like, where does this show up?
this is going to show up in the search results. So whenever you put any, you know, Bing, Google, Yahoo, whatever it is, you're going to see at the very top, there'll be a little blue, you know, like rocket clicks. You know, best digital marketing on this planet. And then a quick summary of what it is that we do. So you're going to see it in the search results, but where it begins is when that page is being built initially.
And this is something that can always be, you come back to, you can tweak it like, Hey, this word isn't working as well. This change or branding around a little bit. So it's not something that's permanent, but it's something that you find in the search results.
Nice. So these, so we covered, we talked about title tags and meta descriptions. We talked about H1s and kind of H tags on the site. We talked about schema data. We talked about broken pages and 404s. So these all seem to be important to driving revenue so that the search engines can actually find you. meaningful category that will also help you drive business. so that's great. Casey knows how to talk about that. And Casey knows how to look at it, but I'm a small business owner.
I don't, how do I know whether or not this is being managed appropriately? What can I do to go check? Like where can I go? How can I be empowered to know whether or not I'm either building on my own, or I'm paying for someone to manage, like, how can I double check on the work, what's my trust, but verify process here,
There's a number of different tools. The majority of them, especially like the better ones, you're going to have to pay for them. But there's tools such as like SEMrush, there's Ahrefs. But something that you probably already have set up for your business is going to be Google search console is going to point out.
Everything like all the issues and it's going to also point out like historical ones that may have already been resolved, but it'll still give you some kind of grasp on exactly what kind of problems that you're facing. Whether it's a broken, what's that?
Does that tool cost something?
Nope. So Google search console, that's going to be free. You just set it up for your business. Same with. GA for your Google analytics. That's another one that will also give you some indication not necessarily as. As deep as the issues that search console can provide you, but it'll still show you some of it.
So if I'm looking, so if I have Google search console, where am I going to look for that?
Ooh, that's so visual. So it's going to be on your left hand bar. And just going through there. One of the big things that you can look at too, is making sure that your site map is loaded in there. But it'll show you if your sitemap is in there, if it's crawled, the number of pages that it found and then there will also be an indexing tab on that left hand menu where you can click into the indexing and it's going to show you everything as far as errors.
And it's also going to show you historically. So if all of a sudden. Something crashed on one part of your site and one month it like skyrocketed and doubled with issues, you can kind of pinpoint, you know, back to, okay, what happened, what were we doing at that point
Awesome. I appreciate walking through some of the pieces that we look at and kind of how you can empower how you, if me as a small business owner, I can be empowered to go check on this stuff and see where it is. And people want to connect with you. The best way to do that?
right here at RocketClicks.
So appreciate it. Appreciate it, Casey. Have a great rest of the day.
Thank you. You too.