Podcast With Peter Rota

Free SEO Audit Checklist To Transform Your SEO with Peter Rota

Show Notes

Welcome to the Agency Insider podcast! 🚀 In this episode, we dive deep into the New Technical SEO Strategies You Must Know for 2024. Join our host and special guest, Peter Rota, a seasoned SEO consultant with over a decade of experience, as they explore the cutting-edge SEO strategies that will help you rank your website number 1 in the coming year.

Peter shares his unique journey into the world of SEO, starting from a sports blog to becoming a senior technical SEO manager. Learn from his hands-on experiences and discover step-by-step guides on how to navigate the overwhelming amount of SEO information out there. We discuss how to drive more organic traffic, improve search engine rankings, and achieve a #1 ranking for your website.

We also touch on the pivotal changes in the SEO landscape, the impact of AI on SEO, and the importance of staying updated with trends. Whether you're a beginner or an advanced user, this video provides practical insights and actionable strategies to enhance your digital marketing efforts.

Ready to take your SEO game to the next level? Watch now and start optimizing! 💡

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:39 - Starting in SEO

02:13 - Initial SEO Challenges

04:13 - No BS SEO Approach

06:02 - Pivotal SEO Changes

08:40 - Staying Updated with SEO

10:29 - Technical SEO Best Practices 2024

13:22 - Commonly Overlooked Technical SEO Aspects

15:37 - Key Elements of an SEO Audit

20:40 - Time Required for SEO Audit

21:02 - Presenting SEO Audits to Clients

22:42 - Common Technical SEO Issues

23:35 - Prioritizing SEO Audit Issues

26:08 - SEO Audit Tools

28:48 - Post-Audit Actions

30:01 - Recent Technical SEO Advancements

31:35 - Enterprise SEO Challenges

34:45 - Scaling Enterprise SEO

37:09 - Coordination in SEO

39:30 - Managing SEO for Large Websites

41:39 - Effective Local SEO Strategies

47:13 - Future of SEO

51:55 - Outro

Transcript

Intro

0:00 welcome to the agency Insider podcast where we dive deep into the word of SEO and digital marketing today we have a

0:07 special guest Peter Rota a seasonal SEO consultant with over a decade of experience Peter has worked with range

0:14 of clients from local businesses to Fortune 500 companies helping them improve their SEO ranking traffic and

0:21 ultimately their bottom line [Applause]

0:30 [Music] welcome Peter thank you happy to be here

0:38 so Peter can you start by telling us a little bit about your background and how did you get started in SEO it's actually

Starting in SEO

0:44 one of my favorite questions because I feel like how people got into SEO is not

0:50 a traditional career path um essentially I went to school for sports management

0:56 and in 2011 I had a sports blog and think this is way back then so it was

1:02 basically a blogger blog and no one uses those anymore but essentially I'd been

1:08 posting for a few months and I kind of wanted to promote it more and get more

1:13 traffic to it and I think I did some searches for like internet marketing and kept hearing this buzzword mentioned

1:20 like SEO or search engine optimization I was like oh maybe I should try that and

1:25 had some success with that and thought maybe like I'll can internship and was

1:32 successful in that and then had another internship and then it's kind of Spun into a career so now currently I do SEO

1:41 full-time for as a senior technical SEO manager for Hub International they're

1:46 essentially an insurance brokerage so I help their technical SEO as well as a

1:51 lot of content optimization and then on the side I have an agency so I work with

1:57 mostly local clients to to Ecommerce and then kind of post about my experience

2:03 with SEO on LinkedIn pretty frequently yeah we all are fan of that L

2:11 post are very inspiring right yes so what were some of the initial challenges

Initial SEO Challenges

2:16 you faced when you started your uh I mean SEO career and H how did you went

2:21 about overcoming them good question I think initially it's just the amount of information was kind

2:29 of overwhelming so when you get into SEO there's all these people that say do it this way do

2:36 it that way but I think how I overcame that was just a lot of just continuous

2:42 learning testing trying not to get overwhelmed um knowing that people

2:50 probably have had the similar questions as you so there's information on the internet not that it's always accurate

2:55 but I think just actually getting around having a website you can test things on

3:00 and learning on the Fly I think now people kind of jump to all these fancy

3:05 objects like AI or backlinks and it's like you want to get a website you actually want to do the work so you can

3:12 find out what am I good at what is engaging things working and yeah I

3:17 definitely say it's a lot of hands-on experience and trying to like avoid a lot of noise too because I mean another

3:23 thing is Google too it's like you would expect them to be transparent and we've seen in the leaks and some other stuff

3:30 that they're not always transparent so I think it's just kind of learning who's

3:35 speaking the truth and kind of testing things out right right right so it's more about testing and believing rather

3:41 than uh listening to what Google says yeah I'm not going to say that they do provide pretty good information but when

3:48 when it tends to come to more ranking information they tend to be a bit discreet but they do have good

3:54 documentation on some of their technical stuff and like the beginner stuff so I'm not going to say they're not like good

4:00 it's just sometimes you're not always going to get a straight answer like why is this page not ranking and they'll be

4:05 like this stuff and it's like not right right and so uh you often

No BS SEO Approach

4:14 mention that you have a no BS approach to SEO so can you elaborate on what that

4:20 means and how does it set you apart from the other SEO Consultants yeah sure so I

4:27 think for a lot of small businesses I've worked with SEO gets a bad rap as far as like people aren't transparent in what

4:34 they doing they're not going to deliver results and they're like we'll do all this amazing stuff and proprietary

4:40 processes and like when you get down to it SEO is three fundamental things links

4:48 user experience content and it's like people complicated saying like with our

4:55 200 checkpoint process or like all this stuff and it's like you need to be able

5:01 to speak the language or your customers or prospects because it's like they don't care about like backlinks and all

5:08 this stuff so it's like if you say like we're going to get you more traffic which is ultimately going to help you get more sales and convert better that's

5:15 going to resonate more to them rather than saying like we're doing digital PR

5:21 Cloud stacks and all this stuff so I think I just like to be transparent

5:27 because um the way I oper is I want to treat people how I want to be treated

5:32 and I also want to sleep well at night too so if I'm just like making stuff up

5:37 I'm taking people's money and not actually doing the work I just I don't feel good as a human being so I think

5:43 it's just important to be more transparent and I think Marketing in general it's like you obviously want to

5:49 sell a product but there's a certain part where it's like are you messing with people's emotions and psychology

5:57 versus actually being a good human being and trying to sell stuff so I I think it's a fine line so let's talk about the

Pivotal SEO Changes

6:03 SEO landscape you know the SEO landscape has changed significantly over the year in fact over the last couple of years so

6:11 what do you think have been the most pivotal change in that industry because you know there are more noises to the

6:17 changes than the actual one so what do you think are most pivotal changes in the industry I think the biggest one at

6:23 least that I'm seeing right now is the fact that like every query Reddit or quer is coming up so

6:30 they'll have discussion like a little feature but even then they'll still show up there so it's increasingly coming

6:38 harder to rank for a lot of those informational keywords and it's like even if that doesn't answer you have

6:44 like an AI overview basically taking that out and I think another thing too

6:50 is that like there's been a lot of sites that were doing well and tend to be more

6:57 topically relevant and then you see like a Forbes or like a a Wall Street Journal

7:04 or like entrepreneur.com they put up one article about a topic in rank so it's

7:09 just it's a lot harder for sites that don't have significant budget to

7:15 basically compete and I think also too is the introduction of these AI search

7:22 engines as you know search search GPT is just coming out I think is in beta now

7:28 but essentially people people I think want answers quickly and they're tired

7:33 of going to the search results and seeing like I went to this

7:40 page and they don't answer my question so it's like now people just put in like topic Reddit so I think people are

7:47 inherently just fed up I mean Google has Google is saying like people are happy

7:52 with the results but it's like there's obviously some bias there so I mean I'd

7:58 say those and I think also just using AI to improve your workflow so I'm using Chad gbt as far as

8:05 like helping plan Google Business posts and helping write my content so I think

8:11 it's just learning the skills that are going to kind of set you apart help you

8:17 stay relevant as we kind of move to the Future because I think Google is kind of pushing people to where it's like we

8:25 have this content in the search results like we're never going to send you people to your website so there's like a

8:31 fine Middle where it's like they want to obviously send people to websites but at the end of the day they're trying to

8:37 make money so it's there's a lot going on right now so so how do you stay updated with these changes and how do

Staying Updated with SEO

8:44 you ensure your strategies remain effective yeah um I mean I follow a good amount of people on LinkedIn so that

8:51 really helps there's a lot of experts on there anyone from like Jake Ward to um

8:58 some technical people but I think it's kind of going back to the

9:04 foundations what Google looks for so they want essentially content that

9:10 answers the question get straight to the point provide value that maybe some

9:16 other Pages aren't doing providing that good user experience can people come to

9:22 your website can they maintain are they able to like produce and like get results and um

9:30 basically good what they looking for also like making as easy technically so

9:36 like as you know there's an ton of like AI content now so I think it's making as

9:42 easy as possible for Google to crawl your SES so removing um hindrances like

9:47 canonical like a lot of the indexing issues we see in search console so Trying to minimize those one possible

9:54 and I mean I I do a lot of freelance too so that helps me too and I think the Great thing you can do as an SEO is be

10:01 doing something outside of your day-to-day work because you're going to be exposed to experiences and learn new

10:07 things that are going to be able to kind of translate into your day-to-day job so

10:13 I mean even if you have an agency it's like have some like maybe affiliator like freelance or some other stuff

10:18 that's not related so you can understand and get different perspectives and things like

10:23 that okay uh I know you are strong on technical ISU so we're going to take a

Technical SEO Best Practices 2024

10:29 lot of technical Su and Su audit questions for our audience so let's dive

10:35 into technical Su so what are the some of the key technical SE practices that businesses should focus in 2024 oh good

10:43 question I'd say definitely having schema I mean trying to have ideally

10:49 custom schema and most of them at this point are like oh just WordPress plugins

10:55 so kind of just differentiating and making it as easy as possible kind of for Google to understand your

11:01 brand I mean I'm actually working with a client now and they're a big brand but

11:07 they don't have any branded traffic and they don't even appear in the knowledge panel so it's like kind of communicating

11:12 to Google who you are corroborating that information getting it out there so

11:17 people can understand it and I mean it depends on the site too but I see a lot

11:23 where it's like people will set up redirects and not update internal links I'll off see a lot where like they don't

11:31 have import links in the header and footer other easy wins are having an

11:37 HTML side map so ideally you want content as close to the rout as possible

11:42 and that's an easy hack as well as using breadcrumbs another thing I've seen a

11:49 lot recently too is like how URLs are accessible from both the www do and the

11:56 nww so basically picking one one preferred Direction and having that be

12:01 the only way people can visit it another huge thing now is we're seeing more and

12:07 more a lot of websites using JavaScript as Frameworks and I tend to like

12:14 JavaScript is not necessarily bad but you ideally want all the important content in the source code I mean I've

12:21 seen websites where it's like it looks great but you turn off the JavaScript and nothing loads so it's like you you

12:28 kind of want it to make like I mentioned Google's job as easy as possible and kind of

12:33 just make you sure like when you are linking you're using HF links and not

12:38 like on click and things like that and I think another thing too when working

12:43 with businesses you especially technical audits you want to be able to prioritize

12:48 by both impact and resources so when I do reports I try to prioritize what's

12:55 going to have the highest impact as well as being aware of the resources because

13:01 I've seen people write up Audits and it's like all this looks great but it's like how am I going to implement this so

13:07 I think it's just being super transparent and providing as much value making sure they can understand and also

13:15 speaking their language so ideally hopefully they work with a developer so someone they can hand it off to just

13:21 explain it easier so I mean of course my next question was what are the some of the key components of technical SEO that

Commonly Overlooked Technical SEO Aspects

13:27 businesses Overlook you almost answered most of them but no no I'm just saying

13:33 so are there any other technical component uh things which you when because you audit a lot of sites do lot

13:39 of Consulting so you do what are the most common overlooked technical sups

13:45 I'd probably say having a uniform experience on both mobile and desktop so

13:52 I've worked on sites in the past well they W have the same amount of links on

13:58 Mob mobile and desktop and some of the content will be missing so Google primarily right now is crawling as a

14:05 mobile crawler so you want to make sure you have a uniform experience

14:11 um I guess kind of the reverse of that is like a lot of businesses will see

14:17 like an error or some errors in like search console or like H or some Russian

14:23 freak out think it's like the end of the world and often times it's something very minuscule so I think these tools

14:30 don't do a great job some rush and HF do it better because they're more comprehensive but they don't always do a

14:37 great job as explaining to people that maybe aren't familiar with SEO the importance of something so I had people

14:46 come to me where it's like oh I'm getting all these issues in search console and is my website being found

14:53 and it's kind of communicating to them that Google is pretty smart overall but

15:00 fixing those things would tend to help but you kind of want to focus on what's going to have like the biggest impact

15:06 too so I think it's also seeing an issue not realizing you have to fix every

15:12 single issue because sometimes they're like non-starters and they're not gonna like because it overwhelms them looking

15:19 at a long list I'm sure yeah yeah it's like they a lot of people they run these

15:24 automatic Audits and it's like oh my God like I have all these issues and it's like lot of times they're just trying to

15:30 do that upsell their service and get you to use your their product right right right right right okay now uh can you

Key Elements of an SEO Audit

15:38 walk us through a comprehensive SE audit checklist and what are the key elements you looked for not the one 200 with the

15:46 200 factors but in general what do you when you just do so can you walk us through some of those

15:53 yeah I mean I can actually share my screen yes please I

16:00 I need to probably up update it but essentially this is the framework I use

16:06 I like to First Look at the on page so I'm looking at the title tag and things

16:12 like is a target key listed as far as left this possible is this the right target

16:18 keyword can we optimize it more is you're using the target keyword but I

16:23 mean it's anything from the title tag you are all my description as you know tags and headers are super important so

16:29 I'm looking at that I'm looking at the body content um I kind of look more so

16:36 at this point to make sure they're not over optimized rather than under because I feel like at this point Google's a lot

16:43 more forgiving if you're under optimized if you're over optimized they're going to like Hammer you so I look at that I

16:51 look opportunities to get more internal links to that page as well as where I

16:58 can see um internal links being added to that page um I'm looking at the canonical tag

17:06 I'm seeing like is this page correctly should it be index should it be self- refering is it a

17:13 duplicate um looking at the image data um are they using all image tags or like

17:19 do their file names include Target keywords things like that looking at

17:24 schema as far as like do they have it is there opportunities to add more are

17:30 things connected are they using any JavaScript on the page is it being loaded um cuz sometimes Google is able

17:37 to render JavaScript we all know that but it's just like we want to make it as easy as possible for the job so I try to

17:44 always make sure the imported content and the site map and then looking at

17:50 meta robots kind of just making sure um is there an option to add like a Max Max

17:57 image preview to kind of get as much content and images in the Ser as possible because we want to take more

18:03 room I'll run like a mobile verse desktop test from technical SEO which I

18:10 mentioned kind of just helps you make sure the experience is universal go through this whole thing but I'll kind

18:16 of give it summary um yeah so I mean I'll look at it's kind of anything from

18:23 like XML search console I'm validating things there I'm looking the robots at

18:29 txt s Maps does the C budget also comes into

18:35 featur someplace here yeah I mean expressively look at the crawl budget but I look at things like some of the

18:42 page indexing issues and making sure I'm able to solve any issues as far as like

18:49 I'm trying to think what the name of them are but it's like page index or

18:55 duplicate or differential or I forgot the name but essentially I try to like

19:00 solve all those when possible sometimes it's like out of your realm of possibility but yeah kind of

19:07 just solving all those and yeah I also look at a craw de too so or the majority

19:14 of URLs at least reachable in four levels obviously it's a bigger website it's going to be harder but you ideally

19:20 want them as close as possible to the route and then I'll also look at their

19:26 back links and their anchor text profile kind of just seeing are they spamming

19:31 Google are they kind of natural yeah I mean I kind of look at those things I do believe in E eat T at this point but I

19:39 think there's a hyperfocus on certain aspects but I mean as they Googs

19:44 mentioned and I've heard other people mention it's mostly backlinks but I mean I still try to like have content that

19:51 would be able to I guess have social proof and positioning so it's like when

19:57 was it public was less updated like who is it reviewed by um kind of linking out

20:03 to your sources putting citations at the end but these things will be more valid

20:08 for a for the article or post right not for the service or a commercial Pages E8

20:15 specifically yeah I mean those and then also having uh about us page that kind

20:22 of just goes into fleshes things out a bit more but yeah I mean that's

20:27 essentially my Pro proc and I'll use I really like to do like screaming

20:33 frog that's where I get a lot of the stuff from but yeah I mean that's yeah

20:39 it can be pretty long though like I've done audits that are like 90 Pages how

Time Required for SEO Audit

20:45 much time does it take you to do an audit like this uh I think that one took like 20 20 25

20:52 hours but it was like pretty beastly because like I'll I'll I did like a Content audit and I'll look at the

20:59 technical uh okay and so when you present to it to the client you

Presenting SEO Audits to Clients

21:05 obviously give a priority to things to implement right yes yeah I mean let me

21:13 actually pull up one of the on I was so then this goes into a PDF DOC format or

21:18 this is the format uh the sheet is the final form

21:23 I the one that's like 90 me let me just

21:28 share my screen but yeah going back to your question I like to kind of at the top of the SEO audit I

21:37 present them in Word documents but essentially I kind of give a summary

21:42 kind of highlighting how the overall audit is areas to like improve but essentially at

21:51 the end I'll basically break it down these are the priority recommend

22:00 yeah so I mean at least this site the biggest thing was the craw dep so

22:05 improving that some other things here and then going through and doing making

22:10 those on page updates and those different page pages

22:15 and things like that and then here's like update this and then

22:23 there's more stuff and yeah that's essentially it so I kind of just like

22:28 lay it all out there and yeah go ahead this one is the 90 page one right yeah that was the beastly one I've done ones

22:35 that are like shorter so it really just depends on the client and what they're looking for and the work scope they give

Common Technical SEO Issues

22:43 right yeah yeah cuz like some they've worked with SEO companies in the past so they may have like some foundations so

22:51 it's like sometimes there's not significant stuff wrong with the website but like that website particularly they

22:58 had not worked with an SEO or SEO so it was kind of like starting from scratch

23:04 at least the SEO goes so are these not the audit but are these sheets available for your uh for

23:12 for you for the for people to is it a publicly available something which you share with the people yeah I mean I I've

23:18 shared my audit checklist on LinkedIn before I'm happy to like share okay so for our listeners we will

23:26 have this SEO checklist Google sheet Link in the comments below all right all

23:31 right that would be very exciting for people to use all right now of course a

Prioritizing SEO Audit Issues

23:36 lot of the questions which I was to ask uh you helped us for example you showed

23:42 us how to prioritize issues found during an audit and you actually I was looking for any specific but can you share a

23:49 specific example where addressing a technical issue significantly improve website performance like one of your

23:56 favorite oh this was the issue and we Sol and this what happened result so if you can just share or talk a little bit

24:03 about it yeah yeah so I I don't have access to the client's data now but when

24:10 I started working with them a large majority of their content they had

24:17 actually so they had moved from basically a different domain and they

24:23 kind of had redirected or not really set up the the redirection of migration

24:28 correctly so essentially I went through and basically looked at the URL redirect

24:34 map set up everything correctly made sure to actually use an indexer to index a lot of the content was able to like

24:41 index like I think 80 to 90% of the pages so um I would say that's been one

24:48 of my good experiences I've worked with um at least my current job I think one

24:55 of I always forget it but it was one of the page indexing

25:00 things in search console and I think it was like duplicate without user selected

25:06 canonical and I got that to drop significantly which definitely helped

25:11 Google just better crawl the website I mean I'd say those ones and then also there was one where like my one of the

25:18 websites I work with is a single page application so the majority of the

25:24 content was not index so I basically made made a recommendation to make it

25:29 like server side so essentially the content is in the source code and I was

25:35 able to get more pages index that way too so I mean there's definitely a lot of stuff but I think it's like how does

25:42 this contribute to the revenue or make the client money CSR or customer side

25:49 rendering actually kills the Su yeah yeah it's I mean I I saw a recent Thing

25:54 by versal basically saying that it doesn't matter but I think it depends on the site and the resources

26:02 anything at this point that's going to make Google's job easier you want to do it so yeah so so we saw the tools which

SEO Audit Tools

26:11 you use for conducting SEO audits but are there any tools out there which you recommend you say okay so besides the

26:18 one which you've been using like SC Rush hrfs screaming frog one of our favorites

26:24 but is there are there any other tools out there your recent one which you like would like to sh yeah yeah so um guess

26:33 I'll share my screen again yeah so I use a good amount

26:38 of Chrome extension so one of my my favorite on is

26:47 the SEO Pro extension yeah so I use this it's super

26:52 good far as looking for those on page elements things like that what is the

26:58 name of this extension SE menion the SEO Pro extension SEO Pro extension yeah

27:05 okay and then another one I like to do is the web developer extension mostly

27:12 use this that's one of my favorite right disable Javas CSS just

27:20 like and another one I like to is it's actually available in that extension

27:27 it's called yeah yeah yeah it's called like the no

27:33 follow looks like there's some mirroring going on or maybe it's me

27:38 yeah okay yeah I mean I'd say those and then I really like this redirect path

27:46 tool which will essentially tell you if a page is redirecting on it um right I'm

27:52 also a fan of this robots exclusion Checker which kind of will tell you what

27:58 robots text is that page being blocked in robots.txt what are the other meta

28:05 things showing trying to think if there's any other ones yeah those are the major

28:11 ones those are a lot of extensions you get you use there but there are some

28:17 some new ones which I found I will definitely I'll definitely put the same in the comment section below so people

28:24 so the listeners can go and download them yeah I mean I joke like an SEO is only as good as their tools try not to

28:31 be like over reliant on tools I think there's sometimes or like they're

28:37 differing so yeah I think it's good to be able to use tools but be it's also important to use your brain and be able

28:43 to make like judgments things like that right now uh

Post-Audit Actions

28:49 so after completing an SE audit what are the next steps I mean how do you ensure

28:55 basically that the recommendations are implement effectively so it's just that you prioritize and be done with it or

29:02 what's the Mi step I mean I continue to follow up with the client and I check to make sure the changes are being done on

29:09 the website and then go through the audit and I'll like make a check on which thing has been done just to make

29:15 sure but I mean most of the clients if at least these local businesses they tend to be do a bit better because

29:24 they're it's not like where you're in Enterprise where it's like you have have all these people all these teams and

29:31 there's a resource issue these people tend to have somewhat of a budget and

29:36 they're they're more able to like have the resource to actually implement the stuff so they're usually very eager to

29:43 get the work implemented because they're like they want to just make more money right away really had a timeon but I've

29:49 also worked with clients where it's like I've done SEO audit and they have a team

29:56 and they're like oh it's fine like we'll reach out if they have any issues so it really just depends of what they're most

Recent Technical SEO Advancements

30:01 comfortable with now are there any recent advancement in technical SEO

30:06 which you particularly f are excited about not one that I can think of right

30:13 now but I think the use of AI as far as helping out with workflows I mean I

30:21 guess one I could say was like I'm not the greatest coder or like friendly with

30:26 that stuff so I was kind creating a custom schema for one page and I put the

30:31 code in and I was like where is the issue here and TR GPT was kind of able

30:36 to figure out where the issue was and I was able to fix it but I mean I haven't

30:42 seen any things that like pop out to me like wow why didn't I think of that so

30:48 are you using AI for technical SEO issues I mean charb or any other to for

30:54 technical yeah I mean I wanted I'm actually sorry learning python I'm very

31:00 at the very very beginning steps but I'm just looking to better find ways to

31:06 automate things but a lot of it's just manual work but I'm also using like

31:11 screaming frog search console um I like to use I mean I guess it's somewhat

31:18 technical but I I use a tool called sight liner which kind of will show you

31:23 where the duplicate content on the website is and things like that but yeah I mean it's mostly like bit manual

31:31 process but like I'll have check-ins that kind of will establish and keep things so move out of the technical SEO

Enterprise SEO Challenges

31:38 we move a little bit into the Enterprise SE I know you have done those lot as well so my question in Enterprise SEO is

31:46 of course you Enterprise SEO presents unique challenges compared to a smaller website can you explain some of these

31:53 challenges and how do you address them some of the common challenges I think the biggest challenge I see at least in

32:00 my work is it's a resources issue so a lot of time it's like we only have a

32:07 certain amount of developers a certain amount of time and it's they're like well what's a priority so I think it's

32:15 very important to kind of show someone what's the priority of this you what's

32:21 going to be the and why are we doing it and making it as easy as possible for them to basically Implement that

32:28 another thing is like often times it's not an ranking issue it's the resources

32:35 so it's like we it kind of hinders your ability to move fast because it's like I have to go through all these lines where

32:43 it's like I have to reach out to like my boss or I have to reach out to like the seen kind of explaining them the value

32:50 and particularly like why we're doing it so it's a lot of Storytelling and using

32:56 data to kind of support your decision making um and another thing too is like

33:03 speaking in their language so I've done a lot of reports where like I can make it super SEO and they're just like what

33:10 does this mean like what's what's the important so it's kind of just somewhere you're speaking in the ideal language of

33:16 the prospect is kind of speaking in their language and essentially communicating to them why such thing is

33:22 important I think another thing too is like everything we do has to have

33:27 purpose and drive back to results so it's like updating like every um like all

33:35 image tag or 404 it's like what's going to be the impact on the bottom line so I

33:41 think it's um a lot of times too it's like some stuff don't work so at least

33:47 for a while now my company we've been having issues with cycore so it's like what can I do to still make progress on

33:54 the website and and stuff like that so so it's a lot of like what's in your

34:00 control what's out of your control yeah being able to lead on your teammates too so it's like if I have a question or

34:08 something that like they can help me out so I would say those are like the biggest challenges I face and

34:17 um yeah I'd say sometimes too A lot of people just don't understand SEO so like

34:23 why are we doing this so you have to kind of explain to them the importance of the issue and get them on board it's

34:31 much easier to sell something if someone understands where you're coming from why they're doing it rather than being like

34:38 we're doing this because it's best practice like okay well why is it important though so I would say those

Scaling Enterprise SEO

34:45 things okay now how do you approach scaling s strategies for a Enterprise or

34:51 a large organization I mean for a smaller is of course lesser keyword lesser traffic but how do you

34:59 I tend to focus more on the different content templates than rather than one

35:05 page at a time so it's like here's this template on blogs like where can we make

35:11 improvements to like maybe make better title tags or better internal linking or

35:16 can we make it more like automatically so I mean I think recently on one of our

35:23 offices section essentially what we did we wanted to basically update all title

35:29 tags with new words so I think we made like a macro or something where it basically updated like a thousand pages

35:35 with a new word so I think it's like using macros to kind of like improve and

35:40 speed things up um I mean as far as scaling i' probably say that's the best

35:47 one and just focusing on what's going to have the most impact for each thing

35:54 rather than being I've updated these two pages like unless those pages are getting

36:00 significant amount of traffic it's like it may not be good so it's like what pag are getting the most traffic what's

36:06 going to have the most significant impact as well as like what's going to take up the most resources so another

36:13 thing we're working on at least in one of my websites is essentially we want to add this component where like if

36:19 someone's on an insurance page to like office for home and owners insurance we want to have a component that also links

36:26 to their Auto Insurance so it's like creating opponent there that kind of like scales on to like a thousand pages

36:33 so being able to like aity yeah yeah yeah topical Authority

36:40 and just better internal linking because like a lot of these Pages don't get linked besides like the XML and HTML

36:48 side M they just trying to like be better with internal linking I think something too is like I mean most sites

36:55 do this but like having a related or something obviously that's better than nothing but I also try to like link

37:02 contextually too so I definitely say both of those things okay now how important do you

Coordination in SEO

37:10 think coordination and collaboration with other department in an Enterprise for a successful oh it's super important

37:16 I mean it kind of makes it break the success of things so it's like I've R the things in the past where it's like

37:23 we had this great strategy but we're getting stonewalled by certain teams so they just don't want to implement the

37:28 work so it's like you can have the best strategy but if they don't want to

37:33 implement the work it's really hard um I think it's also important too to make

37:39 sure everyone understands how to keep up with things so we use a lot of things

37:44 like J tickets to kind of communicate or use workfront to kind of make sure

37:49 things R along well we also use a lot of email and chat meetings so yeah I mean communication is going to make or break

37:56 something and I think like I mentioned it's also getting Buy in from each party so they can be on your side because it's

38:03 if you have people with perspectives and how things should be done it's going to be hard to kind of like get the project

38:10 executed okay now now so when it comes to large websites how do you crawl is

38:15 screaming frog able to do it or do you have another tool which you use I use a few so I use screaming frog which I like

38:23 a lot um I also use S bulb too because I like kind of just goes a bit more in

38:29 depth a lot of the hints so I like to use both of those and I'll tend to run each of those each month but every day

38:36 I'm also checking like search console to make sure there's no like abrupt increases in crawl errors or um no

38:44 robots.txt issues I mean I've also ran into a thing where I'm trying to

38:49 remember but essentially I think basically what had they one of our websites we use um Cloud fair and they

38:57 had sent up these like security permissions to basically block that Bots but they actually ended up blocking

39:03 Google so it took us like two weeks to unblock it and they didn't realize it so

39:09 like I came back and like I fixed it but like I think it's just important to be

39:14 checking that stuff daily and when possible get reminders and alerts yeah

39:19 you really need to be on top of the stuff because like things will be going along well and then it's just like oh my

39:25 God like our s's being attacked like things like that okay now what are the some of the

Managing SEO for Large Websites

39:31 best practices for managing Su on a large scale website best practices um I

39:38 think like going back to the prioritization of just making sure what

39:44 you're doing is going to be actionable to the developers why it's important the

39:49 impact accurately communicating when it's done what is the

39:55 QA or what does it mean by on I think also to when possible working with the

40:01 brand and PR teams cuz that's like super important now where it's like Google is kind of looking for Brands and make sure

40:09 you are getting brand traffic so um kind of sticking on top of there looking out

40:14 for I mean we've done in the past where like sometimes people will like mention you and then not link back to you so

40:21 it's being on top of that I think also like focusing on things you can control

40:28 cuz sometimes developers are need it but you also want to be able to make sure

40:33 whatever you're doing solely is as important as possible you're making the efforts to like actually improve things

40:41 and move things forward I think like communication too so communicating with like your manager like where can I help

40:48 like what's going on with the site kind of being on top of things I like to really kind of spend each morning kind

40:55 of starting reading SEO news so kind of communicate things with them that might be useful for them and just I like to

41:02 like check Reddit and atrust and Su and all those blogs just to make sure I'm on top of things and I think that's another

41:09 thing too is like you want to stay ahead of the curve and try to be as updated as

41:15 possible and see what's going on in the SEO industry so a lot of it's just being

41:21 proactive though I think at this part it's hard to be super proactive but just

41:26 trying adhere to the best practices and knowing

41:32 at the end of the day what schools Ang go and trying to like May the imps that

41:37 are going to reach that goal now let's just move to a bit to a local SEO what are some of the effective local

Effective Local SEO Strategies

41:43 strategies that you have implemented for your clients and you have seen uh

41:50 has Meed yeah so I mean I I would say the probably the biggest most impactful

41:56 one is reviews um those tend to move the newal pretty well well I like for the

42:03 client to basically tell the people that are buy the software get a review to kind of leave

42:09 Atari keyword in there and when they are responding to also kind of use a keyword

42:15 within the reviews that kind of communicates to go that um rankwise and

42:20 making sure the g&b is as complete as possible so making sure the primary

42:26 categories well well if there's options to get a secondary third category making

42:31 sure we're kind of doing competitive analysis and see what they're doing accurately filling out all

42:37 services as far as like all the things the person does products making sure those are all

42:44 updated I like to do gmbb posts four times a month for clients so kind of

42:51 targeting specific service areas and things that they want to rank for and I like to use

42:58 the CTA I like to do more like the call because I feel like if you're sending them to the website it's just kind of

43:04 like going to start them through the whole process at that point so it's like if someone calls you they're ready to

43:10 like be in contact they want the stuff like right now so I tend to get better

43:16 results with those um another thing super important is like service pages and Local Pages so um I mean Google says

43:24 like that it's Gateway page but the pages Rank and people are visiting the

43:30 content so it's like I I tend to do those and another thing I really like to do is

43:35 I'll do press releases but like kind of embed the GMB as well as the citation

43:41 and name address phone number I've had some pretty good success with those and yeah I mean just regular SEO so making

43:48 sure you are getting backlinks that are sometimes locally relevant continuing to

43:54 add new content like I've I've liked to do blog content too that kind of

43:59 addresses different parts of the buyer's Journey so kind of like top awareness and then more downward the fun where

44:07 it's like I don't know like best Carpenter near me and like Arizona and

44:14 just Target that page and make that sure that's really set up well trying to think what

44:19 else do you also bu back do you also build back to the Ian also

44:27 uh I mean I've had like mixed results with that I mean I used to but I haven't

44:34 done a ton recently but I think it's always worth testing but I know like back in the day I would used to do like

44:41 safe like Yelp or like a GMB didn't see like a ton of movement I mean another

44:47 thing too is like which does work well is like CTR manipulation but then you're kind of like getting into like the gray

44:54 hat yeah but I mean it definitely work works right and uh so

45:01 uh okay so and and do you try to get the Naps index as well the business

45:09 liftings yeah yeah I mean one thing I've noticed is I've used a service where

45:14 like if you spend the business description and keep everything else the

45:19 same they tend to index better so I know at least with citations a lot of time is

45:25 like we we'll get them created them them index so I've I've used Services where

45:30 the basically spin like the description and those tend to get better index but yeah I mean I think what citations is

45:37 important you get like the major ones like yel Yellow Pages merch

45:43 circle yellow and of course the aggregators right yeah the aggregators

45:48 are super important as well so especially like get those and they tend to feed you all the other ones so how do

45:55 you measure the success of a local yeah I mean I I like each month I like to set up kind of monthly reports so

46:03 kind of go through the client what we've been working on um kind of like the onpage optimizations we've done backlink

46:10 we've acquired showing where they're getting phone calls from Forum submits um how

46:18 traffic's trending up or down where they're ranking in like local packs I like to use think local Falcon which is

46:24 pretty good and then I also will show them interactions and things the g&b seeing how that's scaling up or down but

46:32 yeah I mean I like to keep it simple nothing like crazy but nowb going away

46:39 with the call data so how would you yeah I saw that that sucks actually but is

46:45 there anything you going to replace it with track calls um yeah I track calls so I'm able to kind of also see like

46:52 when we're getting calls on the the listings and kind of um also seeing like where their clients are coming from so

46:59 yeah it's it seems like every time we get good data from Google they just like to take it away so it's it's tough right

47:07 now now uh those were some great Insight thank you the future of SEO of course

Future of SEO

47:13 everybody's worried about do do does the Su has a future of course every year the

47:18 best song is Su is De but let's play that one as well so the SEO landscape of

47:24 course we know is always evolving what drench what trends do you see shaping the future of SE I think the biggest

47:30 future is these alternative search engines so I was mentioning earlier

47:35 search Chat GPT perplexity I know a lot of I think genz is using Tik Tock and

47:43 other social medias to kind of look information so I think search will

47:48 always exist in some aspect as long as people use search engines but as we've

47:54 seen Google's pushing more and more search features into the search engine so I think I can see definitely websites

48:02 getting less visits but the visits they do get being more impactful because if

48:09 it's asking all these like higher level questions and here and I want to get to

48:15 your website and find more specific information then it's like I'll go to

48:20 your website but I think at this point with at least AI overviews it's it's

48:25 been fuzzy because like I know in the beta they were they had like 80% but now

48:31 I'm seeing they're only in like 3% of overview so I kind of think we're still at a a time where it's like we don't

48:38 know the true impact but I see certain searches though where it's

48:44 like I think some local searches where like if you search Carpenter and it's

48:50 like they have these like local professionals and ads and they basically push like the the four pack or three

48:57 pack way down organic results so I think it's more like Google's trying to push

49:02 people more towards their properties rather than websites and it's like it's

49:08 a hard balance between we need the Publishers but then we also want to make money so I think I think also for them

49:16 too it's like they realized that maybe they were on such a high horse and

49:21 like chat gbg came along and they're like crap like we actually have to like care now I think another thing is like

49:28 the quality so it's like like I mentioned people just don't trust a lot of Google anymore or they they don't

49:35 want answer quickly so they go to Reddit which not I mean there's certainly is some good Reddit sources but there's

49:42 also some that it's like questionable like why am I getting this advice from

49:48 like a 10-year-old on like some crazy topic so I think it's important to know

49:53 where you're getting the information from I I think also a lot of people too

49:58 are not always trustworthy of AI so there's going to be certain people that

50:04 prefer the traditional sources and they can vet things on their

50:09 own now how how how should business prepare for these changes and especially

50:15 with SG and uh how do you think I mean how do you recommend or what all you

50:20 recommend that the business should prepare with Now search CH GPT so that means AI is going to be more into it so

50:26 how you think businesses should prepare for these yeah I mean I I think it's important to focus on your branding so

50:32 trying to make good relationships within the community which will help Foster good links more mentions online tying

50:41 those back to a knowledge panel so Google knows who you are and kind kind of reference you I mean it seems like a

50:48 lot of with them search gbt and some these other things they're they're focusing a lot on entities and kind of

50:56 accur describing that I think also focusing on the fundamentals too so it's like having the keyword phrase a few

51:02 times there in the content and likely you'll hit on some NLP words

51:09 and fostering like good relationships in the community and if you're like a local business for example what sorry have you

51:17 tested any of these no I don't have access yet to search GPT but I've used perplexity and I thought it was pretty

51:23 cool but I'm on I'm on the beta so I'm I'm hoping I'll get access but I mean

51:30 okay um yeah I mean I think it's I'm just not hype not get overwhelmed by the

51:36 amount of stuff I mean if you're on like a WordPress website most of them are not

51:42 too bad out of the box so you don't probably don't have a ton of technical issues so it's like if you see an

51:48 automated tool and you freak out like you have all this stuff wrong like to kind of like get a second opinion and

51:54 not like freak all right those will be all the questions I could think about asking you and there were a lot of

Outro

52:00 knowledge nuggets and yes lot of learnings as well Peter it's been a pleasure having you on the show your

52:06 insights into technical SEO local SEO and Enterprise seos are available before

52:11 we wrap up where can our listeners find you and learn more about you and your service yeah sure so you can find me on

52:17 LinkedIn at petera I also have a website at Peter seo.com and I'm open to local

52:25 freelance technical SEO anyone that really has SEO needs at this point all right fantastic thank you

52:33 again Peter for joining us and thank you to our listeners for tuning in until next time keep optimizing