Podcast With Jono Alderson

Technical SEO Mastery: Learn From Jono Alderson

Show Notes

Unlock the secrets of SEO mastery with insights from Jono Alderson, a renowned name in technical SEO and digital strategy. This video is your gateway to achieving a #1 ranking with a step-by-step guide tailored for 2024 and beyond. Join me as Jono delves into the core of SEO, AI integration, and the future of digital marketing, offering strategies that will drive more organic traffic and help rank your website number 1. Whether you're an SEO newbie or a seasoned pro, this guide is packed with actionable insights to enhance your search engine rankings and boost your SEO game. Stay ahead of the curve and ensure your content shines in the crowded digital landscape. Ready to transform your SEO approach? Subscribe now for more expert tips and start your journey toward dominating organic search results! Want personalized help to rank number 1? Connect with me for bespoke strategies and elevate your website's performance today!

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:55 - Jono’s journey

03:42 - SEO approach evolution

05:20 - Underutilized SEO strategies

06:45 - Future of SEO trends

09:30 - Technical SEO fundamentals

11:28 - Common technical SEO mistakes

12:45 - Understanding crawl budget

15:16 - Handling multiple URLs

17:42 - Explaining technical SEO to clients

20:34 - Overcoming developer challenges

22:50 - AI's impact on technical SEO

24:53 - Balancing AI and human content

27:27 - AI in content creation

29:36 - Marketing with structured data

33:46 - Implementing structured data

36:29 - Future of structured data

37:49 - Importance of site speed

40:30 - Improving site speed

42:26 - Site speed optimization for WordPress

44:20 - SEO strategies for Shopify

45:01 - Challenges for SEO agencies

46:58 - Structuring SEO teams in agencies

49:00 - Common agency mistakes

51:03 - Google's indexing approach

52:54 - Evolving role of SEO specialists

54:34 - Advice for innovative SEO professionals

55:50 - Favorite SEO tools

57:05 - Recommended resources for agencies

57:48 - Staying updated in SEO industry

58:53 - Final advice for businesses in SEO

59:33 - Where to Find Jono Alderson Online

59:57 - Outro

Transcript

Intro

0:00 welcome to the agency Insider show where we dive into the word of marketing strategy and digital transformation with

0:06 industry leaders I am navit kosa and today we have an exciting guest jono

0:12 elderson for those unfamiliar with jono he's a leading expert in technical SEO

0:17 and digital strategies he worked with some of the biggest names in the industry including one of our favorite plugins Yost and today he'll be sharing

0:25 insights on SEO Ai and the future of digital marketing

0:31 [Applause]

0:36 [Music] jono welcome to the show today how are

0:42 you thank you so much for having me I'm great just saying it's unseasonably nice today so I'm glad I'm cooped up inside

0:49 away from the sun and the nice weather now this is great thanks then thanks again going to be fun okay and of course

Jono’s journey

0:55 I'm thrilled to have you here before we dive into the technical topics could you share a bit about your journey and

1:01 current role and recent projects you are working on yeah certainly so I started

1:06 out as a bedroom web developer what feels like a hundred years ago now building websites for little small

1:12 businesses like local bakeries and butchers and insurance firms and stuff um and I got a bit a bit obsessed about

1:19 what does perfect look like so as a as a web developer ner playing with HTML um

1:25 quite early on there was some really interesting challenges where you go okay what order should these tags be in and what does a good Al alt attribute look

1:31 like and what does this thing do exactly and how does this work and then it turns out accidentally what I was doing was

1:37 technical SEO before I'd even really heard of it and had a name for it so that was cool and then I fell from there

1:42 into the world of agencies so I spent a long time working with agencies um and grew teams around me was very successful

1:49 but learned about business and consultancy and constraints and um all the kind of moving parts that go with

1:55 that so perfect is hard right and perfect is even harder when you've got clients who monthly reports and deliver

2:01 BS and things um so yeah did that for a bit hopped around a bit worked at some tool vendors played with some big data

2:06 was into machine learning before it was Ai and cool um and then yeah spent five years at yast running the kind of um

2:12 what does SEO for yast look like the product road map what should we be building the 13 14 million websites

2:19 running yes SEO um based on where SEO is going to be in two three four year five

2:24 years from now and and trying to work out both technically what does perfect look like for that scale but also uh

2:31 what's the direction of travel what is Google going to be in a few years what tools do people need what does good what

2:37 does doing SEO look like and mean for most average users a super interesting Journey I'm still a web developer at

2:43 heart I'm deeply into Tech and PHP and JavaScript and databases and code but

2:49 also yeah I think the the bigger challenges that many businesses have are people and politics and structures and

2:54 priorities and finite resources and budgets and those and positioning and I'm sure we'll talk about like Marketing in general yeah it's bit a bit of both

3:01 ends of the spectrum so time okay right so uh technical Su is something which is

3:07 very intriguing and lot of people Overlook I've seen across I mean I myself love doing technical Su putting

3:14 it Sops but yes we're going to talk more about that as well so of course you've

3:19 been in an Su industry for quite some time how many years you've been in the industry now I've lost count I think um

3:25 definitely since 2006 maybe there about so yeah going on nearly yeah that's year

3:32 right I I know the Su change a a lot I'm being this in Industry since 2002 so yes

3:41 things have changed but how has your approach to SEO changed over the years and uh what misconception do you think

SEO approach evolution

3:48 agencies are still holding to despite all the changes we or the roller coaster

3:53 rides we have been through in recent year yeah interesting I don't think my core approach has changed a lot I think

3:59 some of the tactics and some of the day-to-day prioritization has changed but the the core principles I think still hold true which is that Google or

4:08 Bing or whoever are essentially going to judge your website and your web pages on

4:13 whether this is the best thing for their users and the the best way that you can strategically make sure that that is the

4:20 case is by making the best thing for their users so creating unique Val

4:25 inherently valuable resources by being the kind of brand that people would expect to see when when they search by

4:30 having a reputation by being all those good things which now are very trendly because eat is a thing and obviously the

4:37 it's getting harder to do conventional tactics like link building and content Etc and but yeah I think the heart of it

4:43 still makes sense the core approach is provide the best resources and results to Google's

4:49 users right Ed opinion of course you've been in this industry for almost 20 year

4:55 what has been the most underutilized Su strategies there ENT should be should be

5:01 paying more attention in this year in the coming year I'm I missed the other part of your first question I'm going to

5:06 hop back about what misconceptions agencies hold on to you because what I'll repeat my question so what I'm

5:12 saying what is the most underutilized Su strategies which you see these days I

5:18 think actually focusing on product Market fit so a lot of Brands and websites and companies and agencies will

Underutilized SEO strategies

5:24 start out and they'll we're going to do some keyword research we're going to look at search volumes and current rankings and

5:31 competitors we're going to build them into some kind of spreadsheet put them all in order and then start either

5:36 producing or optimizing content and trying to do slightly better than our competitors so that we out rank them and

5:41 nowhere at the beginning of this process has anybody said actually let's do some audience research and like let's

5:47 actually speak to potential customers in our space let's understand what the kind of problems these users have and not

5:53 just not just at the point of purchase I think critically the point that a lot of people aren't doing is saying let's

5:59 understand the complex buying Journeys that these people go on for considered purchases and say six months before you

6:05 clicked out to car what were the kind of questions you had what were you unsure about what frustrated you what annoyed

6:11 you and what triggered that start of those resource versus and then to be saying okay how do we help those people

6:17 how do we create or commission content and optimize keywords and provide resources that Target people who are on

6:23 those Journeys rather than just fighting for these kind of bottom of the funnel keywords where we're all putting all of

6:28 our efforts and enery yeah bun fighting and not actually helping users who are hire up the F so yeah everyone's missing

6:34 that s right so it's it's like the you most of the time the SE agencies forget

6:39 it's it's always a user first y yeah definitely so of course we often hear

Future of SEO trends

6:46 about the death of SEO I I've been hearing it every year I've been into couple of sessions whereas why it's not

6:53 so I mean as someone like youve been deeply involved in the field what's your take on the future of SEO especially for

6:59 the agencies is it going to remain same or Su agency is going to be like just living in Silo doing Su agency or do

7:06 what do we need to do that so I don't think it's dead but I think it continues available tactics set reduces so once

7:14 upon a time you're going 20 years ago you're going to do some SEO we're going to say okay we're going to do some stuff with some keywords we're going to go get

7:19 some links we're going to do some blog comments we're going to do an infographic we're going to do like a 100 things you can do and then each year

7:26 that goes by there are 10 FS there's 90 things you can do there are 80 things you can do do blog comments aren't the thing anymore infographics aren't the

7:32 thing anymore that list gets shorter and shorter and now it's super short because the kind of content that Google wants to

7:38 rank is the kind of stuff that is authentic genuinely useful unique

7:44 inherently valuable Etc and those things are hard to do if you're an agency because they're very closely tied to the

7:50 business its values its products its services the further away from if you're not sat physically in that business and

7:56 getting touching and experienes experiencing these super hot so the role of agency has to change and this isn't a

8:03 new thing I think I think there's a journey from being external resource that you can Outsource production to not

8:09 really a thing anymore I think now there's much more of a space for consultative expertise and there's a few

8:14 things agencies can definitely do there which definitely isn't dead and will continue to be not dead which is

8:20 understand the kind of things the kind of problems that Google is looking to Sol its users so people working inside

8:26 businesses and in-house don't have the breadth of experience and visibility that people in agencies have to see okay

8:31 here are the trends here are the patterns here's the kinds of challenges that we see here's what we think Google's looking for here's what we

8:36 should do and then the other thing that agencies do nicely and will continue to is breed Talent they are wear super

8:42 smart people cut their teeth get their first jobs start thinking differently so you can think outside the box you can do

8:48 things that maybe your slower more established competitors can't so there's definitely a welfare agencies but it's not going to be quantifying deliverables

8:56 per month there's no I don't think there's a well for agencies where clients say make us 20 blog posts a

9:02 month or get 100 links whatever those are because those things are quite a way away from those that inherent core value

9:08 proposition which is what Google's looking to there so yeah it gets harder to be a commodity agency but as a skill

9:15 as a trusted partner as a set of expertise yeah there's definitely a future so right so it just you just need

9:22 to differentiate yourself not just being a commodity out there right yeah definitely right right all right so

9:29 let's jump into something which is favorite to you and of course we are excited to have more knowledge on

Technical SEO fundamentals

9:38 technical so right you you've been known for your technical SE expertise now what

9:43 are some of the most overlooked technical SEO fundamentals that uh businesses Miss and why are they so

9:50 crucial I think a lot of businesses don't look at their websites and think about them in terms of URLs they think

9:56 about pages and products and blog post that makes complete sense because that's how companies are organized and look at

10:02 these things but Google and Bing Etc just see a bunch of URLs and when you take a step back and you say actually

10:09 have we really critically evaluated every single one of these URLs and said should this be indexable should it be

10:16 callable where should it canonicalize to should it redirect is it inherently good and useful and when you start asking

10:22 those questions you see very quickly things like I don't know um this Blog has a whole bunch of tag pages that

10:29 quite similar that have two blog posts in them that don't really add value okay so these probably shouldn't be indexed

10:34 or you see um okay there's a article from 2008 about some special offer that

10:40 ran that obviously has now expired why is this still inex and many many websites and Fs don't apply that level

10:47 of attention to detail say for every single URL on this domain is it good should we keep it should we get rid how

10:53 are we managing this and that's super important because increasingly those bad URLs or those scale PES all those poor

11:00 poor experiences now impact all the good ones and that's not just about po budget it's about Google looking at that whole

11:06 set of URLs and saying yeah you've got a few really good product pages look there's a thousand RSS feeds and empty

11:12 tag pages and other bits of garbage and users who land on those and see them have a bad experience and that impacts

11:18 not just SEO directly but all sorts of other things like their propensity to like and share and tweet and whatever else yeah really paying attention to

11:25 detail for every URL is is the big thing that makes the difference so so of course you you've seen a lot of

Common technical SEO mistakes

11:32 companies making common technical Su mistakes some of them you listed so what are some of the more frequent errors you

11:38 encounter and how they can be avoided um I see Lads of people just who

11:43 have lots of broken links for example and that's a Content governance thing like over time change and internal

11:49 structures change and Pages get deleted then also the external places you link to their websites change and get deleted

11:56 I think not enough companies or agencies take the resource to say we will continually review all of this content

12:02 and make sure it's still up to date that all these links still work that everything makes sense that if we're deleting stuff that we've got a strategy

12:09 for where we redirect stuff to and just not allowing websites to fall into that kind of state of disrepair I think um

12:16 yeah lots of people don't do that attention to detail okay yes I agree to that I mean a

12:23 lot of people just ignore I've seen lot of sites getting redesigned and forgetting the basics yeah pages are

12:30 lost the URLs are lost and then they they come back after some month and blame it on the Su yeah and they're

12:36 constantly having to start again and build up that lost equity for sure yeah when you do this right it just goes over time but so many people yeah they miss

12:44 right right right now now for a larger website crawl budget is a major concern could you explain how business can

Understanding crawl budget

12:50 optimize their crawl budget effectively and of course for the listeners who do for whom craw budget look like a an

12:59 words so if you can explain is so the good news is most sites won't need to worry about this but if you've got a

13:05 huge site that has millions of URLs then at some point it's something you might want to think about so this is an

13:13 oversimplification but the general principle is Google lobing Etc are only

13:18 going to spend so much time and energy looking at your website and the bigger

13:24 the brand you are and the more wellknown and popular you are the more energy they might spend but if you've got 30

13:29 trillion Pages they're probably not going to get some more and actually even some kind of mediumsized sites might

13:35 want to think about this because if you haven't done that kind of housekeeping and attention to detail it might turn out that I know say you're an e-commerce

13:42 site and you've got categories and filters so I've got t-shirts in red and blue and green and pink and yellow and

13:48 each of those is available in large and medium and small and extra large and each of them is available in the different cut Etc suddenly that one

13:54 t-shirt is 200 URLs and if I've got a th000 t-shirts Each of which is 200 URLs

13:59 you're expecting a lot from Google to say visit every single one of these and then evaluate it and then maybe

14:05 canonicalize it maybe yada yada y so really what you need to be doing it's the same answer is look at every single

14:11 URL on your site not only is this good or bad should it be no index Etc but should Google be calling it at all and

14:17 should they be able to find it and should it be public do we need to block access to this

14:22 now again you only really need to worry about this if you've got a huge number of viewer bells and looking at places

14:28 like um Google search consoles call data report it's buried in the settings section somewhere might be quite a good

14:35 indicator as to whether or not you need to care about this you can get statistics on how many URLs are they requesting of what type and are there

14:41 any problems the other part of this is they're not just looking at the number of URLs it's about the resource they're

14:47 expending so page speed becomes really important because if you've got a million pages and all of them are 100

14:52 megabyte images and full of JavaScript Google's got a lot less Firepower to go through all of those so shaving off

14:59 kilobytes and making Pages faster and zipping things and removing overheads can help as well even if you got a lot

15:05 of pages making them more streamlined can mean Google gets some more of them yeah it's about making it as easy as possible to encourage Google to not get

15:12 lost and waste time in the depths of URL so it doesn't me so so you mentioned Pages having uh

Handling multiple URLs

15:19 just like a t-shirt small size medium size large size so so when I mean this

15:24 is common e-commerce sites issues when they have same product but different urls unique different URLs for sizes or for

15:32 colors so what what is your best what is your recommendations when somebody has these type of pages do they canonicalize

15:39 do they block the other URLs or other product pages what what is your recommendation it's super interesting

15:45 because that's going to depend on the business and its priorities in the market so t-shirts are a really good

15:51 example because there's definitely search volume and user intent for different colors and different sizes so

15:58 you really do all want all of those index but maybe not every combination so I don't know how many people are

16:04 searching for large red crew cut t-shirts there's definitely search volume for red definitely search volume

16:09 for large so you going to do the research and evaluate how how deep and how specific does it make sense to go

16:14 and can we make that page super useful super valuable have content describing

16:19 all of it in a way that's useful to users can't do that for a million Pages that's quite hard so you could decide where that line is and then you say okay

16:26 we index color we index size but we canonicalize in a color plus size and we

16:32 don't want Google calling anything that's got five different parameters so yeah I would start start working out

16:37 where that line is based on the combination of where is there opportunity and what can you resource and if you can't write a million great

16:43 pages I don't know who can then maybe start with 10 maybe start with 100 work out that overlap okay so so that means uh block

16:51 other Pages till then or keep them canonicalized what should be the solution canonicalizing is interesting

16:57 because if the pages aren't the same then you probably shouldn't canonicalize them and a red t-shirt isn't necessarily the same as a blue t-shirt so again it's

17:04 going to depend some some versions are going to be this like deliver a toggle that filters on delivery information

17:09 shipping information it's probably the same products and they probably the same page but colors definitely aren't so again it's going to depend on can you

17:16 make a a genuinely useful page here that's going to meet the needs of the audience if you can't then yeah maybe you can uniz it to something similar the

17:22 same maybe you redirect it or you don't redirect if you want it open but maybe you block it entirely depending on the filters it's going to depend on your

17:29 architect as well but essentially manage it and do the same kind of decision- making you'd make for any other content

17:34 is this good should it be index should it be quable should it be canonicalized it's no different to any other type of page or URL or blog post whatever pages

17:41 of pages right right right now of course what you explained many agencies for

Explaining technical SEO to clients

17:47 that matter say struggles explaining technical su2 clients because of course

17:53 half of the customers I mean will not Implement anything Technical and then they say where are my ranking yeah yeah

17:59 all the time all the time I had a call today with a client and that's what he says where am I ranking I said you have

18:05 not implemented anything given you to do this in the second caution game then

18:11 what am I paying you for yeah yep it I think Technic classo is super tricky in that regard because um I try when I talk

18:19 about it I use the word quality because it increasingly it feels like like so close to what it is so much of technical SEO is just web standards it's like

18:26 build a good website so things like sorry go on go so things like redirect

18:33 they're they're an SEO thing because seos care about them but there are there a normal fundamental part of how websites work and you go back as far as

18:40 the very Genesis of the internet there are ideas that when pages are deleted they should probably redirect somewhere

18:45 you look at things like um alt attributes for images yes there something SEO cares about they're a huge part of accessibility in and making sure

18:52 that people who um have alternate ways of accessing page content can still consume your information so much of

18:58 techn CIO is just web standards and when you start to you look at it that way then you start to get some really nice

19:04 analogies because you can say it's not really different from thinking about a brick and mortar store if I walk into a

19:09 shop on the High Street and there's a leaking pipe and it's really hard to climb over stuff and the signs all point

19:15 to dead ends and the there's nobody I can find to help me and the steiling is broken in places and there are Holes in

19:22 the Floor all these other things this is analogist to technical as here and website quy the challenge that of

19:27 getting stuff done is is that it's not that Visual and tangible in the way that is in the real world and most websites

19:34 have built on the premise of what's the most we can get as quickly and cheaply as possible and if people don't see these pain points and experience them

19:41 then they're not incentivized to really do anything that that's why we have the same problem with accessibility with usability with security with performance

19:47 all of these things are just symptoms of not having built something that's very good so the the one trick I use that I

19:54 think is the only way you can fix this is make them feel the pain is show them

19:59 what those interactions for users look like um run surveys find people who will say this was confusing I didn't like

20:06 this I was annoyed trying to use this checkout and then get them to use it get them to navigate around the site then

20:12 when it takes six seconds for the page to load and the image is broken and they end up on a four four page I go oh

20:18 that's not very good you yeah that's not very good here's the thing on the checklist I sent where we need to fix this yeah you've got to make it hurt you

20:24 got to make it as real as uh as issues in a real life store would be they've got to feel it and understand it that

20:31 way and that's quite alien for most people so so uh for example a lot of

Overcoming developer challenges

20:36 site these days are built on the react framework where of course theing is a

20:41 bigger problem and uh when you talk to the developer they refus to first of all

20:47 acknowledge it they said that this is not a ranking Factor then you go ahead and show them Google cash blank this is

20:54 what Google is caching and then they come up and say that's not possible so how do you overcome these type of things

21:00 when when the the the marketing team gets involved and the developer gets involved so how do you resolve these I'm

21:07 sure you must be getting lot of these yeah all the time so many of the sites I look at have exactly that symptom they

21:12 were built by somebody who didn't know what they didn't know and they've used whatever today's fancy JavaScript

21:17 framework is and it looks sleek but it takes 20 seconds to load Google can't see any of it and it's super unintuitive

21:24 and broken in a thousand ways it's really really hard to go to war with Developers in those kinds of situations

21:29 cuz you're you're saying that their child is ugly you're saying that the thing that they've just spent a year

21:35 working on is wrong and you're saying do it my way when that's going to be more working than all all of this is

21:40 inherently competitive and goes badly I think you need to talk to the gr you need to talk to the CEO or the VPS or or

21:47 the whoever's in charge and say okay look we have we have a technology problem we have an accessibility problem

21:52 we're not going to be able to piix this over night because it's going to be a huge amount of work to undo everything that's been done but we need to be grown-ups about this

21:59 I think there are so many businesses where those developers essentially end up in charge because they hold all the power and get to decide what gets done

22:05 and what doesn't you can't win with that so you need to find the adults and say actually we need to have budget we need to have resource we need to prioritize

22:11 and then they can say down to the development people okay this is our priority we're going to spend so much

22:17 time in doing this you have to listen to the SEO agency because it's important for our Revenue Etc you can't win that

22:23 fight directly you just end up making enemies so much of your advice says okay try and make friends with them try and bribe them buy them beers buy them cake

22:30 and that can work for tactical things you can then get tickets prioritized but it doesn't scale and it never mean it

22:36 means you never really get to address those kind of architectural level issues so yeah go over their heads get buying

22:42 from the the CMO that there's the stuff that needs is hard as well but it's less hard than spending a year Buton Heder

22:48 developers right right right now now of course with the rise of AI generated

AI's impact on technical SEO

22:54 content how do you think technical Su will evolve to ensure content quity and relevance or it's they or they are not

23:02 connected I think they might be connected a little bit I think one of the things that Google and the other search engines are going to have to do

23:08 is get much better at deciding what they call and index based on quality levels

23:14 and whether something looks like it's garbage or not we already see this happening we see a lot of conversation in Twitter and threads and Facebook and

23:20 places with people who have kind of large scale sites where maybe once upon a time they were doing article marketing

23:28 scale and now they're using more and more AI to go faster and bigger and they are saying Google's not indexing my

23:34 content my I must have some kind of technical issue I've got problems with the full budget they're only indexing

23:40 10% of my articles I suspect what's happening is Google are making better technical decisions on what does good

23:46 look like and that threshold is rising and if that's the case then technical SEO becomes maybe more important because

23:53 it's one of the ways that you might manipulate core budget right we said earlier you can go faster you can make your page more efficient you can man

23:59 maximize your internal linking maybe having a better technical site mitigates some of that a little bit so that's one

24:04 angle I think maybe there's some some other stuff as well which I'll sure we come on to but the role of things like structured data gets more and more

24:10 important I think um increasingly our websites will need to cater not just to

24:16 human visitors but to Bots and systems and to act like databases of information so at the moment most of our audience

24:22 are people who come and they look and they see red t-shirt large half of our audience are Rob who

24:28 also need to come and understand that explicitly and Technical SEO and structured data and schema and web

24:34 performance are all going to tie into how we convey that messaging so yeah even even in a world where we're generating all our content with AI or we

24:42 using it in workflows and we're Auto creating media and stuff I think having a robust website framework and making

24:49 sure your platform can handle all of that do it well is still going to be super important okay let let's talk more about

Balancing AI and human content

24:55 Ai and content I mean of course AI a major Topic in SEO and of course with content marketing uh in your view how

25:02 should business balances the use of AI with human elements in SEO and content

25:07 creation um I think most content Creation in SEO at the moment is

25:13 probably not great like a lot of it is just here's a list of keywords produce some articles and we've all got very

25:18 excited because with AI we can do that faster and we can do it more cheaply and more efficiently um and we can remove

25:24 the need for humans to be overseeing it right I think that's the wrong direction you look at where Google's going you

25:29 look at the rise of their demand for quality and authorship and all the eat stuff I think you really want a human in

25:36 the driving seat and where the best content can definitely be expert humans

25:42 using AI systems so where AI can be really good I think there's two key areas one is summarizing so if I've got

25:51 I know I'm an expert in donut and I want to create a great piece

25:57 of content about there's a research process that goes into that where I want to go and read

26:03 the hundred best things that have ever been written I want to go read about the guy who invented donuts on Wikipedia I want to go and spend hours and hours

26:09 consuming all this information and then I want to boil all that down to some key points and some interesting ideas that

26:15 AI can be really good at feed it huge amounts of information and say here are some ideas here's some stuff I'm looking

26:21 to find find some unexpected correlations with the weather in Germany tell me how it affected the stock market

26:28 these kinds of things to get get to interesting information quickly that as an expert in the pilot seat using AI to

26:34 go what about this what happens if I merge it with this data set um what about only on Tuesday like that's really

26:40 powerful you do that the other half is then expanding back out and going okay now I want to explore these points what

26:47 haven't I thought about is this point interesting is this does this make sense have I made sure that I'm catering to

26:53 the right kind of audience and really using it as a kind of sense check and an editor I think that's really powerful as

26:59 well so they crunch stuff down and then help me build it back up in a way that's good I don't think there's much room for

27:05 just generating a 500w article about this keyword because everyone can do that and your competitors can do that

27:11 and they already are and they can do a thousand a day and as we've said Google are already getting better and better at spotting that and ignoring it so yeah

27:18 there's there's a really nice role for experts using it to go faster and better but I don't think scale production is

27:24 the answer to any of the problems we have but can you can you use for improving content creation or is that

AI in content creation

27:30 also not a fair use case yeah definitely but I think not just the conventional get me a list of keywords write an

27:36 article I think you can go you can use it as a muse to explore and balance ideas you can go I don't know what to

27:42 write next here are some vague ideas I've gotten some bullet points help me help me extract a story from these and I

27:48 do this quite often I do I write a newsletter for um a company called cyrix and every month I have to do a think

27:53 piece and I'll sit down for a bit and I'll come up with a few vague ideas and I'll have some bullet points that are maybe connected and I'll start to come

28:00 together then I put it in chat GPT or cord and I say okay here is the Genesis of an idea I'm not sure it's good I'm

28:06 not sure it's interesting I don't think that this bit doesn't flow can you help me turn this into something and what it

28:12 helps me get to is then okay now I have something that's 90% of the way that's still my ideas still original I'm going

28:18 to rewrite the stuff it writes because it reads like it was written by a robot but it will help me Stitch that thing

28:24 together and it overcomes that fear of a blank canvas and that I don't know know what where to start and what to do

28:30 that's really helpful definitely definitely definitely so what what are your favorite uh tools for

28:36 this AI creation not exactly creation but for bouncing these ideas what are your favorite you I really like GPT yeah

28:44 I've played with a few others and there's person cons to all of them I think chat gpt's latest one is it GPT 40

28:50 mini really nice for this sort of thing partially because of the speed I can think in real time and explore and

28:56 bounce ideas back with and forth with it I can say no that looks too formal that's gone in the wrong direction I don't agree with this point what if and

29:03 yeah the the flow is really nice just for kind of it's like you're talking to an expert but you do it really really quickly really nice so it's it's funny

29:11 when you compare it to Germany Germany sometimes goes so way off REM you know

29:16 it reminds me the time when you would search anything on Yahoo or Microsoft

29:22 and the the kind of result they give compared to Google now it's completely the opposite so looks like the Bing of

29:29 yesterday and chat GB looks like a y definitely definitely what a weird

29:35 time yes so let's talk a little bit about structure data and sight speed of

Marketing with structured data

29:40 course I was going through your earlier videos as well now an interesting

29:46 concept you have discussed in the past is the idea of marketing to machines with structure data so could you explain

29:52 what this mean and why structured data is becoming so vital in Su today yeah definitely I can try um I think a lot of

30:01 marketing is about managing and crafting and controlling a narrative like the job of marketing is to manage how well some

30:08 Discovery but also to manage how people perceive and understand my thing and to convey that in the way that I want to I

30:15 want to control how people feel about my brand and my messaging and my content so half of you half the people half the

30:20 people visiting your website aren't people at all their robots their B their Google their my smart light bulbs

30:26 whatever these things increasingly also need to understand my content and they are scraping and extracting and guessing

30:34 in a lot of cases right so a lot of these systems are pulling out bits of content and data and going okay this is

30:40 a product page this is the price but they're getting bits wrong it's not completely reliable it's hard to do that scale

30:46 infinitely Google and Bing and others increasingly are using this kind of data

30:53 to power Rich results in their search results so things like star ings in products in price comparisons in

31:00 carousels of information in calorie counts and recipes in a 100 other places these widgets are powered by data that

31:07 we put on our web pages in order for them to do that reliably which is super important for them right they don't want

31:12 to show a wrong product they don't want to show a wrong price they want to get this right um in order to do that we

31:18 need to be explicit in in the data we're giving them so we use schema.org which is a language a syntax a way of

31:24 describing things and their properties and we put that code in our web pages to say this is an article written by Jon o

31:32 about Donuts published on this date that talks about that brand that has this

31:38 donor that's on offer for this price makes sense and Google can then evaluate that and say okay we understand all of

31:44 the entities that you've just described we know what they are and where they live we understand the relationship between them we're not saying that this

31:50 page jonno is a Donuts we're not saying that Jon is selling that donut we're saying that Jon has written an article about a company that sells it

31:57 understanding those relationships is really key because they need to understand that in order to then run Google merchant center Show excellent

32:03 map result all those other things so this stuff is really important and there's been some interesting discussion

32:09 I know off the Record inside Google off the record record unofficially inside Google for a bit about whether AI can

32:14 just replace all of this and whether it can be smart enough to just extract the right information from the page and the answer seems to be no like AI can do a

32:22 really good job of saying this is a page about Donuts but what it's always going to lack is precision it's never going to completely get write this is an article

32:29 about donut by joh all those relationships in that Nuance so Google still rely on us putting that

32:34 explanation into our code into our content um and every month that goes by

32:39 we see more and more of this stuff coming out and evolving there's been a whole bunch of new stuff recently in

32:45 describing complex product relationships like the T-shirt stuff we described earlier this is a t-shirt that has these

32:50 siblings and variant and brothers and sisters and variants Etc and this one's on offer but this one's not and this one

32:56 has a different shipping time con conveying all of that to Google is super important now e-commerce particularly

33:02 because I'm sure everyone has seen this kind of gradual trend of Google merchant center gradually creeping into Google's

33:08 organic search results right Google looks more and more like Amazon it's lists of products and comparisons that

33:14 stup is being scraped increasingly from your web page and Google are reading the schem in that as our Facebook in

33:20 Facebook Marketplace doing the same thing when they're scraping and visiting your pages they're extracting the structure data in the schema markup and

33:26 using that to represent your product your content your blog post your recipes your videos whatever else so this stuff is hugely important um and not a lot of

33:33 people are doing it particularly well they're getting the basics right but they're not really describing all that nuan in relationship so there's still

33:40 opportunity here if you've got big competitors who aren't doing a great job yeah you can definitely do better okay so so for companies that are

Implementing structured data

33:48 just beginning with structured data what are some simple yet effective ways to implement it and what immediate results

33:55 can they expect of course what are the schemas they must have as well sure so

34:00 if you're on WordPress I would look at one of the big WordPress plugins like yo or if not a rank math or an all one or

34:06 the others they all have a kind of basic Foundation of schema and I know because they copied mine um that's the story for

34:11 another day now I would say one of the things that people Overlook is if we're dealing if we're talking about the

34:17 context of websites and web pages which we presumably are most sites can benefit immediately from implementing a network

34:23 of an organization schema that says here is the name of my company here is the link to my logo here is our um policy

34:31 Pages here's our phone number here's our email address Etc but then also a node about the website and there quite often

34:37 a difference right sometimes it'll be the same thing but sometimes the organization who runs the website is slightly different so you want to say

34:43 here's where this is here's what that is and then the web page that you're on and the relationship between those three

34:48 things is really powerful you can say this is a web page about cats on a website by jonos cat company which is an

34:55 organization that has its headquarters over here and here's its logo and doing that just across your whole website super powerful and then it's

35:01 very easy to go and add other things like this is an article with an author here's my author page here's information

35:06 about the person and their expertise and their qualifications and here's a link to their threads and Twitter profiles

35:12 Etc joining all of that up onto that initial structure is pretty easy so you i' start there um a tool that people

35:19 don't know about enough classy schema.org um is made by an Australian SEO called Tony mccre it's a friend

35:25 really nice way of visualizing all of this one of the challenges with schema is it's dense code right it's lots of

35:31 JavaScript DJ markup it's hard to look at and see and understand CL schema.org gives you a nice way where it visualizes

35:37 it as a graph diagram so you get nodes and the lines between them and you can see the relationships really good for

35:42 plugging errors yeah really excellent what was the URL again schema.org I will share that there so

35:49 you can pick that up afterwards but yeah okay so can you spell that for c l

35:55 a SS y s c ma.org classy schema and

36:02 there's a visualization page on there which is really nice okay what I'll do it I'll I'll I'll put this URL in the

36:09 description of the podcast and video as well for our audience in terms of immediate results um that should I would

36:15 use that and the rich results test from Google and it will tell you what you're eligible for whether you can get rich results for rest of these articles

36:21 videos Etc you might not get them immediately like being eligible isn't the same as getting them but um yeah unlock that potential

36:28 okay right now with search algorithm evolving how do you think the role of structure data will change in the next

Future of structured data

36:34 few years I know you said cannot AI cannot replace but is there any way any other way the the structure data will

36:42 change or evolve I think we'll just see more we're still seeing Google quite regularly adding support for more types

36:49 but also updating their documentation and refining it last week they changed a whole bunch of the wording around some of the organization markup so they're

36:56 still very much using this seeing it as alive I think that doesn't change and I think as as the web continues to change

37:02 and evolve and fills up with garbage AI content this might be one of the ways that we start to differentiate because

37:08 um so much of West scho is really powerful is things like describing an author of an article and their

37:14 reputation and expertise and so much of the AI stuff won't have that won't rely on it or they'll lie about it and it' be

37:19 obvious it' be wrong so I think um doubling down on schema as a framework for saying hi we're real we're authentic

37:26 we have expertise um this isn't just a blog post this is a research piece by

37:31 this expert over here who works with this company who's got all this credibility I think um yeah the people doing good SEO and good content this is

37:38 only going to get more important as Google and others use it in part to validate okay this is legitimate it's

37:44 real it's valuable maybe I might be very wrong it might all go away we might just automate it but we see okay okay now let's talk

Importance of site speed

37:52 about sight speed how important do you think site speed is for

37:58 I think it's hugely important I don't think it's a huge ranking factor and I I I agree with all the people who say this

38:04 doesn't move the needle on rankings and if it does it only does in what's the terminology use Google like extremely

38:10 edge cases and when you're um competing in the margins against other sites I think that means people Overlook

38:17 two things one is all of SEO is competing in the margins right the top 10 websites in any given Nisha vertical

38:25 are going to be competing extremely aggressive they're all putting money and resource and budgets in and if you can get one small advantage in one place

38:32 that might be enough to win these gaps aren't necessarily huge or or maybe you need 10 small advantages but why would

38:38 you overlook one because it's small so there's a there's a mindset thing there where this is always important but I think more outside of that I think

38:44 speeding up your site does a whole bunch of secondary second tier effect things one is um it improves user experience as

38:52 a whole which we know is indirectly a ranking pror right all of Google's um extrapolation user Behavior Analysis all

38:59 of the stuff that the search quality guidelines look for all of the needs met analysis all of the eat stuff has an

39:04 aspect in it of did I get annoyed when I was using this thing and if your site is slow then you're annoying your users it

39:11 affects conversion rate which is revenue through the door which affects how much budget you get for SEO and then the

39:16 amount of budget you get for SEO determines how many people you can hire how much you can give to agencies how much content you can produce which

39:21 affects your rankings um the most significant thing I think it does is it forces you to critically evaluate

39:27 not own your website be your business so why is your website slow nobody says let's build a slow website so something

39:34 has gone wrong if your website is slow and it's maybe an education Gap maybe it's a resources Gap maybe it's a prioriti PRI prioritization Gap maybe

39:42 your CTO is just awful like maybe your developers don't know what they're doing maybe you've been prioritizing all of

39:47 these questions start to be really interesting because as you start to fix your site and make it fast you have to

39:52 answer them okay it turns out that we don't have enough developers it turns out that um we built this a year ago and

39:57 we never came back and we fixed the technical deck because we've been working on this silly project for the the CMO over here all of these things

40:03 come out the woodwork and then as you address those you fix those things you free up resource everyone becomes happier your website gets better you

40:10 start focusing in the right areas and it can have a profound effect on organizations so there's been companies where I've been brought in to do like

40:16 site speed Audits and speed up their site and we've done that but the actual impact has been they've reorganized

40:21 teams they've hired more people they've unlocked budget they've fixed Legacy Tech that they've moved platforms all of

40:27 these yeah speed unlocked power definitely really very cool now what are what are

Improving site speed

40:32 some of the tips for improving the speed of the website and what are some of your favorite tools for that what do people

40:38 get wrong so I guess the best is find slow things and make them faster or remove them um Google's chrome chrome

40:46 developer tools is really really good for this so on Windows machine you hit F12 I don't know what it is on a Mac but

40:51 you get into the inspector window and then there's a network Tab and if you reload the page you can get a waterfall

40:57 report of here are all the things loaded in what order and what were they how big were they and how long did it take and

41:03 you don't have to be a technical wizard to say it looks like that's an image it's a JPEG it was 6 megabytes and it

41:10 held everything else up and then there's there's your plan right we go and we say okay this image needs to be smaller and

41:16 it needs to not block all the other resources and so much of speed optimization is just spotting either

41:22 this thing is too big or this thing is holding up other things and you can do both of those as a non-developer um page

41:27 speed insights is also really nice obviously the kind of official page speed testing tool and that gives some good advice that covers this GT metrics

41:34 is a good blend of both so GT metric you get all of your cor vitals and pay speed Insight stuff but you also get the

41:40 waterfall charts and it will spot you nice stuff and then yeah um I would start by just looking at those waterfall

41:46 charts and saying we're loading a lot of things do we really need all of these those things are big and there's a few

41:52 other categories so we're loading things from other domains that's always inherently slow Google font is a really big a fan to here even though Google

41:58 fonts itself is really fast the act of your browser connecting to another host name is unavoidably slow so just looking

42:06 at those waterfall charts and saying big slow bad blocking and then going okay which of these is the worst thing let's

42:11 go and talk to the developers go in and try and fix and so often it's just compress this image move this JavaScript

42:18 why are we loading that we only need that on the contact page and this is the home page we don't need to load that at all why is this thing six megabytes most

42:24 of the actual diagnosis is easy okay so let's talk what are your

Site speed optimization for WordPress

42:30 favorite uh tools or Plugin when it comes to the speed for WordPress do you are you a fan of tools like Nitro I

42:36 really like Nitro Pac I know the team there really well I know they had an interesting reputation initially because

42:42 they were doing they got a load of bad press because they were I think quite cleverly deferring all JavaScript on the

42:48 page until you move your mouse which actually could in some cases many cases can be a really good user experience I

42:54 think it's super smart it's interesting whether or not right for businesses but yeah the stuff they do is really good Nitro pack really great also one of the

43:02 only drawback I think with Nitro pack is the pricing model is tied to the size of your website and the amount of traffic

43:08 you're getting which might yeah which might be worth it for many businesses and definitely is but depending on your

43:14 setup might be quite expensive so if that's not the right pitp rocket is also surprisingly good I know they they kind

43:20 of simplified their product a lot and taking away a lot of the customization and check boxes so it's kind of good for everyone out the box but it's still

43:26 really powerful um if you want something that's a little bit more Hands-On and a little bit more granular W3 TC W3 total cache um has a

43:35 thousand check boxes and you can spend days going through and say turn this bit on but turn this bit off and make this

43:40 one red and make this um you will break your website um but if you really want to finesse it then that's really good

43:46 you might not need either of those if you have decent hosting with um red installed I really like cloudways for

43:52 hosting nowadays um really nice really cheap really powerful especially for WordPress hosting and it comes with a bunch of performance and caching stuff

43:59 built in and lastly I guess if you've got enough money to spend serious money to invest in your website and it's worth

44:05 it for you um surve bolt do incredible hosting that's all really really Performance Tuned and lightning

44:10 lightning fast but not cheap but you pay for what you get with that sort of thing so yeah definitely either Nitro pack WP

44:16 rocket or w3tc and then some good hosting and that will solve most of your problems and uh do do you do speed

SEO strategies for Shopify

44:24 optimization for Shopify websites as well such a nightmare yeah but so much of the way Shopify works is quite deeply

44:30 baked there are some plugins that do some good work but so much of it is just that kind of is it big is it slow

44:36 resolution so things like adding lazy loading to images and stuff Shopify is hard to make truly fast in the way that

44:43 you can with WordPress but yeah you can definitely make it better than it it comes out the box but it's always going to be any any favorite or any

44:49 recommendations for plugin for a listeners day no I'm about a year out of date on that so I won't recommend any

44:54 but people yeah go to go to your own research I'm afraid been a while since I've touched on right right so uh let's talk a little

Challenges for SEO agencies

45:02 bit about agency strategies and client relations of course you've been a part of most of it as well so in your

45:09 experience what's the biggest challenge agencies faces when it comes to delivering SEO results for clients and

45:15 how can they overcome it I think getting a Shar definition of what results mean I think there's still expectations from

45:22 clients that they're going to hire an agency and then they're going to rank first to a bunch of keywords and as we've touched on so much of the work

45:28 required excuse me so much of the work required to do that is hard authentic

45:34 product Market fit stuff which is hard to do as an external agency or it's going to be a to-do list of actions that they're not going to not going to

45:40 implement so I think agreeing on what success looks like is the most important thing and that might be helping to

45:47 reduce technical debt it might be addressing errors and issues in Google search console it might be reducing

45:54 declining performance rather than ranking first everything overnight and getting some sensible agreements and

45:59 what that might be moving from position 40 to position 30 in the rank might be more sensible and achievable and then to

46:05 iterate from there and go a bit a bit at a time I see so many agencies still saying yeah we will um we'll get 20 20

46:13 links a month and we'll give you five blog posts a month and you're going to rank top three for these keywords in three months it's just not how it works

46:18 I mean that kind of commodified deliverable is never going to hit those targets and if it does it's certainly not going to sustain them so yeah I

46:25 think being a bit more mature about what looks like I think SEO as a channel is less and less close to the money now

46:32 it's hard to track performance it's hard to directly attribute complex Journeys Etc I think we're at the point where we need to start to think more of SEO as a

46:40 brand Channel where we influence consumers and audiences win hearts and minds and preference rather than how

46:46 many conversions did I get at the bottom of the funnel and that has a very different set of metrics and expectations and it comes much closer to

46:52 Conventional marketing and above the line stuff so yeah managing those expectations is

Structuring SEO teams in agencies

46:59 right so so how do you think agencies now should structure their Su team and uh processes to stay ahead in this of

47:06 course AI landscape so I think you don't need a a basement full of 50 link

47:12 Builders anymore I think that's not been the case for a while I think you want to be hiring smart talented people who are

47:20 on their way up who have experience in this evolving web right you want somebody who absolutely gets Tik Tok

47:26 somebody who's building an AI startup in their spare time on the weekends somebody who um codes python um for a

47:36 laugh you want people who are really in there doing clever stuff and you want to bring them together and say here are the

47:42 kinds of problems the client has how do we solve them you don't want prescriptive deliverables you don't want to be doing here is your monthly report

47:48 your have 10 keywords and your five articles you need to be thinking for this for this website for this brand for

47:53 this audience with this budget how do we help how do we try and convince Google that not even convince but how do we

48:00 show to Google that they are a great resource and a great result and that's going to be different in every single case and that's super hard for agencies

48:06 it's not how agencies work right agencies want to be going how do we systemize how do we build processes I don't think that works very well at all

48:12 anymore there is room to do a kind of hybrid thing with we sell expertise and ours and consultancy Etc but the really

48:18 good agencies are going to be problem solvers so are going to be parachuting in and saying we're going to use all of

48:23 this clever expertise we have and all of our bread of exp expert we've worked with 10 other bakery companies or we've

48:29 worked with 100 other car insurance companies we understand this sector and we can see this Gap and this opportunity

48:34 and here's the clever thing that we're going to work with you do and maybe you do that um from inside the company right

48:40 maybe you send some of your team to work two days a week inside that organization so that they can talk to the customer

48:46 service people so they can understand the product so that they can find out where the CEO all these things and then you can start to really make a

48:52 difference in a way that you can't if you just say here is your audit and of course nobody point it's hard really

48:59 hard right uh uh you work with of course various Brands and agencies what's the

Common agency mistakes

49:06 most common mistake you see agencies make in their SE strategies or client

49:11 communication I think um I think a lot of them sell in a big

49:16 dream and then don't always deliver it right they go uh the big pitch and

49:21 here's the the magic campaign we're going to run and here's all the great results we're going to get and

49:27 because of the challenges we've just kind of been through and how hard it is to do that means inevitably that relationship only ever lasts 18 months

49:34 and so you get a year in you've not really delivered the results your your contact is either frustrated and says

49:39 okay we're going to give you six months to turn it around or they've left or they've gone on maternity leave or somebody else has come in they've moved

49:45 on and the new person you have to improve you got six months to prove yourself of course you don't hit the targets because the targets were unrealistic the targets were

49:51 unreasonable so there's two things you can do there I think one is in the pitch process and in that in those initial

49:57 conversations take more ownership of what success looks like so you'll get an fp document or something that says

50:02 here are the metrics you want challenge that don't be afraid to say actually we think we've got a better idea of what

50:08 good looks like what success can look like here's a more realistic set of expectations for your budget and resource and brand Etc we think this is

50:14 a better Direction and strategy and don't overcommit something that's impossible just to win the pitch and then also plan plan either for What on

50:23 earth you're going to do at the one year mark when it turns out that they've not implemented anything you said do that they're inevitably unhappy that the

50:28 person Etc anticipate that don't be surprised by it so have a plan for how you say okay you've done this before the

50:34 thing the thing that agencies will forget is that these businesses are often doing this for the first time or they're on this kind of training road

50:40 you can anticipate that at the end of the first year of course you're not going to have hit the metrics of course there's going to have been bottleneck of

50:45 course the developers are all and you can have a plan for that and you can resource for that you can have strategies for that you can work out

50:51 okay maybe we need to make sure that this person is kept happier maybe we need to ring print some resource for December so we can work twice as hard do

50:57 twice as much you can anticipate all of those problems yeah neither of those are great answers but they're definitely things you can do right right right now

Google's indexing approach

51:05 let's talk a little bit about the future of SEO I mean how do you see Google approach to indexing evolving and what

51:12 should business be doing now to prepare for these changes if they are coming any

51:17 sure I think um The Internet Is Now full or at least it will be imminently right because there are so many SEO agencies

51:23 and individuals just churning out billions of these AI generated articles so Google has to be pickier about what

51:29 they call and what they index and as we've touched on we already see this happening like their threshold for this is good enough gets higher and higher so

51:35 businesses need to be thinking what every page that we add to our website is this good enough to get indexed like if

51:40 the internet is full and if Google had to choose to drop another URL to Index this one is it going to meet that

51:46 professional is it adding distinct value to the internet as a whole I really like this concept right so the internet is a

51:52 resource in the library you think about the people who go to university right dissertations on new areas of knowledge

51:59 synthesize they research they create new resources that's how we need to think about web pages and even these blog

52:04 posts service Pages product pages need to be new resources there need to be more than just the same set of word suit

52:11 that your competitors have like no there is no value in article like I had an example in a conference talk recently

52:17 every dentist's website on the planet has a page that says eight tips to teeth whitening or five great ideas about col

52:24 they're all the same and Google doesn't want or need any of them and they don't add any value to the internet they're

52:31 not useful for users they're just three paragraphs of the same word soup turned and churned again I think we need to

52:36 stop doing that because they're never going to get indexed and if they are indexed now they're going to start dropping out so do less I think don't

52:42 aim to make a thousand pages that are average make 10 pages which are great

52:47 and that's hard because it's different processes and resourcing but the agencies can definitely help there as well so yeah there is

52:53 hope okay uh how do you envision the role of SE Specialists evolving within the agencies as Ai and machine learning

Evolving role of SEO specialists

53:01 becomes more prevalent in the marketing I know you said those Bas link Builders won't do of course but but how do you

53:08 otherwise see the roles evolving I think SCF for a while now has been one quite an increasingly broad one right we all

53:14 need to be um code experts we all need to be performance experts we're now also security and accessibility experts and

53:21 user experience experts and design all of this will get wider and wider because what we are advocating is quality in

53:28 structures and businesses that don't recognize that as a function so we will stretch and we'll stretch and we'll

53:33 stretch and we'll get thinner I think where AI tooling can help us with that is to fill in some of that that

53:39 knowledge Gap and expertise background if we're going to go in and recommend clients do things we're not Security

53:44 Experts to the same level that Security Experts are Security Experts but maybe we can find those intersects between

53:50 okay the thing I'm talking about from an SEO perspective and the thing that you need from an accessibility or you those

53:56 vend diagrams of where the insects things like chat GPT can be really good for saying what do I need to know what

54:01 don't I know that would be helpful can you see where this might be a risk so for example there's um there are many

54:06 scenarios where conversion rate optimization people will complain about SEO tactics we'll say we want some

54:11 content on the page here and they'll say that will harm conversion rate you go okay that's tough we'll have more of

54:16 those types of conversations and chat GPT can be you can line it up and anticipate it and say I I think that this person might have this objection or

54:24 we're going to recommend this strategy for SEO what do I need do to think about accessibility what are the risks where might this overlap that kind of tell me

54:30 what I don't know tell me what I need to know to do this really F really useful and we're only going to get

Advice for innovative SEO professionals

54:37 broader okay and uh what advice would you give to agency owners or SE

54:43 professional looking to stay Innovative and competitive in the industry I think

54:48 dabble I think do Stu I think spend less time um theorizing and researching and

54:54 wondering about whether this type of links better than that type of Link go and build stuff build stuff that's

55:00 authent authentically valuable find out work out what you're passionate about and what you're an expert in and publish

55:05 write um experiments see what works build a reputation build expertise build

55:11 knowledge again like so much of what we do is going to be quality across a Breck of disciplines a lot of that comes from

55:17 getting Hands-On a lot of my expertise in web development and usability and all these other areas is from having built

55:22 stuff and having got annoyed with the things I've built and then torn it down and rebuilt it built in a different way and then Having learned stuff along the

55:28 way and RIS and then okay also security is quite a big deal because I'm going to get hacked and today I need to go learn

55:34 about how servers work and now I'm an expert in email deliverability and and they just keep adding on those skill

55:40 sets and that's much easier to do when you have something tangible to play with so yeah get something on the Internet and grow it over time build something

55:47 you love so now very quickly we just about to wrap up uh we just got three minutes

Favorite SEO tools

55:52 so what are your favorite SEO tools which are not very common in the for

55:57 that's interesting um I'm a big fan of cyrix as a kind of rank tracking analysis platform German hasn't really

56:04 hit the market that's why really good and what else I mentioned classy schema for schema analysis that's really good

56:09 what else what else do I like what do I use what's in my toolbox let's have a look um I've recently started excuse me

56:15 using ker k. which is a Cod environment super cool really really cool um really

56:21 powerful for just you don't have to be a developer you can just describe what you want and say I want a progr or piece of

56:27 software that does these things I want a Chrome extension that does these things I have this problem with whatever and it

56:32 just goes here's your piles here's your code which means non-developers can solve problems really easily other stuff

56:37 I like site bulb is really good as an alternative to screaming frog sure people come across that that's pretty awesome and that's probably about it I

56:44 don't use a lot of tools I spend a lot of time in Google's um in Chrome's developer tools so things like the network tab there we mentioned also the

56:51 sources Tab and applications tab performance tabing they're really powerful for saying how does this website work and what's it doing and

56:57 then you can pull that apart reverse engineer it make things better what's going on yeah you playing Chrome

57:02 Chrome's a good tool okay and are there any resources or tool you will recommend for agencies looking to level up their

Recommended resources for agencies

57:09 Su games besides these or these will be good enough I would go check out web.dev it's Google's sponsored kind of guide to

57:17 what does best practice for the web look like and a lot of it is quite technical but huge chunks of it are also about

57:22 just what is best practice look like but things like accessibility and image optimization and video and ux and other

57:29 areas and it's really good there's links out from there to all sorts of other things it's a good kind of curated knowledge hub for what does good look

57:36 like on the internet whether whether you built a react single page act monstrosity or whether you're using Wordpress or whatever yeah it's really

57:42 nice for going what don't we know about as far okay okay and uh any other useful

Staying updated in SEO industry

57:49 resources you uh like users to go to any go to resources where you keep yourself

57:55 updated in the Su industry I'm still bouncing between Twitter now X and threads it

58:01 feels like yeah I need to get off X eventually but there's not enough people on threads yet um I subscribed to a whole bunch of newsletters I'm sure it's

58:08 the Fairly common ones things like caders um there's a what's the marketing one I forgot what it's called um a bunch

58:15 of kind of marketing and teeken marketing newsletters which I'm just opening my inbox and I can find very quickly maybe growth memo Kevin indig is

58:22 really good um few others yeah and going

58:27 to oh um tldr marketing tldr web dev they're a really good series see I spend

58:32 a chunk of time every morning just reading through my inbox cherry picking articles and stuff again like so much of

58:38 what we do is so Bor that it's worth subscribing to a few of those tldr newsletters and then you pick out all the latest information on what's

58:44 Happening they're really good okay okay that's interesting and uh Jon this has

58:50 been an incredible conversation uh before we wrap up what final piece of

Final advice for businesses in SEO

58:55 advice would you give to business navigating the evolving landscape of su and digital marketing for now in the

59:01 2025 wow that's big question isn't it um go make things better don't be afraid of making a 100 small improvements I think

59:07 we get caught up so much in Grand strategy and Grand Vision and researching and worrying about who's going to think what about what tactics

59:14 people very rarely go that's a broken link I'll fix that or that image is a bit big that's make it smaller or that

59:20 font's a bit weird like go in and make those changes and make them tomorrow and the next day and the next day that's how

59:25 you win like so much of SEO is just incremental improvements that then make your website better than your

59:30 competitors do that don't be afraid to iterate incrementally absolutely right and thank

Where to Find Jono Alderson Online

59:36 you so much for your time and insight you know for our listeners who want to stay connected with you or dive deeper

59:41 into your work where can where can they thank you I'm at Jon wd.com orj Alderson

59:47 on X LinkedIn Facebook various other places Google me I should if I don't show up when you Google me I've not done

59:53 my job right so yeah by that but thank you so much this was okay thank you again jono and the thanks

Outro

59:59 to our listener for tuning in don't forget to subscribe to the agency Insider podcast show for more

1:00:04 conversations with marketing leaders until next time thank you thank you