If you’ve ever had to rebuild a WordPress website then you know that you can easily lose SEO rank. Here are four must-do steps when wanting to avoid an SEO disaster during a website rebuild. Kori Ashton shares tips like content audit, 301 redirects and permalink structure.
Full Transcript
Hey y’all, I’m Kori Ashton, and you have found a video on a YouTube channel dedicated to all things WordPress. Today, I want to specifically look at avoiding SEO disaster when you’re getting ready to rebuild your WordPress website.
What are the absolute best steps to take to prepare your website, your content, your strategy so that you lose no rank whatsoever with the new website? I’m gonna show you the steps right now.
Domain Name
So the absolute first thing I want you to do whenever you’re hoping to avoid that SEO disaster in that rebuild is think about, are we using the same domain name? So is it www.askkori.com? Or are you having to change that? That’s a big question mark, and it really, really has to be asked right up front. If you are able, and best practices would be, you are able to keep that same domain name. Are you then able to keep the same structure of URL path, or what WordPress calls the permalinks, right? You want to be certain that if your old website had maybe the category name in that path, you’re able to do that as well over here in the new site.
The more you’re able to align what each and every page was named, and what their links were, if you can mirror that over here on the new site, then you won’t have to mess with 301 redirects. If you’re not able to do that though, you need to have a strategy in place, because we need to start keeping track of which pages used to live here, but now they live on this link.
Google Analytics
So the second step is gonna be to check your analytics. This is where hopefully you’ve been monitoring Google Analytics. You’ve allowed Google to track your traffic on your website so that you have some data to reference. These are very important stats that you need to know so that you can basically say hey, our new website is doing even better.
So I want you to take note of your top landing pages, your top exit pages, what keywords are helping your website currently rank, and maybe now is the time to think about, gosh, there’s a bunch of keywords that are missing that I’d like to be ranking for. How do we adjust for that? Think about your top traffic sources. Are they coming from Facebook, are they coming from Pinterest, are they coming from Instagram, are they coming from somebody else’s blog or from my podcast links? Where are they coming from to our website, right? Average visitor time, average page visits, unique overall visits.
How many brand new people are coming every 30 days to your website? And basically the overall views. These are the top things I just want you to write down somewhere, take note of, ’cause this is basically our starting point to measure the success of our new site.
Content Audit
Hopefully, as well, some of the data that you can pull out of Google Analytics is to help you with the third step, which is a content audit. I really need you to look through your sitemap or, if you’re running Yoast, Yoast the plugin allows you to have an XML sitemap.
Go review every single one of your pages, every single one of your posts, and kind of measure them up to your Google Analytics. See what those top landing pages are. This is where you can see okay, I absolutely need to keep this content, it’s ranking really well. Oh gosh, this content needs to rank well, but it’s actually one of my high exit pages, so maybe you can start to consolidate or improve those pages, and then you’ll also start to see those pages that nobody ever visits.
It’s old content, it’s not relevant anymore in your industry or for your services, and you just don’t need it anymore, so perhaps now’s the time to eliminate that content. This is where you do it. Keep in mind though, that if you had pages that were ranking on any search engine for that matter, that link needs to be accounted for in this rebuild, and you do that by using 301 redirects.
I have other videos that explain that, I’ll put the links below for you to reference those videos.
Post Launch
Alright, and the fourth and final step is gonna be post-launch. So this is now, we’ve done of our due diligence, we’ve rebuilt the website. The client has approved, we’re excited, we’ve launched the new website, and now you need to go submit the sitemap to search engines through your webmaster tools. Go in there and be absolutely certain that it’s able to be crawled.
I want you to test the responsive design, actually pick up a cellphone and test it on those devices. Pick up an iPad, test it on those devices.
You also need to go do a speed test and be absolutely certain that this website is loading in fewer than three seconds, because you’re gonna frustrate your users if it’s not. There’s free resources online to do that, I’ll put the link below as well so you can go and use those resources to test your site.
You also want to go in and test all of your contact forms. Try to click on the phone numbers, be certain that everything’s clickable. Be certain that you’re getting the contact form submission. Anything that’s a call to action or your CTAs on your website. Be absolute certain that you can click by now and put in your credit card information and actually check out. So once it’s launched, walk through that process.
You also want to be sure that you connect all tracking codes. So be certain that your Google Analytics code is back in there. If you’re running a Facebook pixel, put that in there. If you’re running anything like a video monitoring service, like Hotjar, put that in there. Be absolutely certain that you’re able to track now the progression and the improvements on this brand new website.
Hey y’all, I know that was a lot to take in, but I’m gonna give you that infographic link below in the description box, so you can kind of use it as your checklist every time you launch a new WordPress website.
Infographic
Conclusion
I hope this helps you, and if you like content like this, be absolutely certain to click Subscribe, click the bell so that you can get notifications, because every week, I’m creating content just like this to help you improve your online marketing inside the world of WordPress. I have nearly 400 videos that live in this channel all for free for you to reference. Hey, and if you are a freelancer or an entrepreneur inside the world of WordPress.
PressTribe
If you are an agency owner, small agency, large agency, doesn’t matter, we have a great conversation happening right now inside an online slack channel called PressTribe. Come be a part of that conversation completely for free, I’ll put the link below. You’re gonna have an opportunity to engage with a network talking about business strategies, contracts, best practices when communicating with clients. There’s so much great resources, great conversation taking place. Come be a part of it,
I’ll see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Bye everyone.
You might have a list now of your keywords, but how do you apply your keywords to your content on your WordPress website? Rebecca helps us look at creating a content strategy so that you can apply your keywords across all of your content and know what content you need to develop. This video is a shorter clip from a longer webinar hosted by Kori Ashton from https://askkori.wpengine.com and special guest Rebecca Gill.
Hey y’all, you have found a video on a YouTube channel dedicated to all things WordPress and specifically this video is going to be a section of a webinar, a longer webinar, that I did with Rebecca Gill. In the WordPress industry she’s really looked at as one of the leaders in search engine optimization and in this short clip specifically, we’re looking at how to implement keywords into your content strategy.
Let’s jump into the video right now and catch this section.
Rebecca Gill Talks Keywords
[Rebecca Voiceover] We’ll use it. So what you do is you literally say okay, if I have 20 keyword phrases that are really important to me, where would these live on my website? Do I have an existing content for this? Yes, so let’s match them up.
Let’s create a roadmap for that and say these three keywords belong to this url. These three keywords belong to this url. Well now I’ve got four keywords and I’ve got no content for it whatsoever. But that helps create a plan, and you use this keyword association to url to match up what you currently have, find your gaps and then create an editorial plan of what you’re gonna continue to work on and create.
Now notice we haven’t created any content yet whatsoever, right? We’ve been doing research and planning, we’ve been setting the stage and building up our foundation for success. Once we have all of that, now we can go over to this execution phase where we write quality content. And we make sure our quality content has a solid outline and that outline aligns with the keyword phrases we’ve selected for this piece of content. We write our content for the human, right? You have to create it first for the human, then we use tools like the Yoast SEO Plugin to help us optimize it for search engines.
Kori Message
Pretty amazing right? If you’re ready now to go forward with how to actually do on-site SEO, it’s time to catch the full one hour webinar. I have that video totally for free right here on YouTube for you. I’m gonna put the link right here. And if this helps you all, please be sure to like, comment, and subscribe. See you next time.
How has Google Search changed over the years with its search ranking factors? If you’ve worked on SEO over the years you know that it’s grown more complex. Rebecca helps us identify how Google has changed. This video is a shorter clip from a longer webinar hosted by Kori Ashton from https://askkori.wpengine.com and special guest Rebecca Gill.
Full Transcript
Hey, y’all you have found a video on a YouTube channel dedicated to all things WordPress. And specifically, this video is going to be a section of a webinar, a longer webinar, that I did with Rebecca Gill. In the WordPress industry, she’s really looked at as one of the leaders in search engine optimization.
This particular section is all about what’s changed with Google’s algorithm. She highlights a lot of variations that have changed over the years. If you’ve been trying and trying and trying to grow your SEO in the last decade, what does it look like. This is about a 3 – 3.5 minute section from that longer 1-hour video. If you’d like to watch the full webinar I’ll put the link in the description box below. I’ll also put it up here and I’ll put it at the end of the video. Let’s jump into the video right now and catch this section.
How Google Has Changed by Rebecca Gill
[Rebecca] Okay, so in the old days SEO seemed so easy I started with SEO 15 years ago, sales and marketing 20 and it was like, you’ve heard about cowboys coding and that was us in the old days of SEO. I mean we did crazy stuff and magically you could just get to page one and rank.
But then things didn’t quite stick that way. But when we were there we could see page one we could get there. We had all of these dreams and we had all of these expectations, right. And we were given the keys to the castle and we could do really whatever we wanted to get to page one. And there was some crazy stuff that we did to get to page one. And it was really stinking easy back then to rank cause you just had to know a few of the basics.
Why was it easy? Well,
Desktop was the only search
People only searched for one keyword, maybe they searched for two but there was no more than that
We could rank with three hundred words and a piece of content
That whole, “not provided” and those Google reports didn’t exist
And when we actually saw on a report that we were ranked number one, we were actually number one
And like I said it was beautiful back then. Those were definitely the good days. But then life started to change, you know over the last, really I would tell you five, six years things have shifted.
I’ve run my agency for nine years and when I started with the agency SEO was still pretty dang easy. The economy wasn’t, but SEO was. And then things started to shift.
The technology and the algorithm that Google used became much more complex, Google continues to make updates, They’re updating the algorithm daily actually. They do make major changes a couple times a year but they do daily tweaks and that’s kind of hard to keep up with.
They started giving out penalties, that stinking knowledge graph came where it takes over the page one search results.
Voice search came out and people started to really shift the way that they’re using search.
Mobile indexing started, that just really hit and Google’s moving the way it indexes websites from the desktop versions over to the mobile version.
And then, finally, in just the last few weeks Google started rolling out a “not secure” warning in Chrome.
That’s a lot of changes and it can make people really feel overwhelmed with SEO. It can make you feel like you’re chasing that green dot and the Yoast SEO plugin that you’re not making any progress, that you don’t have any control, and that your life might be stuck with Pay-Per-Click and Facebook Ads.
But, even with all of that and downward slide that you may feel like you’re in, I’m going to show you that there’s a lot of upside to it. Even though we have to deal with things like lack of data and a focus on those plugins and all those Penguins and Pandas and the knowledge graph and personalized search and now semantics search and malwares. I mean there’s just so much, right?
But don’t feel like you are spiraling down a hill and you do not have control of your destiny. Because I want to show you that you really do. I want you to know that you can have a success with SEO and you really can excel with it. And I always want to remind people that they can move mountains with SEO they can win at search and they can bring in lots of traffic. And not just traffic but really highly targeted traffic that really pertains to your website and who you want to serve.
Kori Message
Pretty amazing, right? If you’re ready now to go forward with how to actually do onsite SEO it’s time to catch the full one hour webinar. I have that video totally for free right here on YouTube for you. I’m going to put the link right here. I’ll put the links in the description box below and I will se y’all next time. Bye, y’all.
Can you actually spy on your competition? Can you see your competitor’s SEO keywords? Rebecca starts to explain how you can accomplish this not only – is it possible, she’ll share tools how you can do just that! This video is a shorter clip from a longer webinar hosted by Kori Ashton and special guest Rebecca Gill.
Full Transcript
Hey, y’all. You have found a video on a YouTube channel dedicated to all things WordPress and specifically, this video is going to be a section of a longer webinar that I did with Rebecca Gill. In the WordPress industry, she’s really looked at as one of the leaders in search engine optimization. And in this short clip, she’s giving us the tip of how to look at our competitors online and the importance of knowing what they’re up to. And in the longer webinar, she even reveals her tools that she uses to spy on them. Let’s jump into the video right now and catch this section.
[Rebecca] Once we start to have some information with existing history and data for you, then we start to look at your competitors. You can deep-dive your competitors from their top pages to bring in traffic or URLs or posts to the actual keywords they rank on, changes in their keyword history, where their most traffic comes into the site from, specific keywords, how competitive those keywords are; that information is now available to you on the web.
And it’s really important that you embrace that data because it can help you really make better decisions and better position yourself. And so I always like to have as part of that first research and investigation phase your competitors, and when I say competitors, I’m not talking about who you think your competitors are. That’s a great place to start, but you need to look at specific tools, and I’ll mention some later, that show you who’s your online competition ’cause a lot of times, that’s much different than who you actually think it is.
[Kori] Pretty amazing, right? If you’re ready now to go forward with how to actually do on-site SEO, it’s time to catch the full one-hour webinar. I have that video totally for free right here on YouTube for you. I’m gonna put the link right here. And if this helps you out, please be sure to like, comment, and subscribe. See ya next time.
What’s in and what’s out for websites in 2019? Kori Ashton shares 12 new trends for your WordPress website. By improving your website with these techniques your user can have a better experience and they can help with your ranking.
Hey y’all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday, my name is Kori Ashton. Today I’m gonna show you 12 different concepts that we’re seeing trending for 2019. Ways to improve your WordPress website, today, that can really have a high impact on great user experience, improving your security overall, and hopefully even conversion. Let’s take a look at all 12 different concepts.
Hey, remember if you like content like this, I’m creating videos like this every single Wednesday, so be sure to subscribe and check out my channel. I have over 300 videos living here now for you to see, all free for you to view and find really great tips on how to improve your WordPress website.
Video As Hero Scene
All right, so let’s get to number one. And that’s gonna be adding a new wow factor on your website because what you don’t wanna do is have an old, boring carousel, those are completely out.
These slideshows that you see happening in the homepage, hero scene here, are completely out, everybody’s moving toward video, and it doesn’t take much to create a really small, eight second, 10 seconds, B-roll clip, with no audio to sit in this hero scene section of your website, and really begin to have that wow factor as your customers or your clients log in your website, and check out a little bit of an experience brought to life of who your company is and what you’re capable of doing.
Edge-To-Edge Designs
Number two is going to be edge-to-edge design. No more are you seeing this boxed in design, this very quickly tells somebody that your website is out of date. What you wanna be showing now is this edge-to-edge, full-screen, beautiful view as folks are scrolling down.
No matter what size screen they’re on, right, we’re taking up all the beautiful space and really giving them an overwhelming and beautiful experience, down the page, as they’re scrolling, everything looks filled in. Now, you’re not, I mean you do have some white space, right, so you’re not afraid of white space, but what you wanna do is really embrace the full palette, the full screen, and let people see all of your beautiful content.
Social Media Feeds
Number three is gonna be let’s get social. I want you to start bringing over social media feeds. Instead of just having the icons on your website that then distracts people and have them click on that link and leave your website, I want them to be engaged here, on your website.
So you can easily and dynamically display your Instagram feed on your website. So the moment you upload something from your phone to your Instagram account, all of a sudden, it’s living here on your homepage, or in your gallery page, or wherever you like that gallery to be on your website.
Super important that you do something really cool like this, get creative. It could be a behind the scenes, it could be your latest cupcakes that you’ve done, the latest product that you’ve sold, the latest testimonial you received, whatever that looks like. I highly suggest that you do something like this, and then ask them to follow you on Instagram.
You can, of course, always have your social media links elsewhere, maybe down in your footer or up in your header, wherever you’d like to have them, but you definitely need to have your feed. I’m gonna challenge you to go figure out how to get your feed over here.
If you’re looking to do your Instagram feed, I have a video for how you do that in WordPress, I’ll put that in the link below.
Schema
All right, number four is gonna get us a little bit more technical, well, we’re going more advanced for search engine optimization. You have probably already done all of the basics, you’re using Yoast on your WordPress website and you have all those green lights, and you’re thinking to yourself, I have done a lot of work to get those green lights.
Now, what can I be doing next level for advanced SEO, to really help my website shine? And that, in 2019, is gonna be schema. This isn’t really a new concept but more and more folks are embracing it, and we’re starting to see Google give us extra credit, basically, and rank us higher when we are using something like this.
So, do a little bit of advanced search on Google Schema, or markup schema, I’ll give you a couple more links in the description box below if you wanna go and investigate this.
What you wanna be looking for is to use this if you’re running any type of events, any type of recipes, if you’re selling products on your website. There are all sorts of reasons, really, to be using this on images, anything like that that you’ve got going on on your website that you wanna have rank higher on search results, look at schema.
Accessibility Compliant
Number five, we’re, again, getting a little bit more technical. This is accessibility, this is a buzz word that’s happening in our industry right now as we’re realizing that more and more users who are engaging on our website might not be fully, physically capable, maybe visually capable, of seeing how we’ve coded a website.
So what we wanna do is be accessible for all. And be certain that everybody who wants to visit your website, who wants to engage on a form on your website, a fill-out, content, purchase a product, engage with you, that they’re able to do that. And it really does take a little bit of extra care to your code, and to the detail of how your website was coded, to accomplish that.
So be sure to check out WCAG guidelines and see if your website is compliant, there’s all sorts of checkers. Again, I’ll put more in the description box below so you can check these things out.
SSL
Now we’ve gotta get secure, you guys. The SSL that changed your website, if you see this up here in the top corner, it changes it from a HTTP to a HTTPS, adding an extra layer of security. Google has been looking for that for us for a few years now, they’re wondering why we haven’t already moved to that.
It doesn’t matter if you’re selling products or not anymore, they want you to be secure. So be sure to do that and, of course, if you watch my channel you know that free is always in the budget, unless encript.org allows you to have a free SSL.
So be sure to look at that, you’re hosting provider could also provide a free SSL for you.
Scroll Transitions
Number seven is going to be a really cool experience, where you can give your customers, or your visitors on your website, a little bit of a wow factor as they begin to engage and scroll down your website. So I want you to see this as we’re scrolling. See that the pieces kind of slide in, glide in, from the left and from the right? And this is what we call a lazy load, and it’s a little bit of animation, it’s not really extra hard scripting to do, and a lot of themes these days, inside of WordPress allow you to do a really cool transition as you scroll. So be sure to look for that, and that adds that, just that little extra wow factor, and keeps them scrolling down your page.
Phone Numbers Clickable
Number eight is gonna make absolutely certain that all of your call-to-action phone numbers are fully clickable. I have preached and preached and preached on this. You guys, if your mobile traffic is through the roof and you’ve got a lot of people coming on your website through their cell phones, they are probably trying to click to call you and if there’s not code sitting behind your phone numbers, or if your phone number is displayed in an image, that the smartphone cannot read that, and it won’t necessarily pick up that that’s a phone number, allowing the individual to just, simply, click and call you.
So you wanna be able to let that person, let that visitor quickly engage with you and not have to memorize or write down your phone number. So be certain to put in that extra little bit of code in there, behind those phone numbers, to allow people to click to call.
You wanna absolutely be certain that this is in place in your header or your footer, your contact page, wherever you have your phone number displayed. I’ve got another video on exactly what code you’re gonna need to implement in the description below.
Conversion Tracking
Now, number nine gets me so super excited because this is so creepy, Big Brother, cool as you are able to watch people experience your website. I wanna challenge you to add in some sort of conversion tracking, monitoring, video recording capability in your website.
You want to be able to see, right away, what users are struggling with on your website. Where are they clicking, where are they getting lost?
Google Analytics can tell you a lot, a heat map can tell you a lot, but there’s nothing like watching somebody come on your website, scroll through, try to click around, and struggle through your website. Or succeed through your website, right.
You wanna be able to be certain that all of your hard work in designing those landing pages, designing that homepage, the re-design of your website, all of these things are actually being effective, and you’re seeing the conversion happen.
You especially wanna do this if you’re not seeing a conversion on your website because this will very quickly highlight where the struggle is, where the customers are falling off.
Automation
Number 10 gets me very excited too because this one is all about working smarter, not harder. This is about automation. How can you improve your website’s actual dynamic capabilities? So, I’m gonna recommend Zapier, that’s this website that we’re viewing right now. They have a lot of integrations, specifically for WordPress, and you can just come up here at the top, search WordPress, and you’re gonna find this landing page.
It says that we have over 100 different integrations here as you scroll through. Very cool for you to think about, how can your website better automate? So maybe you want it to dynamically, as soon as you publish a post, that it displays on your Facebook page. With Zapier you can do that. You want it to Tweet for you, you can do that.
You want it, maybe if someone comes into your website and they submit a ticket or fill out a form, you want it to automatically appear in your Slack channel, you guys, the possibilities are endless. Zapier is an if this, then do that type of relationship builder, if this happens, then do that.
So check that out, look at that resource, and you can thank me later because it’s pretty amazing.
Google Optimizer
We are gaining momentum here as we’re hitting number 11. And this is gonna be really cool to implement more of dynamic content, like geo-targeting content. You can also very specifically, dynamically change content using Google Optimizer to allow you to change content as users are coming in, right.
So, notice that this would be considered, maybe a pop-up that’s happening on the website. Depending upon my IP address, it could say Texas and show me a different picture that relates specifically to my winter Texas gear, which would be hiking. Or if my IP address coming into your website was from Colorado, it can show skiers and talking about ski equipment being 15% of ski suits.
So, depending upon that, we could actually dynamically, instantly, change content to resonate more directly with that consumer coming in your website. This is really advanced and a lot of fun to do, and we can certainly help you here at WebTegrity if you’re struggling with it.
But I’m gonna challenge you to figure that out because this is next level stuff that’s really gonna improve, overall, that quick conversion, that quick sale, happening on your website.
Vlog
And number 12 is gonna be the start of vlog. So many of you have been doing blogs for quite a while, and you might be struggling with even thinking of what content to do for the New Year. Gosh, you’ve been doing a blog for year after year, after year. Well, let’s go next level, mix it up.
Maybe once a month you’re gonna do a vlog, a video blog like I do here. It doesn’t take expensive equipment, you can actually do it from your phone. Record yourself, get a little lapel mic that plugs in immediately to the audio. You can get a selfie stick, walk around, it doesn’t take that much of an investment to make a really quick video. You can do things like recording your customers in-house, in your brick and mortar, as they’re excited and buying your product, or as they leave your veterinarian hospital and they’re excited that their dog feels better.
Take a quick video, let them brag on you. Put that on your website, either in your testimonial section or create a whole vlog about it. It’s a really cool opportunity to bring some cool life into your website and, hopefully, get a video that goes viral.
Conclusion
So, in conclusion, I really hope that this helps y’all. These are 12 different things that you could be doing today, researching today, to improve your overall website, and improve that user experience, and hopefully, at the end of the day, improve your conversion.
So, here’s the thing, I want to challenge you to come be a part of my monthly community here. If you like this type of content, if you’re a freelancer, if you’re trying to move to that agency level, if you’re a small agency trying to move to that mid-level agency size, I have some resources here for you and I’m gonna be doing this every single month, adding more and more, longer webinar type interviews from amazing people in our community.
As well as just moments where I have an epiphany and I wanna share something a little bit more advanced with you, I’m gonna be adding that content here, to this section. I’ll put a link to this in the description box below. It’s $7.99 a month, come be a part of this community, and I’ll be loading content in there every single month. I hope you’re having a great WordPress Wednesday. Subscribe because I’m doing free stuff too, every single week, see you next time, bye y’all.
Kori Ashton helps you interpret Google Analytics numbers to apply them to your WordPress website’s content strategy. This will improve your rank as well as user experience. This could even improve your conversion/sales.
Sponsored by: Pressable. WordPress Hosting & Support Use ASKKORI for a free 90-day trial!
Full Transcript
Hey y’all, my name is Kori Ashton, and so many of y’all have tweeted to me, DM’d me, emailed me and asked how do we interpret the information that Google Analytics is giving us, and use it to improve user experience on our website, and even our search engine optimization? What do we do with this, all these numbers, all these graphs, all these charts? How do we reapply them to our strategy? I’ll show you some tips today to hopefully help you do just that.
And of course, this is brought to you by Pressable.com. If you’re running a WordPress website, be sure to check them out, especially if you are looking for WordPress support. These guys are incredible, they’re award-winning, and they will answer your WordPress questions every time you are hosting with them. I’ll put a link below for 90 days money back guarantee with them. I highly recommend them.
Let’s go take a look at Google Analytics.
All right, y’all, your Google Analytics dashboard might look a little different from how I have mine set up, but the numbers are really what we wanna pay attention to, and specifically three different areas right over here:
Your audience, that is, who actually comes to your site and what is their demographic, where are they coming from, as in their location.
Acquisition, how did we get them to come to the website? These are really important things to know inside of all your digital marketing efforts.
And the behavior, what did they do once they were on your site? So, breaking these three things down, we’ll really be able to grab out some numbers and understand how to reapply them to our content strategy, our page improvement, our conversion improvement, right?
Google Analytics Home
Setting A Timeframe
Overview really quickly, staring at me right now, these numbers and kinda how to apply these immediate numbers. Obviously you can see your traffic. This is over the last seven days. You can toggle that and have it set to a custom, or maybe set to a 30 days, 28 day, whatever you like it to be. And you notice that seven day upswing. We’re having a pretty good upswing right now, so that’s encouraging.
Users Versus Sessions
So, you’ll wanna monitor your users versus sessions. Basically what that means is 154 people, users, came to this website in the last seven days 159 times, so we had a couple repeats. That’s kinda nice to see.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate means that they landed on a page and they clicked their back button immediately, they did not go anywhere into your website. Now, they could have already read your phone number, and dialed your phone number, and called you, so you converted them.
They could have looked at your address for your location, memorized that, or tapped on it and gone to a map, right? They could’ve done something where they left your website, and you could’ve converted them. But, for the most part, what Google wants to see is them engaging and staying on your site, so these last two numbers are very, very important. You want your bounce rate to be super low, you want your duration to be super high.
So, your bounce rate, in my opinion, a healthy bounce rate is in the 30 or less range, 30% or less, so this particular client could work on lowering that bounce rate a little bit more. You might see a higher number if you’re really aggressively doing some new marketing inside of social networks.
Session Duration
Session duration, you want that number to be super high. This means they stayed on your website a really long time. They were watching your videos, they were clicking on your pictures, they were clicking page, to page, to page, reading your articles. Very exciting to see that type of engagement. So, there are your goals there. We want a high number, a high number, a low number, and a high number.
When Visitors Visit Your Website
This is important to interpret as well, when do your visitors visit your website? When do your users come over? You’ll wanna monitor this for the days of the week, as well as the times. If you start to see a spike and you realize, gosh, on Thursdays, we’re seeing a lot of activity in that 2:00 range, then remember that and try to schedule some posts, either your blog posts can publish at that time, or maybe your social networks can be more active at that time, because your visitors are there, they’re ready to engage with you. It’s a really good opportunity and a moment that you can potentially be interacting with potential customers or loyal fans. Another number to look at is just below that here.
Acquiring Users
So, how do you acquire the users? Basically, how are they getting to your website? Is this organic search where they’re finding you just naturally by searching a keyword on Google, Yahoo, or Bing?
Are they coming direct because maybe your car wrap is visible or they have your business card, or your billboard in town, or your print magazine ad that you’ve been doing? Whatever it is where you’ve been trying to get your name out, they’ve learned about your domain name, and they’ve dialed it in directly, and they’re right there on your website.
A referral, maybe somebody has linked to your website that you didn’t even know about. You wanna be monitoring those, definitely. And of course, if there’s any paid or other options, paid search is gonna be, obviously, if you’re running any Google Adwords, any sort of paid ads there with Google.
Top Devices
Another quick analytic to take a look at is what are your top devices? So, how many people are actually coming in off of mobile, versus desktop, versus tablet? The majority of us would probably see a higher number coming off of mobile, which is what they’re seeing here, but they’re actually seeing a lower number than their average, right? But here, there you go, over the last 28 days, the majority of their traffic’s coming in off of mobile, then desktop, then tablet. So, you wanna be certain of what those devices are so that your website is optimized for those devices, and you wanna be testing on those devices.
Looking Deeper Into Google Analytics
So, let’s dig a little deeper into these three over here, audience, acquisition, and behavior. There’s just a couple of quick highlights.
Google Analytics Audience
You could lose days clicking in here, clicking around and trying to learn all these numbers and interpret all these numbers, but I just want you to see briefly that you can take a look at your audience demographics and their location.
I want you to mainly study those two right now. You could, if you wanted to, also look at their devices, which is interesting to me. There’s all sorts of different ways to get creative and reapply this knowledge to your marketing strategy.
Demographics
But demographics, understanding their age and their gender so that you understand what sort of imagery to be using on your website, what sort of conversation you should be using, as well as what social networks. You might not even realize that you have a younger audience trying to come to your website. If you didn’t realize that, you might not know that you need to be on Instagram or Snapchat, right? There are opportunities here to really understand who your audience is.
Location
The location, as well, is interesting, because you wanna be certain that you’re using the correct terms to drive the audience, especially if you’re trying to go and venture your company out into other cities, as well as other states, or even other countries. So, super important to monitor those two underneath the audience tab.
Google Analytics Acquisition
So, next one, of course, is acquisition. It’s how did we acquire our visitors, right? Where did they come from? So, it’s really important to click on overview, take a look at that, and see how the breakdown works, how much are you spending on your ads versus your organic reach and all of your efforts writing those blog articles, creating that organic content. Is that working for you? This will tell you what your ROI is.
It’s very exciting to monitor this, and you can see also specifically where the traffic is coming from, you can find keywords inside of here, and you can find which social networks are working for you. Very, very interesting to take a look at acquisition.
Google Analytics Behavior
And lastly is gonna be behavior. This is where you really wanna understand where they’re coming into your site, where they’re spending their time, where they’re clicking around, kind of how long they’re staying on each page, time on each page. These things are gonna be really important to understand, not only where they’re landing, but also where they’re exiting.
Here’s why, this is how you reapply this knowledge now. You understand what pages are working. Maybe you’re using a certain landing page for a social media campaign that you’re doing, or an email blast that you’re doing, and you know that you’re driving traffic there. But you need to watch and see where they go from that page.
Are they filling out the form that you’ve got on there, are they calling your phone number, or are they clicking and going to another article? What’s intriguing them to click around and move through your website? Understanding their behavior on your website will allow you to write better content, to write more content angled toward their conversation and what they’re interested or engaging with. It’ll also let you understand what not to be doing. You’ll know on these exit pages, gosh, my highest exit pages right now are really some of my best landing pages that I needed to be making money from I need to go back and improve those pages.
Conclusion
Y’all, I know those were a lot of numbers, but it’s so important that you understand that Google gives us this information for free. They’re tracking all of this, and if we know what to look for and how to reapply these analytics, interpret them and apply them to our content strategy, you can actually seriously improve your ROI on your time and your money spent working through all of your content, improving your ranking, improving your conversion, improving that user experience.
I hope this helps you. If you have questions, you’re more than welcome to put ’em in a comment below, tweet to me, send me an email over at askkori.com. I’d love to help you as best as I can. I hope you’re having a great one. I’ll see you next WordPress Wednesday. By, y’all.
Kori Ashton celebrates her four year anniversary of this YouTube channel with circling back to the very first plugin she ever promoted – Yoast. Here’s a step-by-step process on using Yoast import export settings from an old site to a new site and how to deal with a failed installation. If you see the error too on the Destination fold already exists – Installation failed. š
Step-by-Step:
1. Back up both websites and databases. Be sure you have a plan to access these backups easily and for free. I suggest using UpDraftPlus.
2. Set up access to FTP at your hosting company for your new website that is showing this error alert. (If you need a free tool to access it you can download FileZilla.
3. Find the file folder wp-content >> plugins >> wordpress-seo
4. Delete the entire folder
5. Go back to your website’s dashboard and install Yoast like a normal new plugin. Activate it.
6. Go to SEO >> Tool >> Import. And import the zipped file that you already exported from the old site.
7. Do a little dance and tweet to me that you #nailedit! @KoriAshton
Video Transcript
Hey y’all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. You have found a channel dedicated to all things WordPress. It is WordPress Wednesday. And just like us being dedicated to WordPress, so it Pressable, who is our newest YouTube channel sponsor. They are all things WordPress hosting and support. If you’re looking for a really great solution, if you have questions about plug-ins or hacks or optimization tricks, anything like that, reach out to Pressable, check out their support plans, all their hosting packages. Really, really dynamic, great solutions for you. I’ll put the link to them in the description box below.
You guys, I’m so excited to say that this is my four-year anniversary of my YouTube channel. That’s insane to me, I love it! So, in celebration of four years of you guys hangin’ out with me and our community growing here online, I have launched a brand new website called AskKori.com. I’ll put the link to that in the description box below, as well.
Y’all, all of my videos live here totally for free for you to come in and dig through. All sorts of information, some bio stuff in there, we’re gettin’ personal, you get to see some Instagram stuff. Come check it out, let me know what you think about the crazy new website, and be sure to ask your questions to me so that I can make a video just for you.
Okay, so, you’re here probably because you wanna know about Yoast. This is what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna talk about Yoast importing and exporting, how to do it quickly and easily without frustration. There’s a simple way to get it done. And I did it today, so I know it works perfectly. And this is all done within the free version of Yoast.
So, how do you import/export or export/import the settings on Yoast from an old website to a new website that has the same content on it? How do you do that? Well, that’s exactly what I did today at AskKori.com. So, I’ll show you. You’re gonna go into the dashboard of your website. You’re gonna go over to the SEO tab, and you’re gonna go into the Tools section, mm-kay?
Now, this, where you wanna be right now is the old website. So, while that’s still live somewhere, you wanna go to the old website where the old content was, where you have all of your amazing green lights, you have all your meta description in place, your title tags in place, everything’s ready to go ’cause you’ve already been working on pages and posts over there. And you wanna grab all that content and get it ready to go put on the new website, where all that content now resides, right? Maybe you’ve migrated a website.
So, you’re gonna come here to this screen, you’re gonna click Import/Export. Remember, this is the old website, so we’re gonna export this content. And all you’re simply gonna do is click this button. That’s it, not tricky at all. And just in a matter of minutes, it’s going to create this downloaded zip file. So, this would live inside your downloads folder now. And it’s a zipped file, that’s all you need.
Then, you’re gonna run right back over to your brand new website, and go to SEO, and go to Tools, and you’re gonna do Import. That’s it, you’re gonna choose the file right here, and import that zipped file, click Import. That’s all you do and it works perfectly and seamlessly within a couple of minutes.
Now, if there’s any speed bumps that you hate, it might be the alert that I received today, as well. So, when I went to go migrate my website over, my Yoast plug-in did not come over with me. But, for some reason, inside the database and inside of FTP, it did carry over the plug-in. So, that folder still lived there, but it carried over no content. So, what you have to do in that scenario is access your FTP, go to your server. And I’ll put step-by-step instructions for this in the description box below, so you can just go boom, boom, boom, step-by-step.
If Pressable is your hosting company, GoDaddy, WPEngine, whoever it might be, go to them and ask for an FTP user. You’re gonna log in your FTP account, and you’re gonna drill down into the folder that is plug-ins, and you’re gonna find WordPress SEO, and I want you to delete it. Now, remember, we’re doing this with everybody having a backup in place at both websites, right? We already know UpdraftPlus is the plug-in we’re using for backing up your website. But, if you delete that folder on the new website, it allows you to then go reinstall it, just like you normally would inside your dashboard.
So, you’d go back to your plug-ins area, and you just say Add New plug-in, and you go ahead and install Yoast now, once you’ve deleted that folder, and it’ll work perfectly. This little alert will not happen anymore ’cause you will have removed the folder that they’re claiming already exists. Once you reinstall it, that’s it! All you have to do from there is go import your new content, and you’re up and running.
Hey, if you guys use Yoast on a consistent basis, I’ve got an entire playlist dedicated to Yoast. I’ll put the link to this in the description box below, so you can check out those videos, too. Subscribe to my channel ’cause every Wednesday I’m releasing a video just like this to help improve your online marketing inside the world of WordPress. I’ll see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. By everyone.
Have you ever wondered… Is my WordPress theme good for SEO? If so, then check out this video where Kori talks about some things you can check on your website and some resources you can use.
Video Transcript
Hey Y’all welcome to another WordPress Wednesday my name is Kori Ashton and you are watching a video that is on a YouTube channel solely dedicated to all things WordPress. We have over 200 videos here in our library that can help you improve your online marketing specifically in the world of WordPress.
And today, I want to talk to you all about understanding if a theme that you’re using inside of your WordPress website, understanding if it’s good for search engine optimization, or if there are some things that you should adjust. Basically, how do I know if the theme that I’m using for my WordPress website is good for Google or for SEO?
Behind the scenes
Out of all the hundreds of literally thousands of different themes that are out there, how can I trust it? What are some things I can look at kind of under the hood to be sure that Google loves my website, and is rewarding me with high ranking? There is quite a few things that you can be looking for. One of the reasons why this is so important, and I want you to wrap your mind around this, is whenever a coder or developer creates a theme, there are specific things that Google is looking for inside of your theme structure, or the nerd code kind of behind the scenes. They’re looking to make sure you have header tags in place, they’re looking to be sure that you have alt tags inside of your images. And some theme authors will be very generous and give you the ability to have those things on your site. Some themes that might be free themes to use or themes that are no longer supported and out of date might not have those opportunities.
Is it responsive?
One of the biggest things they’re looking for obviously is the responsive design, does it look good on a cell phone or a mobile device, an iPad? These are the important things that you need to be looking for. I’m gonna give you a couple of tools right now that you can go troubleshoot your website, run them through, test your website, it’ll spit out a report to give you some insider tips, and also, I’m gonna give you a bunch more videos that you can spend more time watching. If you wanna go super nerdy on this, I’ve got plenty of videos to talk to you about search engine optimization.
Site: in Google
So one of the first things we need to talk about is, basically, how does Google even see your site? So this is one of the faster tests you can do: you can go to Google and type in Site: and I want you to do just your website address, no www needed. So mine would be webtegrity.com and the reason why this little test is so important is because it’ll spit out for you, basically, a report that shows you every single page, every single post, every single PDF file, whatever Google has been able to crawl on your domain name and index. So here they all are, and I can click through all of these pages and start to see what every single page on my website looks like, if it were to be rendered inside of a search results page. This is so important because I need you to go through this list and be sure that there is no weird thing sitting here, like a page that you accidentally published that shouldn’t have been published, and it’s sitting here. A page that might have been default content inside of your theme that has nothing to do what you offer. If that page is published, those things could be unfortunately weighing down your website, so it is really important that you run and go through this list, and be sure that everything that’s sitting here looks legit and is relevant to your website.
Google Snippets
The other thing you might be able to find is some of these Google Snippets that need some improvement. So I’ve got another video, and I’ll put the link to that here on how to optimize those Google snippets, and really this entire playlist is pretty phenomenal when it comes to search engine optimization tips and improvements for your site, so I’ll list that here as well.
WooRank
The last tip I want to show you is WooRank. If you’ve never used this tool, it is pretty cool. Now the first time you use it is totally free, you can come in here, drop in your URL, run the report, and see how your site ranks for search engine optimization. It’s a really cool tool.
I hope this helps you. If you have question, put them in the threat below. I’ll see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Bye Y’all.
What is “Engaging Content” or “Strong Content” for your WordPress website? What are SEO folks talking about? Let’s look at several things that can help make your website’s content more engaging.
Video Transcript
Hey everybody, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton and we are gonna talk about an SEO hot topic.
You’ve probably heard people say the term, you have to have engaging content on your website or on your blog. Well what the heck is engaging content? What does that mean? You might hear SEO people say oh you need strong content. What do those terms mean? If you’re doing a search out there some of their tutorials are still very just kind of hit or miss or kind of over our heads, we don’t truly understand.
I hope today this quick video is gonna help you better comprehend, better apply when you’re learning about what is engaging content, what is strong content for better SEO purposes, all right. Let’s look at some examples here, so one of the things I wanted to show was original content is some of the best so as you’re scrolling down you’ve got something visually appealing, it’s easy to read, it’s easy to navigate, maybe it’s not too too long, maybe you have some bullet points, you’ve gotta have something engaging down the page.
You’ll notice here even though I have a lot of text going on this page I still have something visually kinda carrying our eyes down the page over here. If I get bored in this area, I can re-engage over here. Then of course down toward the bottom of my page, I have even more imagery, more videos, more opportunities to click and engage.
Here’s the thing, here’s what engaging content means. The first thing we want to know is that it’s original. I’m gonna explain why that’s so important. Original content means that you’ve written it yourself no other website in the world has the paragraph or the page of content that you just wrote. It’s super important that your website gets the credit first for that content. Google will crawl your website and find that very intriguing and that’s one of the elements to having engaging content. Now you can’t just write five paragraphs and think I’ve done my job, right.
Engaging content has to prompt them to do something, has to draw them in, give them something emotional that impacts them, I know that sounds silly but we emotionally buy, we emotionally learn. It’s just kind of our nature as human beings. You also wanna have something that’s visually appealing so you saw that I had videos, images make a page so much more appealing, right, and be sure those images are great quality and they don’t take forever to load. All of these things cause a great experience for your user and that helps them engage.
You wanna have something that’s interesting. Maybe they’ll learn something if they’re reading down this paragraph and page. You wanna think about am I too close to this, am I using technical terms where people aren’t gonna understand it. You’ve experienced that same thing if you’re watching this video because you’ve probably already heard other tutorials or read blogs that go right over your head. Sometimes we have to just break things down a little bit more simple.
You wanna be able to prompt them to do something so your content needs to prompt them to buy or sign up. Your content needs to prompt them to share or comment on your website. All of these things help Google see that whatever you’ve got written on your page right there is fantastic and engaging. We call that strong content because now you’re gonna start to have authority on the subject that you’re talking about as people are coming to your site, enjoying your content, clicking on multiple pages, commenting, sharing. All of these things are gonna happen if you’re able to build and resource the type of content that users are excited about. Does that make sense?
All right, if you need more support on this check this out, I have an entire playlist, look right over here. I have an entire playlist and I’ll put the link to this in the description box below, for SEO tips on our website and there’s a ton of videos everything from how to find keywords, there’s topics in here on how to find topics for your blog, it’s pretty incredible and these SEO fixes really, really work.
All right, I hope to see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Subscribe, I’ll see ya later, bye bye.
It’s so important to check your WordPress website for broken links. Use these free resources to help improve your ranking & user experience on your website.
Video Transcript
Hey y’all, my name is Kori Ashton, and welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. Every week, on Wednesdays, I’m releasing a video just like this to help you improve your online marketing if you’re using WordPress.
So this week, we’re gonna look at making sure that you have no broken links in your website. It is so important for Search Engine Optimization ranking, and for user experience, which is actually why it effects ranking. If you have a ton of broken links, or even just a few, on your website, it can actually be impactful. What it makes you look like is kinda spammy, or like you don’t care. It certainly causes confusion as customers or visitors hit your website and things are broken causing four-oh-fours, right?
Alright, so how can we scan our website, even if it’s a smaller site, or, if it’s a robust site, what are some resources that we can use to scan or keep track of our website’s links and making sure that all is well. I’ll show you a couple of resources today.
This is definitely one of the better plugins right now in the repository for checking your broken links, so pretty cool. If you’re watching this video in the future, please be sure to make sure that it’s been updated recently and that it’s tested up to your version. I’m currently running four-point-nine-point-two, but this should be okay because it’s got so many installs. This should be pretty good to run. So, once you add it, search in here for Broken Link Checker inside of Plugins, Add New, right, search for Broken Link Checker, you’ll see it. Install it, Activate it, and once you’ve done that, you’ll have it here, where are we, Broken Link Checker right here.
Here’s the Settings area. Or, you’ll find it over here inside of Tools, and go to Broken Links, and it’ll basically just start to list out any links that are on your site. You can do a really cool search over here if you wanted to, but we’ll say Link status, we wanna look at all and any type, so search the links right now, and it went and searched and didn’t find any broken links, so, that’s pretty darn great, and now, I’m running a pretty small site, though, so you’ll definitely wanna do this on a regular basis for your website, any website for that matter.
But I’m gonna show you one more tool that’s pretty cool. If you’re running a Mac, there is a free app that you can use called Integrity Link Checker. The productivity one is the one that I use. You can do a search inside of the marketplace for, I just did integrity link, and found it. This is what the icon looks like. What you can do, though, is when you open it up, you can run a website here, and let’s just do H-T-T-P lucys doggy daycare, I’ll show you what it looks like, dot-com. So it’s scrubbing the site right now to check all of the links, you can see right now it’s checked nearly four, over 400 links.
Good grief, that’s pretty incredible. It finished the scan already, and opens that up, and gives you an idea of maybe some errors that you might see. But overall, the site looks pretty great. No errors. Awesome, it says zero bad. But you can of course change those settings. You can do it by page if you wanted to, by status if you want to, four-oh-fours, three-oh-ones, whatever that might be.
Here’s the thing, I wanted to tell you this, specifically about this app, I have used it before when I’m on the phone, pitching to a potential new client, let’s say you’ve got a phone call and somebody was like, hey, you know my website’s not running the best, so I was hoping you guys could look at it and see how you can make improvements. I’ve literally just opened up this app and run their website on here, while I’m on the phone and I’ve told them, oh yeah, it looks like you guys have 42 broken links, and we can certainly get those types of things, and they’re blown away by how quickly I can give them that report.
I hope this helps you guys. It’s so important to be sure you have no spammy broken links runnin’ on your website. Have a great WordPress Wednesday. I’ll see ya next time. Bye y’all.
