Ok, so this week we are going to just do a Q & A for search engine optimization questions. There is a lot of bad information, misinformation, and lack of information out there, so I’m going to tell you what is actually working right now.
What is better, SEO or PPC?
I’m naturally biased towards SEO, it seems like a longer lasting plan because you are building a website to the best standards of the internet and html. But it’s important to do what works and what makes sense from a dollars perspective.
Plus, if you are doing something that is just working for you, that is making you decent money, whether it’s Pay Per Click or SEO, or email marketing, or even direct-response mailers, keep doing that.
There is a time and a play for just about everything. SEO and PPC are simply tools, they may work well for you, and they may not.
I know a dog trainer that was getting a ton of good relevant traffic to her website using Google PPC. She was paying $.09 per click. That’s crazy cheap. So, in that case, PPC was a way better spend of money compared to SEO.
But SEO lasts much longer. You can actually stop “doing optimization” to a website for months, and it can still rank highly and get a ton of relevant traffic. It all just depends what works best for your situation.
What is On-page SEO?
On-page refers to working specifically on the website to make it easier for a search engine to find and understand the information on your website. This means stuff like fixing your URL’s so they have relevant information, add schema (https://schema.org/) to your website, making sure your website loads quickly, fixing your Page Titles to give relevant information, fixing your images and their Alt Text and file names, making sure that you have relevant anchor text.
You will also want to go through your content, that means the actual words on the page, the paragraphs, like what you are reading right now, and make sure the content is unique, helpful, and valuable. It is also a good idea to use H tags, or Heading tags where appropriate such as for sub heads and naming of a paragraph.
All this work that is done on the website itself is referred to as On-page optimization. Off-page basically just refers to links to your website. But, if the company you are working with really knows what they are doing, the will say how Off-page also refers to things like branding.
What are the best plugins for search optimization for WordPress?
This is a great questions and an area of a lot of misunderstood stuff. The three plugins I use are RankMath, Yoast, and All In One SEO. They are all good and they all can get the job done.
But, here’s the thing, you only need a plugin create an xml sitemap (go here to manually create a sitemap: https://www.sitemaps.org/index.html), a robots.txt file, to no-index pages you don’t want to show up in a Google search, and to control your Page Titles and meta descriptions, and that’s it.
These plugins do a lot more than this, and they make you think that you need to do a lot more that this, but that’s incorrect. All you need from these plugins is the most basic stuff. People way over complicate the plugin issue.
This being said, some of these plugins do have a Bad Bot Blocker built in, so that’s pretty cool if you need it.
What is a ClickFunnel and does it show up in Google?
This is an interesting question. I don’t know what exactly you call a ClickFunnel, at least technically anyway. It’s a sales landing page. It is not a website. So, I guess it is actually some sort of web page, because obviously you see them on the internet.
Now, I wouldn’t waste any time optimizing a ClickFunnel page for bots to crawl. I originally thought that ClickFunnel pages would not index in Google, but then a week ago I randomly checked and a few actually did show up in the index. That was new to me.
If an SEO company tries to tell you they can rank your ClickFunnel page, go ahead and just walk away from them
Which is the best local SEO tool to manage store listings – YEXT vs Uberall?
I will tell you right now that they all suck. I’ve tried them all and they are all terrible. They pitch you that they will monitor your listings. FFS, once you build a business listing, or citation, then that’s all you need to do, you do not need to monitor it.
The problem with Yext is that they either own or have exclusive contracts with a lot of good citation websites and they only way you can get on them, is to buy Yext’s over priced service.
The whole thing seems scammy to me and I avoid all those tools and services.
What is something most people don’t realize about search?
Most people do not realize that to get to the top of a competitive Google search, you can just look at the sites that are already there. Google has to show you what it values. It obviously values the top 10 search results on the first page.
Boom! Google just showed you how to rank. So just study those websites. Look at their domain names, look at their URL’s, look at their on-page. Are they using keywords in the H tags? What keywords and related keywords are they using.
You’ll also want to see if it’s even possible for you to get your site up there. So searches are just dominated by large authority websites and if you are not a large authority website, then you don’t have any chance of showing up.
So, it’s important to study what Google thinks. You are not going to change Google’s mind, but if you can study what Google already values, then you have a great plan and you can just build towards that.
Well, I hop you got a lot out of this weeks Q & A session. It was a lot of fun. If I find some other great questions, we’ll do another one of these soon.