SEO When You have No Time (and even less budget)

SEO is a pain in the rear end, especially if you have little or no money.

At a recent Cowork Crew, Andrew Cock-Starkey shared how to do great SEO without breaking the bank.

So lots of people then come to me and they say, well, how do I do SEO?

I haven’t got any budget and I haven’t got any time. And the answer is like, well, you can’t with no time and no budget, but if you don’t have very much of those things, what can you do? Like what’s the kind of minimal things that you can do to help do table stakes stuff? So that’s why I’m going to try and get to today.

I hate these kind of intro slide things because it’s like, hopefully you’re not really you don’t really care who I am yet. Maybe you might by the end. But the main reason I put this one up. So if you want to follow me on the social stuff, that would be lovely. But this one. So lots of people. You’re welcome to take photos of the slides, do things, whatever.

But this link I’ve set up to go to optimisey.com/coworkcrew. Then you can download the slides so you don’t have to memorize stuff. All the links and stuff, the tools and things I talk about, did it call it that or was it called that or whatever. There’s a web page on my site that’s got the slides you can download.

It’s got all the links, all the stuff I talk about. It’s all on there. So I’ll put the slide that up again at the end. So if you want to do that one, what I’m going to talk to you today about is the three core pillars of SEO. Some of the cool free stuff that I mean I’m so I’m a father of three.

My children eat money almost directly sometimes, so I really like cheap and free things. So we’re going to talk about some of those, some of the some tools you can use, which are hideously expensive. We’ll talk about a little bit about those two, and then we’ll talk about some of the mistakes and things that I still see lots of people make every day.

How do you avoid doing some of those and then how you can measure success? So hopefully the aim of this is to convince you that you can do this stuff, and then how you can see whether it’s working or not, to then persuade you to spend a little bit more time, or to persuade your boss or your clients to give you more time and to give you more money to do more of this kind of stuff.

So three core pillars of SEO broadly, it’s these three things. Anything you’re going to do in the CEO space is going to be related to one of these three things content stuff like the words, the pictures, the videos, the pages on your site, the technical stuff like is it fast, slow? Does it work on mobile phones? Does it fall over every time more than ten people visit your website, that kind of stuff.

And then links. So links basically is other people on the internet saying that you’re good and linking to your website recommending you, but also like some of the links that you send out, some of the links you do to your own stuff will come into more detail on that.

Simply work on a really big website. People like working on client websites. Anybody work on a website with more than 10,000 pages? So not so for most people. We’re down there. So this is the kind of scale this a very nice chart that a chap called Mark Williams Cook put together. A very smart guy worth looking at. But basically the size of your website is across the bottom on this axis.

And how important it is, is up the left hand side. So if you’re a really big if you’re like Amazon or Wikipedia, you’re way up. Your site is massive. It’s like, you know, every every time Wikipedia’s page is slowed down by 0.1 of a second, multiply that by 8 trillion pages. Whatever it is, they’ve got slows down a lot of stuff.

So if you’re a huge website with tens of thousands, millions of pages, the technical stuff is really important for the majority of us. We’re down about here. So our websites are not very big. So the technical stuff, not saying it’s not important if your website doesn’t load in like under a minute, that’s not great. But the thing that’s going to move the needle for you most is content and links.

So yes, you’ll get all these people that go all your core web vitals score is minus three or whatever the heck it is these days. It doesn’t. Not saying it doesn’t matter, but it matters much less. For the majority of the people in this room, I expect, and the majority of the sites are working on. I need to talk about the elephant in the room.

So the elephant in the room? No, probably. Some of you might think I know Nick’s thinking it already. Isn’t all this pointless. Anyway, I don’t need to worry about Google or SEO because ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude or whoever it is, or AI mode or all these kind of it’s going to kill SEO and it’s all pointless anyway.

And isn’t it all going to get searched in Google and me and people that do SEO all going to be replaced and out of work anyway? No. Is the short answer to that. This is the final thing. So somebody did like this fun meme about like, how does ChatGPT answer all these questions so cleverly? Because it’s kind of ten Google searches stitched together.

I know it’s more complicated than that. And they kind of it, but it’s like broadly, when you look at the guts of how lots of these tools work. How does ChatGPT know when you say like, oh, what’s the best coworking event in Northampton? It goes, and it does lots of searches and then it collates all the answers. So if you’re not ranking in these search engines, so actually is powered by Bing.

So of their search to happen on Bing. So I know nobody uses Bing but but it does. So if you’re not ranking. So all the stuff that you do to rank in search engines will also help you rank in the GPT perplexities, all this kind of thing. So there’s a very high correlation between doing good SEO and doing good geo, whatever the heck the latest tech pros call it, because.

So everybody said there are lots of these people, particularly on LinkedIn, seem really keen on like geo CEOs. Dead goes the future. And it’s like, okay. And then you ask them, what are you doing to rank in Geo? And basically SEO tactics, the stuff that’s particularly important. So ChatGPT and perplexity and all these things sends out a little robots to like crawl your website and get all the data back.

If you’re blocking them in your technical setup for your website, it’s not going to find you. So all these GPT and they like really fast answers. So again, if your website is particularly slow and it can’t find the stuff that it wants in a particular short amount of time, they tend to, then they’ll go somewhere else because they’re working against the clock, because the whole thing is like GPT is going to give you the answer like that.

So technical stuff is, is more important for ranking in these kind of tools. And then, yeah, spammy stuff. We were talking about this I was talking to Jess about this earlier. So Google has had like 20, 30 years of working out all the tricks that people pull to try and rank and cheat and get to the top of search rankings.

GPT and perplexity and OpenAI all kind of starting from scratch. So they’re falling for all the stuff that Google used to like for, for 20 years ago, but have worked out how to stop. So there was a great example of I think it was Lily Rae wrote an article on LinkedIn because LinkedIn’s a big, authoritative website, and she wrote this like basically a hatchet piece on how OpenAI was terrible.

And it’s an open. I started citing it because it’s in a big, authoritative website, and it must be important. So we’ll pull that in. And that’s great. And it answers all these particular questions. So yeah, there’s a lot of spammy stuff like so back when I first started working in SEO, if you put Britney Spears tickets on any page, it would rank number one because it was really in demand phrase.

So you put Britney Spears tickets in white text on a white background and hide it in the bottom of the page. That was about, I don’t know, selling beer, and you’d rank number one for beer. It’s like, you know, so it’s a stupid trick, but a lot of the stuff that used to. So it works at the moment, it doesn’t.

It’s not the way it should work. It’s not the way, you know, I’m sure sound Altman and all these sort of people want it to work, so they’re going to work out ways to stop it. But if you want to make a quick buck. Yeah, just go look at how SEO worked in the early 2000 and you’ll be doing great.

This is a good demonstration. So lots of people are like, clients come to me, they go, oh, what are we doing about AI and what are we doing about perplexity? And how are we ranking in ChatGPT? And I say to them, what’s your strategy for being are you worried about being. No, nobody uses being. What are we worried about that it’s like well okay.

So then if you measured up all the people that search on Google in a year and it was the site of the size of the Empire State Building comparatively, how much how many people do you think are using ChatGPT a year? Which of these buildings might it be comparatively? And the answer is it would be Sam Altman sized, standing in front of the Empire State Building, because it’s a tiny, tiny fraction compared to the amount of traffic that Google is driving.

So it’s not that it’s not important. It’s growing, of course, like, you know, ten years ago, nobody had heard of ChatGPT, but it’s a tiny amount of web traffic at the moment. So yes, of course you should worry about it. It’s growing and stuff. But if you’re not focusing on where the majority of your traffic and your conversions and the money is coming from, in almost all cases, I work on hundreds of websites.

You can look at the proportion of traffic that’s coming from search engines, from social media, from GPT. It’s still less than 1% for almost every website I work on. So what do all of these things mean? So content technical links. When search engines are looking for you and trying to find your content and match you up to the things that people are searching for, content is broadly, is it relevant?

So you search for what’s the best coworking event in Northampton? If you don’t talk about coworking events in Northampton, you’re not relevant for that search. So I get lots of people that go, come to me and they say, oh, I want to rank number one for tennis. And it’s like, cool. What do you what do you do now?

Are we sell tennis shoes. You’re not going to rank number one for tennis because somebody searching for tennis too broad, right. You need like I’m selling specifically green tennis shoes for men in a size nine. Great. That’s really specific. Somebody searching for the big head term, we call them because there’s 8 million people a year. Search for tennis.

I want to rank number one for tennis. It’s like, of course you do. I want to rank number one for Sexiest Man Alive. It’s not going to happen, but you’ve got to think about where you’re going to go with those kind of things. So the content is matching your content and making it relevant to what people are searching for.

Technical stuff is does it work when Google comes to try and find your content? Does the website work? Does it fall over? Is it fast? Does it look nice on mobile? Mobile is important. Google these days almost exclusively crawls the web through a mobile window. So lots of people sit there on their desktop. And, you know, designers got lovely big jumbo screens that, oh my God, my website looks amazing.

And it’s like on a 3G connection on the on the train on the way home. Not so much. So you need to look at all that kind of stuff. So the technical stuff is important about how it works. And Linksys is it famous? So everybody goes, oh, you know, how do I say I’m, you know, I’m the best.

Well, who else says you’re the best? So I’m the best SEO in Cambridge possibly the world. But who else says so? If you got other people that link to you and say, like, I’ve been to this restaurant is great, I bought these shoes. They were amazing. I bought this camera. It did all the things I wanted to. You’ve got reviews on other websites, you’ve got newspaper articles talking about you, saying all those things that you do because Google basically doesn’t like being wrong.

So if you if you have an obscure name like optimizing, what does that mean? If you put on your website your content saying, I talk about SEO and SEO related things, that’s a clue. If you’ve got other people talking about you and linking to you saying, this guy knows about SEO, that’s another clue and another endorsement for Google to go, yeah, okay.

It’s probably this is a good answer related to C0. So you want all those signals to be pointing towards the same place. Okay. Onto the free tool stuff. This is where we want to get to. So I talk about some of the stuff that you can do and don’t do do do do do. This made me laugh because I’m quite immature.

Some of the things you should do and shouldn’t do around content. Your content should answer the questions that your customers have next. So when they come to you looking for. Right, okay, I want tennis shoes as the example I’ve somehow managed to talk myself into. What’s the thing they’re going to ask next? Is it good for these shoes?

Good for people with shin splints? Are these shoes good for playing indoors and outdoors? Are the issues good for? So think about those kinds of things. And there’s lots of tools you can use which will come on to intersect to help you find those next questions that they’re going to ask and promote your authors. So lots of people tend to do this.

I used to do this still probably do probably too often on my website, so don’t work on it enough. Google wants to rank content from people, so optimizing. Great. That’s my brand name, Andrew Cock-Starkey. That’s my personal name. It’s much easier for Google to work out who I am because I’ve got quite an unusual name. If you’ve got quite, I want to say common, but that really upsets someone.

Once a popular name. If you’ve got a popular name, if you’re John Smith, that’s going to be tricky. Google is going to find lots and lots of John Smith, so it wants to disambiguate you. So if you put stuff on your website to make clear about who this John Smith is, this John Smith is this person. And here’s their LinkedIn profile and here’s their social media profiles.

Here’s all the events they’ve spoken at. Here’s the areas they’re specialist in. You can put all that kind of stuff on your website to promote who you are. So Google has a much clearer idea about, okay, well, I can see this person and they’re talking on optimizing about SEO, and they’re also talking on the Cowork Crew about SEO.

And they’re also they went to this event and they talk about SEO and see, because I can join those dots together because it’s all the same person with the same really obscure name. Google’s got a really clear idea about who the author of that piece of content is. So that’s a really good thing to do with your content.

And if people get kind of like icky about it, it’s like, oh, I don’t want to put my name in it. I’m just going to author it as like, you know, web admin, or I’m going to author it as the company name or whatever. Put your name on it. It’s fine. Don’t do the content that lots of people fall into this thing I’m supposed to.

I’ve got a good example of that will come to that. The content that when you Google it and how do I write good content and lots of SEO blogs and say or do this kind of like, well, come to examples of that. Why? That’s an awful idea. Don’t do this obsession that people still have with word counts. This is a rumor that won’t die.

This thing about like, oh, if I have to write SEO content that’s going to rank, it has to be at least 500 words. Sure. Or 5000 or 50. Depends. Again, depends on the kind of if you’re asking if some of your clients and the people that are searching for you are asking, what’s the time? In Toronto, 500 words is a massive overkill.

If they’re asking like, what’s the best restaurant and evening out in Toronto? 500 words. Probably not going to be enough. So start with setting about the word count. Answer the questions that kind of your searches and people are after. This is the example of the content you’re supposed to do. This is a genuine thing. So I actually found this on this as a plumber’s website.

There are a whole piece of content about what is a tap. Yeah, because that’s because their audience are interested in taps. And, you know, it’s all these kind of entities. And I’m a plumber and I write about taps and this is going to be great. And this, this is the I mean, if this wasn’t written by AI, I’m going to be slightly astonished, but it finishes.

This is the kind of end piece to the article about what is a tap.

It’s awful. Right? But they did it probably because somebody in SEO advised them like, well, you know, so you make clear about your, your called whatever they were called like, you know, cherry tree plumbing or Google’s not going to understand who are you should write about all the things that you do like taps. You should write about taps and baths.

Like, well, how do you define what a bar. Come on. Nobody’s googling. Oh. I’m not. What’s that thing that keeps leaking water in my bathroom called? Oh, yeah. So don’t do that kind of stuff. Some of the tools that can help you with this kind of stuff. There’s a tool called also asked you can I think you can do three free searches a day.

So you sign up for an account, you get three free goes a day. If you pay like it’s like this starting point is only about 1,012 pounds a month. You can pay all the way up to high amounts. But you know when you go on Google and you search something and you get like just slightly down the page, people also ask these other related questions also, as basically goes down the rabbit hole for you and pulls them all back.

So it will go like when you expand that. People also ask these questions and then when you expand them on Google, then you get another three and another three and another three and another and you keep going down. Also pulls them all back. And that’s really useful for whether you search. You put in men’s green tennis shoes and also ask will then go and add all those questions for you about like ones fishing splints, ones for ones with laces, ones with Velcro.

What are the other things that people also want to know? And it’s all powered by Google because Google only puts those things in the search results. If people also ask them, they’re not just kind of getting so they know that they’ve got all the data that shows that people want to ask that stuff next. So it’s super useful to then expand your content to be a bit what are the things they’re going to ask next?

It’s everybody use all these things like SEMrush and Moz and Strix, all these kind of really big, expensive tools. Some, some people looking kind of blankly at me. That’s okay. So SEMrush and Mars are the kind of big mammoths in the search engine tool space. They are getting phenomenally expensive. So I think the starting point for SEMrush is now 200 pounds a month.

It’s like a lot. And so they’re aimed at enterprise people. So if you’re like a small one man band like me, it’s massive overkill. And you probably don’t want to spend 200 pounds a month on those things. See, ranking is the tool that I use for this kind of stuff. It starts at about 50 pounds a month. It’s much cheaper, does pretty much all the bells and whistles that same Russian Mars and all those kind of things do significantly cheaper.

So it’s a good way to then you can turn these kind of tools on your competitors. That’s kind of nice when you’re really like, I’ll run out of content ideas, plug in your competitors domain and it will show you like which of their top ranking content. It will show you which of their top ranking keywords, and you can go, that’s quite a good idea.

I can do that and do my version of that piece of content or steal that idea or do that, this content, but better and now outrank all your competitors. And out scraper, as the name might suggest, is a scraping tool. I use it for scraping reviews. So again, it’s just that you can again, you can use it for free to a certain threshold.

I think it’s like scrape 500 off something so you can get it to scrape your LS search results. Whatever it is, I use it for scraping reviews off Google Business profiles, so it’s really useful to then get content that your customers are talking about more reviews and they’ll say, this place is great because these things and you can start to then put it into nice little word clouds.

So then all the people talk about. So it’s a great example. So like Cambridge people have everybody been to mill Works in Cambridge. Really nice restaurant. And they have this really funny little quirky thing set up in the place where it’s almost like in airplanes, where you can press the kind of hostess button on your table to call the waiter or waitress.

The kids go absolutely nuts for it, because if you press it and it lights up on this board, like your table number comes up on this board, and then the waiter or waitress comes over as if by magic. And there’s no embarrassing moment when mum or dad happened to be. So you just press the button and it’s great.

But the kids absolutely love it and loads. People mention it in the reviews and the website doesn’t mention it at all. So this is a client of mine and I said, you’ve got to get some pictures of this, put it on the website, write about it. It’s fun, it’s quirky. It kind of adds to the experience. Now they’re getting even more traffic, all that kind of stuff.

And it’s also super useful. You can point it again at other people’s websites, scrape the reviews of your competitors, find out what he complains about. How can you do that better? It’s like, oh, they get loads of one star reviews because people hate their returns policy. We should change our returns policy and like go up so you can do that technical stuff.

Do do’s and don’ts do’s. Everybody got Google Search Console. Anybody know what Google Search Console is? That’s okay. If you don’t know what Google Search Console is please get it set up. Everybody’s familiar with Google Analytics roughly that sort of thing. Web analytics tools. So Google Search Console is similar to that. And you set it up with a little token on your website to say that you actually own the website.

And then Google will literally give you loads of free data about how your site performs in Google search. So if you haven’t got Google Search Console set up, please go and get it set up. It’s super easy. You can come and ask me, I’ll show you how to do it, literally like a five minute job. If you have got it set up, please use it.

Lots of people get it set up and then forget about it. And you can actually go and look at what are the keywords that your site currently ranks for. What are the pages that are performing really well? When somebody searches your brand name, do they come to your home page or do they go to your about page? Is that the right way around?

Do you want it that way around kind of stuff? So Google Search Console super useful and sitemaps is always a classic one. So WordPress website people the number of websites I still see set up and they’ve got it built and it’s brilliant. It looks great. Everything’s in place. They put all the things in, they’ve got all their services pages and they still have their Hello world default dummy blog post live and it’s in the sitemap.

It’s not linked to anywhere on the website, but it’s still in there and you can still find it in the site map. And there’s loads of other junk default pages that come out of the box with the template you download, and you don’t want those pages in your website, you’re just making the haystack bigger. Google can’t find the content you really want it to find, because it’s reading all your default hello world and default about pages that you didn’t actually want to set up and you’ve hidden away.

Don’t do the free SEO audits. Like most things in life, they’re roughly worth what you pay for them. So you get lots of these lots of these tests where they go, we’ll do your free SEO audits. Fine. You put in your website and it comes back with all these red flags about all these. They’re really binary checks. So it will tell you like, oh, you know, you’ve got 20 pages that are missing meta descriptions.

Cool. You got 20 pages that have meta descriptions. Cool. But it won’t tell you whether they’re any good or not. So I had somebody to come back to me. Go no, I met the description is are fine. They left all the law emits and stuff in there or the placeholder content. So technically they had meta description. So the free C.O. tool said yeah, you got that description.

Great. Tick the box. It was a rubbish meta description wasn’t helping. Should have been changed. And the latest thing that seems everybody’s very excited about its core web vitals. That comes back to the bit I was talking about at the beginning, about the technical side of your site and how fast it is and how great it is. Google, like, lean on these things all the time because the faster the web is, the better it is for them.

Because they’re crawling lots of websites every day cost them lots of money. All the websites in the world sped up by one second. Google’s costs go down. So it’s in their interest to say, make it faster, make your site faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster. Here’s all your core web vitals scores. It’s all in. It’s red and green and yellow like it’s very hard to get green.

Scores read very bad. Like the difference between ranking first and second is not down to your core biters. Unless you’re like the Guardian or something, like you’re in a super competitive space. Some of the stuff that can help you with the technical things. So we talked about Google Search Console. If you have Google Search Console and you get slightly intimidated by it and you’re like, there’s so much in here, I don’t know what to do, I kind of split it into these things.

So this is for the super nerds. These are my people who live in spreadsheets and love love data and nerdy things. You can use all these kind of tools. So Google Sheets is basically like Excel. There’s a tool called Search Analytics. For sheets. You can automatically connects into the Google Search Console API and dumped all the information into a spreadsheet for you.

And I get very excited. And no doubt if that sounds like your idea of a nightmare, then there are some tools which are like for the cool kids, that will just make some of the stuff in Search Console a bit more palatable for you. So analytics C.O. gets so can you can set up a free account on there, and it will start to bunch some of your data together so you can tell it what your brand name is, and it will split out his or your branded searches for non branded searches.

So do you rank for people searching for coworking crew events in Northampton? Yes. If you didn’t, you’d be a bit upset. Do you rank for networking events in Northampton? Not mentioning your brand so you can try and look at those kind of things. So I rank really well for my brand name, generic SEO terms, not so much. So you can get that kind of stuff in C.O. gets again for free and advanced GSI.

Visualize it as a similar kind of thing. It’s a little Chrome plugin, so you can put that in there and it’ll start to then. So one of the things you find with Search Console, it starts to get really jagged lines all the time because your traffic goes down at weekends. With things like with GST visualizer, you can start to smooth it out.

You can say, show me all the data by week or by month, so you get much more. Kind of like now compare last month to the previous month. It just starts to make all the kind of intimidating stuff in Search Console that gets a bit overwhelming for some people, a little bit more palatable. And then I have a little thing down here saying, don’t forget me about being so.

Bing has very similar things to Google Search Console. So they have Webmaster Tools, which is their equivalent. Again, they’ve kind of realized their place in the market. So once you’ve set up Google Search Console, you can go to Bing Webmaster Tools and say, I want to set up big Webmaster Tools and it will say, have you already set up Search Console?

And you say, yes, and it will just copy all your stuff over from there so you don’t have to set it all up again? They realize that they’re kind of slightly behind Google in the pecking order of things, so it’s even easier to set up being webmaster tools, and it gives you loads of really interesting data and stuff as well about how you’re performing.

And Bing, which if you’re particularly interested in, is very important if you have an older target audience, Bing is important to. So my mum still thinks she uses Google, but she’s actually using Bing because she bought a new Microsoft computer. And Microsoft of course, defaults to all the Microsoft things. Being owned is owned by Microsoft. So she has a search engine which she thinks is Google.

And when you type into the search bar and things, she thinks it comes back with search. Dot looks very much like Google. It’s being so lots of older people use Bing without even really realizing it. Lots of people that we had a place I worked where lots of people in prisons were using Bing to find all our content.

It was educational content. Don’t worry, they were doing all these training courses in prison because all the computers in the prison were locked down to Microsoft stuff, so they could say so. Lots of institutions use Bing and Microsoft things. So again, think about where your audience is. There is a really great again, I’ll link to it in the slides and all those kinds of things.

When you download it, there’s a talk by a chap called On out Hellmann’s Dutch Guy, absolutely mad as a box of frogs goes like open sea swimming, eats oysters. But he did a really cool talk at Search Norwich about being and all the kind of stuff that you can find in there that isn’t in Search Console. Some really weird stuff that you can find that shows you loads of data about your competitors that it probably shouldn’t, but it’s kind of interesting.

So if you’re interested in that kind of stuff, go find that talk. That’s really cool. Some of the things that can help you with the technical stuff. So screaming Frog brilliant name again. You can use it for free if you’re if you’ve got fewer than €500, it’s completely free. If you have more than 500 URL, it’s about 200 pounds for a year for a license.

But you can basically then use that tool to crawl your website as Google would crawl it, and it will go and find all the broken things and all the broken links and all the images that are too big and less them all out for you. It’s super cool. Anybody familiar with Hot Jar Jar tracking and you get like those kind of like heat maps that will show you where people are clicking on your website kind of stuff.

Everybody went nuts for Hot Jar about 15 years ago. Clarity is Microsoft’s version of that. It’s a kind of free tool that you can then put on your website to show where people are clicking and what, where they’re kind of rage clicking of that thing that should work and doesn’t work and that kind of stuff. Super interesting. I don’t know why it’s free, though.

It’s a bit like Google Analytics. I’m sure they’re probably taking your data and using it for themselves somewhere, but you can set it up on your website for free. It will give you like, yeah, that kind of search mapping kind of stuff. You can find all those technical issues with your site that people are finding and getting frustrated by.

I would then suggest taking you off again because it is quite resource intensive. It will slow your website down. So stick out for a month, get all the data, then go and fix all those things. Put it back on again. Visual ping is another fun one who has clients, changed their pages and then not tell you and then complain when it’s broken.

Yeah, so you can set visual ping for free. I think it’s €3. €5. You can basically get it to memorize what a page looks like and then email you and it changes pennies. Very excited about this. So when they change it and don’t tell you or they change their about page, or they change their home page and stuff, visual ping will email you a notification saying this page has changed.

Very useful. You can set it up for like sitemaps and set it up for all those kinds of things where it’s like you’ve just added 20 pages to the sitemap and they go, oh no, we didn’t. It’s like you. And marketing sirup is a fun little Chrome plugin again. You can then visit any page on the website. Your competitors page is included and it will just pull up into one little neat box the page title, the URL, the canonical, the meta description, all that kind of nerdy SEO.

So the response code, all that kind of stuff in a little box. You can then the word count of any particular page. There’s loads of interesting stuff in there and just things that you would use lots of these other tools to do, but like just in a very neat little box in chrome links. Don’t buy links. I know we all get loads of emails about it all the time saying like, oh, I can sell you 50 links for $50.

It’s like, don’t, don’t do that. The number of times I still work on websites where they’ve had a ranking issue and it’s been it’s like, well, did you buy links? No, no. Well, we did ask that guy in Fiverr and he said he was going to do some digital PR for us. Is that okay? How much did you pay?

About $50. It’s like look at all the digital PR they did. They just spammed the links on like horrendous bloggy websites that nobody ever visits to try and gain the system because back in the day, it still works at ChatGPT a little bit. The more. It used to be an arms race. If you had 20 links and I had 21, I ranked first.

It doesn’t work like that quite so much anymore. But still, people still fall into that trap of I need to buy links. I need to buy links to buy links, don’t buy links. The links you want are the no SEO links is the way I try and think about it. If SEO didn’t exist and Google didn’t exist, would you still want a link from that website?

If it’s a national newspaper talking about you, saying Nick is the greatest things that sliced bread? Yeah. Of course. Do you want that link? Great. Does it help you with SEO? Absolutely it does. But if SEO didn’t exist. Do you still want it? Those are the links you want to get, those kind of things. We think about other people in Northampton, other businesses, other events.

Are they talking about you and saying, this is a really cool event. You should go like business help, help groups. You were looking for networking, coworking in Northampton. You should go to this event. You would want that link if C0 didn’t exist. It’s going to be great. People that visit our website and read about you going. This is a great event.

Yes, please. So the know SEO broadly. That’s a good rule for for links. If you’re looking at links, no SEO links and internal linking is still one. A massive thing that loads people really miss. It’s a big signal from your website to Google about which your most important pages. So which of your pages do you link to the most?

So when you. Your home page is almost always the answer, because every page has that little button in the corner that takes you back to the home page. But if you have your service page, your key thing that you do or sell, be that shoes or whatever it is, but it’s hidden down like three levels of navigation on your website, you don’t really mention it on other pages every time you log about.

We sell the greatest tennis shoes in the world, but you don’t link to your tennis shoes page. You’re sending clues to Google that this page is probably not that important every time you talk on your website. So when you write that new blog post, I call, you know, we’ve got to write a page about what is a tap because we’re plumbers.

Fine. Don’t do it about what is a tap. But talk about oh, we went and fitted a new wet room in this person’s house last week. And here’s some lovely photos. And then at the bottom of the page you say, if you’re looking for a new wet room, click through to our Wet Rooms page. Whatever it is you’re looking for a plumber in Northampton, a little internal link to your plumber in Northampton page, all those kinds of things.

So internal linking is a big lever that lots of people still don’t put, things that can help you with that. These tools I’ve already talked about, they’re really good at coming with Screening Frog, you can kind of get it to crawl all the content and find every time you mention tennis. So it will then pull out all the pages that mention the word tennis, and you can go and look at them and go, oh, I haven’t linked to my tennis page from that page.

So go and find all those links and fix it. See, ranking similar kind of thing will help you find all those good internal links opportunities that you can find common mistakes to avoid. So these are things so not only your data is still a big one where I go to work on a website and I say have you got Search Console?

And they go, yes. And then I go, can I have access to it? And they go, oh, we’d have to ask the agency. It’s like, okay, if you can’t kick your agency out of the data that you own, it’s the wrong way round. There’s still too many times I’ve worked and again, some of the web developer people will probably have this where once you stop working with that agency, their response times go through the floor.

Then you ask them for, can I have the log in to the back end of the website because I need to change something and they’re like, no, all you can do, but you have to sign another month retainer or just I just want the password. Okay. So if you don’t have the admin rights to search console, data analytics and your website CMS, please get them yesterday.

Make sure that you can get your agencies well, if they’re one of those kind of shady agencies, they might kick and scream about it a little bit and go, well no, no you can’t. It’s really risky. And if things go wrong and fine, but you still need it, you still need that opportunity at some point in the future to go, we’re not working with you anymore.

We’re removing you from this data and that should be fine. So please own all your data, all the shortcuts and things. So yes, of course you can ask chat or SEO. It’s not very good at it. Please don’t do that. Or the other kind of shortcuts. The classic shortcut is still buying links. People buy links and like, you know, get AI to write their content or I need more content from my website.

I’ll just get AI to write. What is a tap article? Don’t do that. And people are obsessing over the wrong metrics. I’ll come on to metrics a little bit more in second. Now, how do you measure your success? Not like this. We’ve all been in these meetings where somebody says something that doesn’t mean anything. So this used the Da domain authority.

Like how many links do you have pointing to your website that’s like, oh, my Da has gone up. It’s like, great, we’ve got a link from blah blah blah, stupid random blog that nobody really cares about. Our Da has gone up. The domain authority is a kind of approximation. Lots of tools, particularly SEMrush, make about how many links you’ve got.

It is not related to anything Google doesn’t use Da. Nobody really cares about Da. But people get very obsessed about you still get people selling you blogs and we’ll give you 50 links on our website. Our website has a Da of 52. Like that means anything, so don’t do that. He would all be in a meeting. Our bounce rate has gone down to 23%.

So 12 on your keywords rank like nobody cares about these things. Like you’ve all gone in like talking about the wrong metrics and like in the meetings, we’ve all been there. Like, what people want to know about is this stuff, the little sack of money at the bottom so you can talk about all these things in marketing. And I think this is a good marketing funnel.

I’ll come onto the what they want 12 new keywords rank on page one. Great. Are they relevant ones for our audience? Are those people coming to our website buying our stuff? Are they booking meetings with us? Are they taking a free trial? Are they doing something? Are they getting closer to giving us money? Our Da has gone up to 49.

Whatever it is, who cares? Does that mean we’re getting more money? That’s what. That’s the kind of conversations you want to be having. And you can map all of this stuff to C.O. stuff. So awareness. Like, have people heard of you? Are you visible in the search rankings? So when people go and look for best coworking events in Northampton, do you show up?

Are you there at all? Are you visible? And then the consideration is then do they come and search for you by name? So now they’ve heard about you and they’re like, yeah, okay, I can’t, I can’t make it to this one. But they come back in a week and they go, what’s that thing Cowork Crew something. Now they’ve heard of you.

You’ve got the name in there. So you can again you can measure all these things. You can measure how many people search for you. You can measure how many people search for your brand name. You can measure how many people are signing up for your email lists and your social media kind of things. And of course, you can measure conversions.

You can measure how many people are clicking through to your checkout, how many people are buying things, and lots of people come and they go up. I don’t think, you know, there is no checkout on my website, but it’s like, okay, well, how many people are filling out your contact form or how many people are clicking directions to your venue or how many people are going downloading your brochure because that brings them a step closer.

If they’re like, well, maybe it’s a wedding venue, it’s 20 grand, you’re going to drop it. It’s not an impulse purchase. You’re not going to go check out 20 grand. Yeah, fine. Maybe you would, but not I wouldn’t. But you download the brochure, it brings you a step closer. You can measure all that stuff too. And then loyalty.

So they come back. Do they really nice reviews. Do you get like five star recommendations? All those kind of things. All of that stuff you can measure. Hopefully. I’ve talked to you a little bit about most of these things. If I haven’t come and talk to me afterwards, my last little bit is a little plug. So I do a service called SEO Power Hours.

So my kids told me this. Apparently I should call it the SEO roast because that’s what I basically what I do is I criticize your website. So if you want me to professionally criticize your website and tell you all the things that if it was my website, I would fix and in what order, this is the service for you.

So normally I charge 195 pounds. If you say that you came to the Cowork Crew, I’ll do it for you for 150. So yeah, you want me off website professionally roasted? I’ve recorded. Basically I record a video of me on loom going through your website pointing at things, saying this shouldn’t work, this should do this, this should do this.

And you know, you’ll get actual, actionable things you can do about it, what you do with that. But you don’t have to share anyone. If that video is like makes you die inside a little bit because you’re so embarrassed, it was just between you and me. It’s fine if you then want to share that video with all your colleagues and say, can we fix these things also, up to you at the end.

Last slide to give. You want all the links and things, all that.