 I'm actually getting a real kick out of being back at WordCamp again this year. I grew up in Hamilton. I used to walk right by this building every day on my way to school every day. So this is kind of a neat homecoming. I've been working with WordPress since about 2009. I've been on the web since 1996, which makes me kind of one of the old farts in this area of the industry. But what keeps me fascinated about SEO is the fact that it is always changing. It is always adapting. It is always moving forward. And the downside to that is there's so much uncertainty on an almost constant basis. But the question this year is, I've got a clicker that's not working. Does it seem like this year has been even worse than usual for updates and changes and just, my God, the sky is falling, kinds of adaptations to SEO? The reality is that level of change presents all kinds of opportunities. But it's also pretty intimidating because we have to keep up. And I'm going to give you the first piece of critical information about how to handle SEO in 2019. This is like the first tweet bite of the afternoon, are you ready? Don't let yourself get overwhelmed. Accept the fact that we're now in an era where Google is finally walking its talk, all the things that it's been saying it's going to do and that it values for a long time, it's finally putting the actual systems in place to value those things in its search results. And we have to keep up. There is real opportunity. It is overwhelming. So don't think that you can take the risk to just turn your back and hope that you don't have to pay any attention to it, okay? We need to hit a balance. And I'm serious when I say don't freak out. Adaptation is the key to survival, both for your sanity and for your success with SEO. It's just the way it goes. So what we want to do today is get a really clear understanding of the implications of what has changed in the last year. And then we're going to get a rock solid set of strategies and tactics for how to adapt our WordPress websites to either mitigate against problems or actually take advantage and gain some benefits and leverage over our competition that we're trying to rank against. If that sounds like a good plan, we're going to hit these as the main topics, the main areas of SEO that have seen really large changes in the last year. It's pretty clear as we go through the presentation, there will be some fairly text heavy slides. I wanted to give you some really good plans and processes to work with. Don't worry about having to write them down. There will be a link at the end of the presentation to grab this online. And there's also a page at the end of the presentation with all of the links and resources typed out there. So don't worry about trying to grab that now. There are also some pages that I will just reference as being a resource for you to look at later. I'm not going to cover all the information in it. I just wanted to give it to you as a step by step resource. That said, the one element of this that I won't cover specifically is the major changes to the essential tools. That's not going to be a standalone section. I'm going to refer to those as we get to each area that we're talking about and how the tools that are related to that area have been updated to refocus what we're doing. The obvious place to start is with mobile. For years, the search engines, Google and Bing and everybody else, has been telling us that mobile is the way they want to move towards understanding the web. This last year, since March of 2018, they've finally actually done it. They have built their system to think like a mobile user instead of like a desktop user. Starting in 2019, we moved to the mobile first index. That's Google saying that Googlebot crawler, that piece of software that they send around the web to discover your website and learn about it, it now operates entirely as a mobile crawler. It's looking at all the mobile aspects. It's identifying itself as a mobile crawler. That's the way it thinks about the web. That's the way it wants to think about the web. As the search engine understands the mobile aspects of your website, they're even measuring your desktop version against that mobile process. So your desktop version is living or dying by how well your mobile version is optimized. Does that make anybody a little nervous? Because it means that we don't get to say, well, you know, everything looks great on desktop, so I'm sure mobile's OK because Google's going to say, yeah, I'm looking at your mobile website and no, I'm just not happy here. A desktop user may love you, but a mobile user is not going to be happy. And there can be lots of reasons for it. But the key is to identify whether you've moved to the mobile first index. The measurement was, is your desktop site functionally and content essentially identical to your mobile site? If you are, they said, fine, we just move you to the mobile first index. You should have received an email in your Google search console when that happened. The other easy way to tell for sure is you can log into Google search console and request indexing of any page you want. When that index report comes back, it'll tell you what user agent crawled the page. And if it says Googlebot smartphone, welcome to the mobile first index. So that's the way you can tell for sure. If you're not there now, you're on your way very soon, so start planning and getting ready for it. As of just this week, Google announced on Tuesday any new website created after the 1st of July will automatically start by being in the mobile first index. They will never see the desktop index. When it comes to the content on mobile, as we start thinking like a mobile visitor, we have to do all of those things that a desktop user doesn't have to worry about. We've got a small viewport. We've got a whole lot of scrolling. We've got to organize all this data. Start doing that from the perspective of a mobile visitor first. I will give you one caveat. If you truly do not get a significant percentage of mobile visitors to your website, you still have to do this optimization to make sure the search engine is happy with you, but it becomes less critical for your visitor because fewer of them are going to see it. One little caveat, though. I've had lots of clients say, oh, we don't get any mobile visitors to our website. It's like, yeah, that's because your mobile version sucks rocks. When we fix it, you suddenly find that 15 or 20% more people and more page views are coming from mobile. So don't turn the cart before the horse and say, we don't need mobile because nobody uses their site on mobile. It's maybe the reason they're staying away is because they can't. The other big change, for a long time, anything that was hidden from the user on first load of a page, Google did not give it significant ranking authority. That has changed. Basic accordions, basic tabs and things, those are essential usability features to make mobile readable. Google has said we'll start considering that content. Don't hide it behind JavaScript interactions. CSS and stuff, great. If you put it behind JavaScript, there's a chance Google will not process it. They will try to, and you're going to hear this refrain a number of times today, lots of the stuff I'm talking about, you will hear Google say, do your best, but if you don't want to do anything about it, we can usually figure it out. Don't let Google try to figure it out. Feed them exactly what you need them to have. Because they will get it wrong at least as often as they get it right. Sorry, I'm going to need you to do it really out. Yeah, that's great. As long as the Googlebot doesn't have, the Googlebot is trying to run JavaScript. But if they don't have to run it to see the content in the first place, that's even better. But we know, you get one of those great, big, long FAQ pages. If you don't put those into an accordion or a roll-up, oh my god, the person's thumb is going to get fatigued by the time they get finished the rest of the roll. I'm just going to give you this one as a reference point. Font size and size of icons have to be way bigger than you could possibly think that they need to be. As big as you think they need to be, double it. It's the simple truth. Google's done the measurements of how big people's thumbs are. 72 by 72 pixels for a tap target. Without those, you'll get a little warning in Google Search Console that says, the mobile-friendly content of your page is compromised. That's probably what's happening. Same thing with font size. Make it good and big. Here's a real kicker. Second layer of this process of Google saying, we only exist on the web now as assessing the mobile approach. Starting in July last year, all speed assessment is based on a mobile crawler and a mobile view of your pages. We have to start looking at all of the aspects of the speed of our page using mobile-based tools, not using the traditional old desktop tools. We have to switch, because Google has. The same situation still holds, as what I mentioned last year. Speed is not a massive ranking factor. You're not going to jump up 10 places in the search results by making your site go from 4 and 1⁄2 seconds to 3 and 1⁄2 seconds. When you go from 20 seconds to 6 seconds, that's going to make a difference. But don't waste your time, nickel and diming tens of seconds if you think you're doing it for ranking, because it's just not going to have that kind of effect. But boy, how do you do the user's care? So the big focus on speed is to keep the user's happy. This is just going to give you a summary of the most direct things you can do to a mobile page to get the kind of performance Google is going to require. A lot of these are most easily handled for those of us who aren't developers by a good solid caching plug-in. They will handle browser caching, they will handle some minification of some of your JavaScript, some of the better ones will allow you to move your JavaScript to the footer of the page, or to not even load it on the page. If your page doesn't have a contact form on it, please, please don't load the JavaScript for your contact form and waste that extra load time. There are a lot of elements of your website that you will realize plug-ins are trying to load on every page, even though the page isn't using them. Find those and tell the system to not load them. You will be amazed at how much you can speed up some of your most critical pages. The big difference, and I mentioned this last year and it's great because you say something and you're saying, I don't have Google's proof of this, but every indication I've got says this is true, and then this year I can stand up and say, guess what? Google just said it's true. Google has changed the focus of what they care about for page speed. They don't care about total load time because they know users don't care. We as a visitor on our phone hitting a web page, we don't give a rat's tiny-hiny how long it takes for that footer stuff to load. We want to know that we can start reading the top of the page within a second or two. That's called time to contentful first paint. It's the time that we start getting a signal that this page is going to be useful to us. And then there are some other load times that become useful to us as well. And as I mentioned with the tools, Google has completely re-engineered the page speed insights tool, its own page measurement tool, page speed measurement tool, to reflect this change. So now when you look at page speeds insights, anybody that heard me speak last year, the big problem with this tool is it didn't actually report speed. Nowhere on the page did it say how many seconds your page load took. It does now. But look at the page speeds that it reports. First contentful paint, first meaningful paint, which means that the page is starting to become interactive. And then you've got some other ones like first CPU idle and estimated input latency. If you really want to get geeky, dive into those and read the definitions of them. But if you've got a page on mobile that is becoming contentful first paint aware in less than two seconds, we're good. The user is going to experience that as close enough to instantaneous that they're going to be OK. When it starts dragging beyond three seconds, we need to start figuring out whether we should simplify the page. I mean, the honest truth is we need to start building simpler websites. For people that are trying to read a website on that viewport, the Dancing Macaroni just doesn't cut it. Depending on their search, depending on what the topic is, they don't want to be entertained. They want to be educated fast in and out. Get what I need and go. Because particularly on a mobile device, not only is it small, but they're using it when they're on the go. They're not sitting at a desk where they've just spent an hour perusing YouTube videos on instructional stuff. They want a quick hit of that information as fast as they can get it so they can act on it and get moving. That's intent. And we're going to cover that in a second. This top section here, if your site gets enough traffic and is well known enough to Google, there will actually be measurements of Google's understanding of the speed of your page. Like it'll actually pull from the Google Experience Index, which comes from their browser tool bar. Most of us are working without that information. So we're working with Contentful Paint. This information, on first load, is based on a typically 4G mobile speed connection. It's not using a fast database connection. So don't be freaked out when you've got a much slower result here than you're used to with the desktop. You can actually toggle it. Top left-hand corner. You can toggle between mobile and desktop. But do be aware that Google's kind of taking a worst-case scenario for mobile connection speed and saying, we're going to base it on 1.2 megabits per second, I think, is what they're connecting at. So if you know that the vast majority of your customer base is working in a city, like Hamilton or Toronto or something like that, they're probably at LTE speeds, we're going to look at a different way to test that to get a clearer idea rather than Google's worst-case scenario. But know that that's going to freak you out at first because you're going to go, man, is my page slow. That's why. The second aspect of this, you can get those page speed insights measurements from inside your own browser. The developer tools in Chrome now incorporate what's called a lighthouse audit. And it does exactly the same speed measurements as you just saw from the page speed insights tool. Right-click, select Inspect in your browser, and you can ask for a lighthouse audit. It's also going to give you some really good stuff around SEO. It's going to give you some really good stuff around usability. It'll even do a really rudimentary accessibility audit for you. You're going to need to do more than just what Chrome will give you for your accessibility audit, but it's a really good starting point on a flag. You can set that test on your own browser to run at your native internet connection speed. So that would test the desktop speed. But that's not what we're focusing on. So you can also set it to use what's called the applied 3G speed, which is just like a fast 3G. So again, keep in mind, that's a worst case scenario. If that test is giving you three seconds, you're probably survivable. If you're down at two seconds with that test, oh, I want to meet the guy who wrote your site, because that's impressive. If you want to do one-off testing of individual pages, webpagetest.org, for example, you can set the connection speeds. I can do my testing from a server in Toronto, so if my customers are local, I'm going to test from a local server. But I can configure the connection speed to LTE. That's going to throttle that connection to give me speed results as if I had been using an LTE phone. Unfortunately, it doesn't let us actually use a device that is a phone. I mean, a phone is a little bit less powerful to process for JavaScript and stuff. We can't do that with it yet. But this will give you a really good idea, run over a couple of tests, two or three tests, and running repeat tests to see how well your caching is working, to see how your phone-based speed is working one page at a time. So this, combined with PageSpeed Insights, gives you a pretty good bookend of best case scenario, worst case scenario, and you probably live somewhere in the middle. This is my favorite way as an SEO, because I don't want to have to go to a completely different testing program to be able to test my site in mobile. This is Chrome Tools again. This is Chrome Developer Tools. When you get into the Developer Tools section, that bottom left-hand corner, you can see the too little, it's supposed to look like a mobile phone overlaid over a tablet. When you click on that, you can then select what device you want it to pretend to be, and what network connection speed you want it to pretend to be, and then you can browse your entire website by clicking anywhere. I mean, you navigate your website just as if it was on your phone. But it means you've got all your tools. You can use your inspection tools. You can use all the DevTools that you normally use to look at that content that you don't have installed on your phone. It's not perfect. It's not flawless, but it's a really good way to start that process of saying, I want to pay more attention to the way my mobile device or my site renders on mobile than on desktop. Because by default, we fire up our browser to check out how things are on our website, and it defaults to desktop view. And we all are so programmed to assess our websites based on the desktop view as you were talking about this morning. Get the content first, and then fit the content into the presentation on the website. Well, you'll suddenly start realizing that a lot of that critical content, you've got to really simplify the layout of the page. And don't fall into the trap of saying, oh, well, the big fancy dancing macaroni and stuff, we'll just hide it on mobile. Because you know what it does? It hides it from view, but it all still has to download through the bandwidth in the back end. And you're going to load up this great big bulky page with a great big slow load time, even though it's only got three paragraphs of content. So actually put the content in your mobile version that the site needs to have, and then re-adapt it for desktop. But this tool is one of the fastest ways to start thinking about your website like a mobile user, rather than constantly switching from phone to your screen, and phone to your screen, and back and forth. You can do it both in the same place. Lots of talk in the last six months or so about voice search. I want to make really clear the difference between voice search and voice results. Because voice search we need to start optimizing for and dealing with right now. Like we need to have been doing it for the last six months. Voice results for most of us, we need to start building a plan. Let's put it that way. We need to start planning for it, but the implementation isn't likely to need to happen in 2019 for most of us. So the difference is voice search is what we currently do on the phone. You tap the Google Assistant on your phone, or you tap the microphone, and you dictate best pizza place in Westdale. That's voice search, but it still gives you the same traditional results back. You get a page of search results that you then scan down, and you've got those top three in the local pack of the top, and then you've got a bunch of links to other websites. So you're still seeing a choice of results, and then you make your pick of which of those results come from there. That's not what happens with things like Alexa and Google Home. You are asking it a question, and it is picking one result out of the entire internet to dictate back to you. It's a very different process. We're not there yet for most of us with our websites. We're just not. I mean, the typical smaller business websites or local websites or blogs, people aren't using their Alexa devices to ask questions that our types of businesses sites would answer yet. But we're getting there. I mean, you just watch the numbers of the devices being bought and sold. You can really see we're getting there. One thing to really watch out for in terms of deciding when you need to move on the implementation, the stats that they talk about about the amount of usage that those devices get includes the really typical, what I call, personal service queries. What's the temperature today? How long does it take to drive to Toronto? All of those kinds of questions that are just informational. No website needs to answer that question. They're the same things. If you type them into a search engine, you get the answer right in the search results page. So don't be thrown off by, oh, the volume of these queries is getting massive. Yeah, but are they queries that people would be looking for my kind of content for? Probably not yet. How do we optimize for these? People use conversational question language to ask their phone for information. So start using those same phrases in our content. It used to be that we would say pizza Westale. If we were typing it into a browser, we'd say pizza Westale, and we start looking for all the pizza places in Westale. Now, we actually ask, where's the best pizza place near me? That's the actual search phrase that we now need to optimize for. We're not optimizing for pizza Westale. We're optimizing for where is the best pizza near me. Going to give you some hints as to how to go about doing that. How do we tell exactly what those phrases are? We can't yet. Google Search Console isn't dividing them out separately. Boy, have I got my fingers crossed they will get around to doing that, but we're just not there yet. So everybody think good thoughts for Google adding that to the process. We can also help Google understand the content for those kinds of questions by using effective headers, just straight HTML composition of your page. Good H1s, H2s, H3s, organize them as sub headers. Get your schema markup in there. We're going to jump on that one. Voice results is a lot of that same information as voice questions, but we're going to have to be even more careful with our schema markup, because Google needs to really understand the content of a page before it can decide to dictate it back. This is why I say, plan it this year, but you're not likely to need implementation until next year. The obvious next step since we've just started talking about how do you decide what words to use to answer those kinds of mobile questions is we've got to start getting into a conversation about content quality. And the last three updates, major algorithm updates that Google has made, have been entirely focused on understanding the quality of our websites. This is really different. This is the abilities that they've developed, because of RankBrain and all kinds of machine learning and a whole lot of extra capabilities they're building into the search engine to understand language the way we as humans understand it. The downside to this is Google is no longer announcing their algorithm updates, because they know they freak everybody out. They're only mentioning it if they think there's something specific that certain site owners might actually be able to do about it. So an example would be, we've just released the latest algorithm update, which is designed to penalize websites using PBNs, private blog networks, artificial linking, manipulative linking. They're going to announce that because somebody could sit down and say, OK, if I do some research on my website, I can find out that the last guy that did SEO was using some of these manipulative looking techniques, and if I clean them up, this problem will go away. But the general quality stuff, they're just saying, this is us. This is what we do know. We make our search engine assess the quality of pages. Don't let yourself go down the rabbit holes of really specific individual changes, because Google keeps changing their mind. The business with meta-description length. We went from 160 to 300 characters. Now we're back to short characters again. Give it some time. If you see a major drop or surge on your website, give it some time. This is becoming the common aspect of the algorithm. So don't keyword for the day. Don't freak out. Give it some time to see whether it stabilizes. The other aspect, just from this last two weeks, Google's having some real problems with their index. They had to freeze their index for almost a week because somebody broke it on the back end. They deleted a whole section of the staging database. They've had problems with Google Search Console. So if your data seems really weird or really unusual, give it some time before you start making changes because you may be reacting to artificial glitches. The beauty of this question is Google has actually, I love the expression, opened the kimono. They are publishing their quality raters guidelines. It's a PDF, it's about 100 pages long, and it's their description of exactly what they consider to be a top quality website. This quote is from Ben Gomes. It's not the ranking process. It's what they use to inform how the ranking process should deliver results. So they use it to train actual humans who they then assign to look at a whole bunch of websites. And then they tell the algorithm to assess those websites. They take the ratings from the humans and they compare them. And they say, hey, if there's a big discrepancy between what our algorithm thought of this page and what the humans thought about it, we need to adjust the algorithm. Either we didn't catch a whole bunch of crap that the human users think is terrible, or we thought this was a terrible page and the human users are saying, no, this is exactly answered the question that was necessary. So I know it sounds like the SEO geek coming out in me, but take a Sunday afternoon and just open that thing up and start reading through it. I mean, it's got amazing sections. It's got a whole section specifically describing what constitutes a low quality page. I don't even have to guess anymore. In a way, that used to be the secret sauce of an SEO. We'd hit enough of these problems. We hit enough of these problems that we could interpret and interpolate what might be the problem. Now we can just go to the pages. Oh, well, Google says that if it's thin content, if it's fewer than 20 or 30 words on a page and it seems to have been copied from another website and it doesn't contribute anything material to the knowledge of the topic at hand, we consider that a low quality page. It's like, okay, every page on my website that meets that description, I'm now going to go and delete. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, louder, please. Oh, it's the Google Search Quality Raiders guidelines. There'll be a link for it at the end of the presentation. So it both shows what constitutes a good page and what constitutes a bad page. We have to start being more strict about what we put on our websites because Google is starting to care. It used to be if it was low quality stuff, it just didn't do you any good. Now it's actively working against you. It's diluting the quality of the page. So how do we deal with it? Update it and improve it. If you've got content that has been written six months ago that is about a topical thing that's still going on, go and rewrite it. Add some new resources, update the images, make sure the links all still work or find better links to better resources. Do a rewrite of it. You can even add schema into the back end of it to tell Google that it's been updated. Google will recognize they'll see the changes. But if it's not good quality content, improve it or get rid of it. And you can get rid of it by either no indexing. If it's still useful to a human user for some reason, but the search engines shouldn't know about it, you can no index it. You can redirect it, although be careful. If it's really crappy quality, you're just redirecting the crappy quality signals to a better page. Or just nuke it, simply delete it and let the search engines find a 404. They're gonna say, hey, this wasn't any use to me in the first place. I don't mind that it's gone. The specific types of pages to watch for, anything that has really, really small amounts of content on the page. Now, if this is a functional navigational page on your website, fine. But if you have been grabbing a typical example as people grab, they use if this then that to grab tweets and stick tweets on a page, one page at a time. We had a site that had 4,000 pages that were one tweet long per page. That's just, Google doesn't care for that stuff. And they're now saying, if you've got 5,000 pages on your website and 4,000 are this tweet crap, we're in trouble. Because they're not gonna say, we'll just ignore the 4,000 and we'll give you credit for the 1,000 good ones. They're gonna say no, those 4,000 crappy ones overshadow all the work you did on the 1,000 that are good. WordPress specifically has some challenges with this. They tend to create duplicate content around things like tags, categories, and category archives. So date-based archives, author-based archives. Either beef up those pages, customize them so that they have some solid introductory content explaining what the value of that category is or no index them. Category pages can be great landing pages but you have to customize them. Tag pages, I have found one site in 15 years of doing WordPress SEO that was worth keeping the tag pages indexed. So they're a pretty good candidate. But watch for those kinds of things where it's the same content from somewhere else on the website but formatted differently and presented in a different order or organized by author, that kind of thing. Those are created by WordPress by default. We need to adjust them to get rid of them. Screaming Frog, really good crawling tool. Rick talked about it this morning. It's my Swiss Army knife. The free version will let you work with about 100 pages of a website. The paid version, I will argue against Rick's comment and say for 150 pounds a year, I couldn't do without it because it will integrate your Google Analytics and Google Search Console results. So when I wanna know pages that the search engine seems to think are low quality, I can actually ask Screaming Frog to show me the top 50 pages, sorry, the bottom 50 pages in terms of pages that haven't received any links or any traffic from the search engines in the last six months or nine months. And I can look at those pages and say, okay, well, some of them it's because they're about Christmas and Christmas was a year ago. But boy, out of those 50 pages, I've got 30 pages there. The reason nobody's visited them is because they're crap and I can do without them, okay? I know none of us have the luxury of having all the time in the world to do what we wanna do for SEO. So this kind of process can let you pick the 50 things to focus on instead of the 500 things you don't have time for. How do we actually improve the content of the pages? Okay, this is where we get going. The intent of the content is way more important to Google now than it ever used to be. Are they just looking for general information to study a topic, to get more information about a topic? Are they researching a product to get ready to buy it? Are they looking for a site to buy what they already know they want? Or in the case of, sorry, of, yeah, sorry, transactional is the ready to buy. Investigational is they're doing the research to find out what product they might want but they're not buying yet. And the results, the way you target those things would be very different. So for example, if somebody's looking for the best compact camera, that's their search term, Google's not gonna give them a page of product results. There will be probably a carousel at the top of products, but the blog pages, the pages that it's gonna return are gonna be review sites. They're gonna be opinion sites. That's the content you need to write to go after the intent of that keyword. If you think you're gonna win by getting two or three pages of your phone products listed as a result of that search, you've mismatched the intent and Google's gonna ignore you. We need to change the way we approach content research. And this is really hard. This is as tough a thing to change as the switch that we have to make for going from mobile, going from typically thinking of our websites from desktop to going to mobile, okay? We're not working with individual keywords. Google has figured out that a way to understand beyond just sticking keywords in the right places at the right time. Okay, over a third of Google queries in any one day are more than four words long. So people aren't searching for digital camera. They're searching for best digital camera for kids, right? That's the way we need to start thinking about our content. It's no longer working if we just want to get, if we think of our webpage as a jigsaw puzzle and if we just put the right words in the right slots on the page, the whole thing will come together and give us rankings because that's not Google's intent anymore. They've moved way beyond that and put a lot of time, money and engineering resources into getting a holistic human understanding of the content. So instead, we need to be optimizing and building content for concepts, okay? Topics, ideas, problems, what we're solving, that's the content that Google now considers high quality and it values, okay? This is the idea that the simple keyword is now expanding, Google wants to know about its synonyms. If you're writing a page, Google now has a pre-existing set of conditions that it thinks are already related to that topic and it expects you to include them and if you don't, your page can't score as well. This is called semantically related terms. They're a really easy example. If I've got two pages and in my mind, I'm thinking both pages target the word Apple. If this page also includes the words, cinnamon, crust, oven and 350 degrees and this page includes Steve Jobs, iOS, share price and phone, it's the same word but it's the semantically related terms give a completely different meaning to the page. That's tough for us because we gotta start figuring out what are all those terms that are related to what I'm trying to talk about and how do I know which ones to include, right? That's the level, that's the way to move to the next level is let's talk about some tools, some specific ways of doing that. First one is let the SERPs answer your question. SERP is S-E-R-P, search engine results page. Google's now putting a whole bunch of stuff on those search results pages to tell us what it thinks is connected to the topic we're researching. They're doing the work for us and they're actually reporting it, okay? So this is just autocomplete. If you start typing in your search and stop partway through, it'll try and guess what you're asking for and it'll tell you a whole bunch of stuff that it thinks might answer your question. We've got the same thing with people also ask sections, okay? And if you click on the people also ask, it actually expands to give you six more results. Same thing with the people also search for, the section at the bottom of the page. The great thing is we can now grab a tool to do most of the work for gathering this stuff for us. We can, if we install this Keywords Everywhere search extension every time you do a search on a SERP on a search results page, it'll stick this little sidebar box in there and it'll amalgamate and total up all of the information from those separate components of the page and let you export it as a CSV. That's Google telling you, these are the semantically related terms to what you just asked for. You can do the same sort of process in Google Search Console. The new Search Console will let you ask to show you a page on your website and then list all of the search terms that people have actually been exposed to that page for. You will find some real gems in there that will really surprise you. You'll see words that you didn't think were related but suddenly they are. So in this case, I'm not sure how clearly you can see it. This is a best races to qualify for Boston Marathon. And there's the typical ones in best marathon qualifying for English, blah, blah, blah. So the first one actually includes the year. Oh, gee. I guess if I wanna be relevant, if I'm, this is obviously something that changes from year to year. Google's gonna expect me to be up to date. This one blew me away. I had no idea that racers referred to the Boston Marathon as BM. There's 435 searches a month using that short form. We already had a really good well ranking page for this content, but when I went back to the content folks on the website and said, please, a couple of times on the page where you refer to the Boston Marathon, just shorten it to BM. Because Google now understands that that phrase is directly related to what I'm looking for. We've also got things like the fastest marathon courses. It doesn't even mention Boston, but Google has figured out that somebody who wants to qualify for Boston, the easiest way to do it is to run a marathon that is already typically fast in the first place, right? And then the last one is just location qualifying times. Or sorry, I can't even read it myself. Just Boston qualifying times. So Google's actually expecting you to list what the times are for this year's race, okay? Answer the public, another superb tool. You enter a topic, it will generate all of the questions related to that topic in all kinds of different ways. The who, what, where, when, why, how, it will pull all of that information from Google's automatic index and Bing's automatic index and give you a list of those answers. Okay, that's gonna give you an idea of how you can use some of those kinds of questions. So this is us finding out the longer phrases and related terms that people actually use to ask for what they're going for. Remember I said the tools are adapting? Yoast has just put a whole lot of work into their SEO tool, particularly the Pro tool that now understands and recommends semantically related terms. Even the basic version will now take into account synonyms instead of giving you a fail on the content of your page because it says it doesn't include enough of the keyword. It's gonna recognize that synonyms count as the keyword. So we're getting at much more towards what the search engines think rather than hitting all those green lights. Site architecture is really tough. The more complex our websites get, the harder a time Google has understanding how our pages relate to each other. So we have to give it as much help as possible. Okay, we need to make clear the relationships between pages. The easiest way to do that is with the original site architecture. So in this case, typical WordPress setup is just slash post name. That's a completely flat architecture. There's no implied relationship between pages. If we can get subtopics and subsubtopics into the structure of the directories of the page, Google starts to understand a little bit better. The absolute gold standard is just internal linking. How you link from one page to the next tells Google which pages you think are related to each other. That's probably the weakest and easiest to fix component of anybody's website. Start thinking of what the, excuse me, of what the primary page is, what the most authoritative, you know, broadest page is, and really optimize it. And you know, consider making it a page instead of a post. But then when you write blog posts that are about that topic, link them to that primary page. You've heard it called cornerstone content or pillar content, right? Let the internal linking show the search engines how all of these pages that are, you know, about a similar topic all link to this one primary page. Okay, well this primary page becomes the one to rank for the hardest search terms and all of these guys get to rank for their longer simpler terms. We've got to make sure that the search engines can find our stuff. Okay, they have to be able to get through the website. The crawler will only work so hard and then it will just go somewhere else. And the way this works is what happens is the crawler traverses the page and just traverses the website and follows all the links and follows your site map and tries to discover all of your pages. But at that point all it says is, I know this page exists. I don't know anything about it. I haven't assessed that it's quality or not. I just know it exists. The next level as it has time is it will process the pages and it will develop them for the index. And that's deciding is this thing valuable enough to actually put into the search index? And then the last stage that happens just as somebody types in their request is it will compare a whole bunch of possible indexed pages for the best result and it'll return that as the ranking, okay? So what we wanna do is use the new Google Search Console coverage report because it actually has a report called discovered but not indexed. We never had that before. This is, I mean, those of you who heard me speak last year I said, you know, the new version of Google Search Console just isn't there yet. So we're gonna keep focusing on the old version. Yeah, not anymore. Everything's gone from the old version so we're now in the new one. Okay, this is Google's tool forcing us in the direction that they want us to consider important. This is the report. I've got 50,000 pages on this site that are marked as excluded. And all down this section it's giving me all the reasons why some of those pages aren't there. Everything from submitted URL is marked no index. Well, that might be a good thing. That's probably the pages that I did that to on purpose but I'm gonna review it and make sure I didn't goof and block some stuff accidentally. Submitted URL has crawl issues. I'm gonna get in and see what it tells me about what the crawl issues for and see if I can fix them. But the one in particular that I'm looking at here is excluded by no index. Okay, we know that might be good news. Discovered but currently not indexed 7,600 pages. I'm gonna start looking at those. Some of them it may be perfectly legit. I'm gonna look at them and go, yeah, my privacy policy page. I'm not surprised that's not indexed. I'm not gonna worry about that. But you'll start discovering patterns to these pages that Google's saying, hey, I know all about this thing and I don't think it's worth putting in the index. Okay, then I'm gonna start diving into all of those other quality methods that we talked about and figure out how to turn that into something that Google cares about enough to index. And once I've made those changes, each page as I click on them, there's actually a little button that says resubmit to the index, which is asking Google to reconsider the fact that they've excluded it, okay? Another element here, I'm gonna move through these quickly because the slides are fairly self-explanatory. Schema markup is you using data and code to explain to the search engines exactly what a piece of data means. So if the search engine sees that number, it's got no idea what that number refers to. But as soon as you mark it up with schema, oh, phone number, okay. We can do the same thing with all kinds of different content. We can do it with events, products, recipes. Just in the last six months, FAQs and how-to pages. You wanna get those voice search results? Have the markup on your page that says, this is a page that answers this question. Here is the question, here is the answer. Like you can't get any more clear instructions to the search engine than that, okay? You can also mark up the different architectural aspects of your page. You can mark up your breadcrumbs. So search knows how to use those in search results. You can also mark yourself up as a person, as an organization, or as a local business. And those are really critical for the search engine understanding how to credit you. There's the structure data testing tool once you get it configured. A lot of this you can pull from plugins. The better plugins for events or products or whatever, they will include the markup. The better SEO plugins are starting to incorporate a lot of that markup in them as well. This is Google's own tool. There's a link at the end of the thing to show you how to test. And this is what it does. It actually gives you a readout. And if you click on any of the right-hand side there, where there's a warning and an error, it'll highlight the code that it doesn't consider correct. Like it really helps the process. This report is also available in your new Google Search Console. It'll tell you pages that it thinks has problems with your schema. That's what you get as a result of having schema. This is a project that I've been working on and it's great. It's a really good example of what happens. So there's a rating schema. And that's in addition because there's event schema on the page. There's a page that only has product schema or rating schema. And look at the one in between that doesn't have any schema at all. They all have the same markup on the page because I built it. We can't count on Google honoring our requests to get those reach snippets. We can give it the best information we can and cross our fingers and hope for the best. And it'll develop over time. This is a very recent project. Local search optimization has really shifted because Google wants to be your homepage or your catalog. If you're a local business, Google is saying if you type in the topic of the business or you look for that topic in a map or you hit, excuse me, you hit the search result itself, they want, if you're looking for the phone number to book that haircut, they want to show you the result on their page and keep you there until you find the phone number and then you click the phone number and you get to the hair salon. They don't want to send you to the hair salon's website and then the hair salon lists their phone number and go. We have to be aware of that. We may not like it, but we have to fight that battle. This is especially applicable on mobile because it's location dependent. If you're looking for a pizza place, the search engine is going to recognize I'm in Westdale and it's going to give me recommendations close to me. I'm going to have a really hard time competing from the East End of Hamilton if somebody's standing outside the front door on Longwood Road saying, that's pizza. Yep, that's right. So this is what it's going to look like. When you do a search, you'll get that three pack at the top either on your phone or on desktop. And when you click on one of the elements in that three pack, this is the stuff that comes up. But in the last six months, Google's given us a raft of really useful new stuff. And the expression I use is, don't bring a knife to a gunfight. If that content is all available there, your competitors are going to use it. Somebody's going to out optimize you if you don't do the work yourself and you can't afford to give them that advantage. So this gives you some point forms of some of the stuff that you need to get set up in there. A lot of that information is coming from, right? So if you look here, you've got things like address, reservation addresses, phone number. There's a whole lot of information on there. It's all coming from your Google My Business profile. And in addition, the schema markup that you put on the page, that local business schema, okay? You can now put your own posts on that page. I think the site that I gave the example. Yeah, they have a post from Aberdeen Tavern. They have from Aberdeen Tavern, a big city dining experience. You can publish a post and it will show up right there in the search engine results. You can't pass that up. You can make it an event. You can list a product in there. Really get creative and think about how you can use those. We've had really good luck making the photo that goes with a post look like a call to action button. Don't make it an illustration. Like make it a solid background with the arrow and the click here for today's special. It's not a pretty photo, but the user doesn't care. They react to it as a call to action button. When you click on that result in the search results page, it's gonna show you this. Now there is a link at the top there for the website. If you click that, it'll send you out to the website. If they don't need to go to the website, if they're just looking for the phone number, they can click on the phone and it'll dial their mobile phone and they'll get to call for a reservation. Sorry, I can't hear you. Yeah, for a restaurant, that's true. There are certain kinds of queries that we would much rather have the visitor get to our website so that we can do a better job of selling them the end result. But a restaurant is a perfect example where most people will get what they need from the GMB results. Service area businesses have changed. If you're somebody who services people away from your local residence or address, make sure you go in and adjust it. It's now a different process than the old circle used to be. You actually have to list it by area code or by postal code. Getting that schema on your website, one of the sneaky things you can do, you can add your own questions and answers. You can put your own question in and then answer it yourself. So do the most important things related to your website. And then the sneaky part is get your friends to go in and upvote that question, okay? New citations, building content with local intent. If you're not gonna be blogging, do a couple of case studies for each of the neighborhoods where you do your work, okay? I'm gonna run through this really quickly because it's a resource for you when you look at the result offline at the end because this is just a summary and action plan of what we've been talking about. So for mobile, switch to those new tools. Get your content based on what a usable version for a mobile visitor will be. Get that content full first paint down to two seconds. When we get to voice search, go for those and start using those longer, more conversational questions as the leading point of the content that you're writing and get schema and page headings on there. Content quality, this is the stuff that we spend a fair bit of time on. Read the search quality raters guidelines. Like my God, there's no better Bible for us as website owners to understand what Google is going to reward on our websites. Create a process so that you have a way of getting the old content updated and upgraded. Don't just, oh, it's been a year and I just thought maybe I'll spend a Friday afternoon going through it. Put something in the calendar to make it a process. Get that content matching the intent. Look at the search result for the question that you're trying to optimize for and see what kind of pages come back and shift to that new research process of using concepts and topics rather than individual keywords. Site architecture, we covered pretty clearly. Schema, we just covered. Get the configuration for as many of those elements as apply to your content as possible. And watch for the new stuff coming out. There is voice search schema. It's only used for news websites at this point so don't pay any attention to it. Okay, and then local search. Get into your Google My Business console and start looking at all of the things that are there and figuring out how to use them. Just on Tuesday, mobile search results, you now have your little website favicon, favicon showing beside your website name. If you don't have one for your website, you get this boring little generic thing from Google that won't arrest people's attention. So simple little thing, if you don't have one, get it configured and get it installed on your site. There's the link to the resources page. Okay, so you can quickly get to all of the stuff and that's the link to the page itself that is loaded up on Slideshare and it's ready to go for you. So all of that information is there so that you can copy and paste and read it quickly instead of having to take it off a photo on the phone. Okay, I'm gonna say again, don't freak out. Know that these changes are going to continue and they're going to speed up and the best way to deal with them is to know that they present opportunities and you're gonna need to cherry pick the things you have the resources to address but as long as you work to that plan and pick the areas that you're gonna optimize in each section of your month, you can make some really good progress and you can start getting ahead of the folks who are like that little kid on the swing with his world going up in flames behind him. That's the majority of website owners. They're just hoping they can ignore it and keep swinging their swing but it's the folks that are diving into the frustration and the uncertainty and saying, okay, we can work with this. It's gonna be a little scary. It's gonna be uncomfortable but it is working with because the great thing is if it goes wrong, you just undo it and do something else. I mean, you try not to do that too often but you really have to overcome that idea now that a page is done when you publish it because six months from now you're gonna have to go back and do a bunch of new stuff to it because Google has re-adapted how they're gonna assess it. So don't freak out, stay patient, don't overreact but build a plan for the things that you do have the resources to tackle and go after them. That's how you'll get to success on SCL in 2019.