Seven Hills Search – Technical SEO

Chris Barnard: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Bear Business with me, Chris Barnard from FeedbackFans.com. Today my guest is Matthew Jones, founder of Seven Hill Search and Freelancing friends, Matt and I talk about the role of technical SEO, what it is and why it is important to have a solid technical foundation early on for your business. We also delve into how to measure SEO success effectively, and some quick wins that you can implement today.

Matthew Jones: So, hello listeners. I am Matt Jones. Uh, and as Chris said, I’m an independent technical SEO consultant. I’ve been doing marketing for around 11 years, which is probably 10 years longer than I want to admit. I’ve kind of worked the full range. So I started in house, I then moved kind of agency side and then. As much as we don’t like talking about it, kind of throughout that kind of COVID period when everyone was kind of working at home and we were kind of getting used to that kind of more remote work, kind of made the decision that it was probably about time to try the freelance route, see how I could do it myself. Um, kind of take that plunge and that was just over four years ago now. So I’d say it’s been relatively successful so far, hopefully, which is why I’m here four years later. But we all know the saying about small businesses and five years, so just gotta get through the next 12 months.

Chris Barnard: And I’m sure you’re gonna absolutely smash the next 12 months. And, and you mentioned your range of experiences there obviously got a, a breadth of experience across your professional career so far. Are there particular sectors that you enjoy working in more than others? Any particular, um, clients or, um, is it, is it particular relationships? Do you prefer it in-house or agency or are you preferring it in the new freelance role? Uh, what do you find that you enjoy the most as part of your, your business?

Matthew Jones: So I think when it comes to kind of the types of businesses that I enjoy working with. I can’t even really explain why, but e-commerce tends to be up there. I kind of enjoy working. It sounds like such a, a cliche spot. I enjoy working on any business ’cause they all come with their own challenges and I suppose that’s the beauty of an SEO in its nature. But with e-commerce sites, they generally tend to have quite a lot more widespread issues. So I think maybe it’s kind of that problem solving aspect of that. And I think when it comes to relationships, I would, I’d definitely say. The freelance is the one that I’ve enjoyed most, but I think that’s because you get the nice mixture from agencies and in-house. So all of them kind of have their own, obviously pros and cons. Freelance, the main con is, is obviously you are the, everyman you’re kind of working for yourself. You are the boss, but you are also you know, the assistant making the, the teas and coffees. So you are doing everything in between. So it is kind of a lot of getting used to at first and there’s no one else to really fall back on outside of if you’ve got an accountant that you pay, they’re the only person that can fall back on. Um, then when you kind of looking at in-house, it was. Yeah. I always find people, especially marketers that I’ve spoken to, generally tend to choose they prefer in-house or agency, but it’s quite clear cut for them. But I don’t think I ever really experienced that. I don’t know if it’s because. I spent such a shorter amount of time in-house than I did agency side, but I think with agent, uh, in-house, sorry, you can kind of be a lot more hands-on. That’s what I kind of enjoyed there. You are generally working a lot closer with all of the internal teams. So the main one, when you’re kind of looking at SEO, especially on the tech side, would be, developers, they become your kind of the group on the table that you want to become friends with, as if it’s like you’re back at school in the in the canteen and you’re like, that’s the group I need to be friends with. That’ll be the developers. But it’s nice that you kind of have. Generally a much easier way to kind of talk to them. You don’t have to go through as many channels. Sometimes you can just get out of your seat and go and talk to them. The issue there does sometimes become an, I always like to say it’s about who’s the best sales person internally, because obviously if you have got an internal development team, it’s coming up against. Every ticket that’s in the system, you’ll have ones that you’ve put in for SEO, there’ll be other marketing ones, but then you’re going to have everything else. So the product team are probably gonna have the same what they need. If you’ve got customer service team, there’s probably, um, tickets that have come from, maybe feedback they’ve got, for example. And a lot of it comes down to who can put across that point in the best way of how important everything is. And generally if you are in-house, sometimes you do see your ticket keep falling down and down the pecking order. So that’s probably the bigger con there. When you’re looking at agencies, if you are a fan of a wide variety of work and a fast paced, that’s where they kind of come into their own, because generally, and this isn’t every agency, but most that I know about you will average between maybe five to eight clients that you kind of look after. And a lot of that depends on kind of the size of those clients and kind of how much retainer time they’re taking, you know, but also your kind of role at the company as well. So if you are like a manager for example, or more senior, you might take on less clients because obviously you’ve got additional kind of responsibilities to take. But generally you’re kind of working across these clients and in most cases there are some specialized agencies that will just work with. Sector X or sector Y. But generally, if you’re working at an agency, let’s say you’ve got six clients, they might all be in complete different niches. So every day is different. They’ve got their own issues, and it’s kind of, you’d learn a lot more I think, about things that you never thought you would so I think in my career, I’ve done everything from. Kind of your local car mechanics to construction companies right through to kind of national e-com brands that, you know, we kind of use day in, day out or you know, even international brands as well sometimes and, and looking at kind of ground travel. So you are learning kind of everything in between. And I think that for me was one of the better parts of agency side was just the knowledge that you gain by default because you’re not setting out to learn how it all works but naturally you have to have kind of some input there for, for the work that you do with SEO. And I think kind of coming back onto why I prefer to freelance, you kind of get the best of both worlds. So it is fast paced. You can choose your own clients so you can make sure there is that range and variety there. But also you’re not gonna work on clients that you don’t enjoy, which is sometimes the case at agencies. You can, you know, you’d be the one that gets the problem, client, for example, that might pay the least but requires the most. Whereas obviously freelance, you can kind of dictate that. But it’s also nice that you kind of tend to find yourself integrating with the teams a lot more. And that’s probably. Just the nature of doing a consultancy role. But that kind of then goes back to the pro that we spoke about for in-house work, where you kind of build those better relationships and you can, it becomes a bit easier to push across. This needs doing and it needs to do. Now here’s why. Please do it.

Chris Barnard: I certainly became, from my time in-house, became a big advocate of, uh, our marketing team, and particularly, uh, myself doing the SEO role, SEO role there. Uh, being in with the IT team, you know, even bringing them to the point where you’re bringing them donuts, bring them a few little bits just to make sure that you get on the on the list of priorities, right? ’cause it can be difficult, like you say, we used to have, uh, product teams who would be fighting for spots for the developers, for changes they’d want on the website. And it does at least seem that over time SEO has become a bit more understood. It’s a bit more highly regarded. Uh, developers have a greater knowledge of SEO and why it’s important for them to integrate it into their processes from the start. But technical, SEO is quite a, a newer role, isn’t it, within marketing. So I just thought. For our audience’s benefit, if you’d be able to sort of explain your role as a technical SEO and, and what your objectives and goals look like for clients as a technical SEO specialist.

Matthew Jones: Definitely. So I think if you asked 10 technical SEOs that question, you’d probably get a different answer every time. Um, I think a lot of it does come down to obviously what everyone perceives their own job to be. But for me, technical, SEO is. Specifically looking at SEO from the part of, kind of more the search engine part. So you’re looking at the crawlability of the website, can everything be indexed properly? Is the architecture of the site in the correct place as well? Um, generally you’re kind of looking more at tasks, and this is probably doing it down way too much, but you’re looking more at tasks that are going to involve the code more than the kind of on-page stuff. So. Personally, I still include on page within kind of the tech SEO work that I do, but I think that’s just the nature of the beast of kind of wanting to provide the best job, um, possible really for a client or, or do the best work that there is. So some people would probably still class on page elements as technical SEO and it wouldn’t technically be wrong there. But I think for me it is looking a bit more at the i’m gonna say advanced side of things and kind of really gaining that understanding of when a search engine spider lands on your website, how’s it kind of crawling through the site? Have we got orphan pages that don’t, you know, shouldn’t be there? Are we kind of picking up any areas that as they crawl through the website, might break their journey? And naturally as you are doing that, you are also kind of appealing to the user experience side of things as well, because if it breaks the journey for a search engine, it’s nine times out of 10 going to do that for a user as well. But it’s really looking at making sure the site is efficient as possible. I, I always use the word like site health, so you kind of view it as if these things are done. It, I’m gonna go back to an analogy that I always use, which is probably a bit cheesy, but for me, technical SEO is the foundation of a building. Everything else is kind of what you just build on top of it. And you wouldn’t build a house on an uneven, broken, wobbly foundation. You would build it on a solid one. So for me, Technical SEO is always that part where you are really making sure, I’m gonna say the basics, but it’s the advanced basics, which in itself makes no sense. Um, but that’s kind of looking at making sure the site is in a place where no matter what we do from this point onwards, we are confident that the foundation is strong, so everything else will get the best results out of it. It just makes the rest of the work as efficient as possible.

Chris Barnard: Yeah. Yeah, I was just thinking in terms of sort of SEO, that journey, it’s come on in terms of the foundation and SEO, that the big challenge always used to be, oh, you’ve come and asked us to do bits of SEO that should have happened when the site was built. We can’t just plug in and play now, or we can, but it’s gonna be far more difficult. Uh, that was it always a great challenge. Remember having many of those conversations, both with development teams and marketing teams, in terms of if you can include an SEO early on in the process, the results are gonna be so much better. Is that, do you think we’ve learned any lessons from that as businesses? Are we any better? Do people engage with you at a slightly earlier stage, Matt, these days?

Matthew Jones: Yeah. I’d say in general it’s gotten better. There are also still. A lot of cases where that, that hasn’t happened. Um,

Chris Barnard: And and generally, yeah, you are fighting a battle there because you’re kind of saying, well, the site’s being built for however long it is. These kind of really basic foundational aspects haven’t been covered. We need to do them now, and that can sometimes you, you basically say that and you just see this look, go across their face and you’re like, it might be time for me to just move off of this call now just to give you a moment to yourself. But it, I think it’s becoming easier to sell it in that, even if it’s coming at a later stage than it should. It has to be done now. And it can be a huge task. And I think that’s where you kind of get the kind of roadblock from them is you might turn around and be like, well, your site is 500 pages. We need to change 90% of the URLs because the URL structure doesn’t make sense. And that is a massive task and it does obviously hold within itself some potential concerns about things that could go wrong from it. But realistically, you, you kind of just having to sell to them. It’s not ideal and I will admit that it’s not ideal as well. We have to work with what we’ve got, and if you want the best results possible, we have to look at doing this as soon as possible. There’s, I think the better part of it is there’s more ways that we can all mitigate those risks now, and I think obviously as SEOs we’re constantly evolving as well. We’re constantly learning, so it allows us to kind of better mitigate those risks and kind of get that buy-in because if we don’t get that buy-in and these tasks don’t happen. The results aren’t gonna be what we know we can achieve, so then it reflects badly on us, essentially, and the client’s not happy. We’re not happy. So it’s not happy days for anyone.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, I think it’s, uh, technical. SEO be being so well, I say so new. It’s kind of always been there, but it’s not been defined and you’ve never had someone to manage all of it, which I think is a, a great development, uh, in terms of being able to, like you say, get a foundation right get some quick wins in early, uh, make those sorts of changes is do you find there’s a lot of misunderstandings in terms of, of what you will be covering as part of a tech SEO brief? Um, obviously there’s lots of people who, the term audit is used a lot in terms of, oh, okay, I’ve had this audit at the site. We’ve now got these improvements. We’ve gotta make some might technical, SEO, some might be overall SEO might they, but often they will just get a report if they’re promised a technical SEO audit. Often what businesses find they get is a, a very tech heavy report that they’re kind of left, um, to fend for themselves with, that has loads of warnings and error that they might not understand. Uh, usually comes with big red writing or big yellow warning signs, doesn’t it? But that’s, that’s not what you are providing. You are providing that service where you are um, you are doing an audit and you are talking through, you’re probably prioritizing it and talking to the business about what they can change and what those business outcomes might be provided from doing that. Matt, is that correct?

Matthew Jones: Yeah, definitely. So there, there’s been times before when I’ve been brought onto a project and literally the first thing is, here’s this audit document we’ve been sent, but no one followed up with it. And, and as you say, it’s just a huge document where loads of things in red and yellow and warnings and critical and, you know, you kind of look at it and think, well as SEO we. If we understand what all of those mean, like that, that’s the nature of the job. We know what everything there means, but we do this day in, day out and we’ve been doing it for 5, 10, 15, however many years. Whereas the client probably doesn’t have that on on their side. They don’t have the beauty of being able to be like, okay, well actually yeah, I understand it so. A lot of the time, I think with the technical side, it’s, you probably are gonna have an audit where you could look at it and it could be incredibly tech heavy and there’s a lot of stuff on there that would look very worrying. But I think part of our job is to basically take that and not dumb it down, but basically pretty-fi the document and say, let’s categorize it into, you know, where the issue kind of lies. Highlight the issue. ’cause they need to know, obviously it’s an issue and, and how widespread that issue is. But then let’s make sure we’re including why it’s actually an issue and we’ll do that as jargon free as possible. So it is kind of the dummies version of this is why it’s an issue and why it needs fixing. Kind of putting that point across, highlighting as well how to fix it. I think that’s the important part because regardless of if you are kind of working on a retainer basis and you are going to do the implementation yourself. There’s always times when the client might be like, oh, well we’ve got a bit more internal resource. We’ll take it away and we’ll fix it or send it to our developers. You know, you kind of need to at least highlight, even in a basic summary, how we can fix those issues. Because if you’re not doing it yourself, you’re essentially just providing yet another document where you’re saying, look at all these bad things. Have fun. You know where I am if you wanna pay me more. And that’s not the case of like what pretty much every SEO I’ve ever met. No one does that. It’s. It is kind of providing that full service of, even if you’re not gonna use me to implement those fixes, I need to make sure by the time this audit is complete, you have a full understanding of what the issues are, why they’re an issue, and more importantly how to fix it. And then for each of them, as you say, it’s kind of putting ’em in a priority say, if you don’t fix this one first, you’re gonna have a much worse time. But yeah, generally you find even if you do kind of pass that over to to a client and they’re gonna do it themself. Especially when you’re doing like a, a consulting kind of basis, like myself, you will still have chats because there’s always questions and there’s never really a right or wrong way to implement most of the fixes. ’cause a lot of it comes down to the CMS that’s used or if it’s being built custom and what code base they’re using. There’s just so much to it where there’s not really one size fits all solution for everyone.

Chris Barnard: You mentioned three words there. That’s kind of a horror, horror show for me and takes me back to in-house roles. Nobody’s implemented it, which used to be sort of the classic for any sort of marketing kind of audit or, um, improvement plans or anything else, you’d kind of say what happened to it? Someone would say nobody implemented it. If, if anyone even did remember it by that point, nobody implemented it was usually a classic in terms of, uh, I wish that, uh, we, and again, it was sort of going into the priorities really and, and trying to impress on teams the importance of this, because the, the, the potential of the wins from technical SEO, if you implement it and you take the advice on board and use the recommendations. You’re probably looking at success metrics around revenue success metrics around, uh, proving your ranking, brand awareness. How do you sort of badge and, and, and how do you sort of sell the benefits of the technical SEO are, are you going and saying, we gonna measure the success by increases in revenue? How are you measuring the success from your work with your clients at the moment?

Matthew Jones: So I generally tend to split it into kind of two ways. So as we’ve kind of already touched on, the first thing that I’ll always do is an audit. And the nice thing, so in SEO, there’s not many things that you can start and complete with a clear kind of. Finish line to say this is now done. Uh, which is fine. It’s an ongoing thing and it always will be, but with an audit, you can do that. So for me, the first part of that success is to literally say, we’re gonna create this audit. We’ll send it over to you. So from there, we’ve got this entire list of everything we’ve just spoken about. Then we can go away and implement it. Whoever’s actually doing that, for me, the first success metric is being able to kind of update that document that you dunno however you want to do it, or if you’re using maybe like a, a Jira board for example. But to have every single one of those tasks marked as complete basically means that audit is now done. And that will be audit version one. They’ll be with the ones in future, but that specific one is done. And to me, that should be seen as a success. And it isn’t always, but every audit, no matter kind of what you’re doing, always has at least one or two things that just they’re slight outliers and they’re not easy to fix and they’re gonna throw problems and roadblocks. But essentially you’ve taken this document, you’ve completed it, and as you say there, the amount of times things just didn’t get implemented. Maybe it’s kind of partly based on that, but that’s the way I see that as the first success metric is we’ve done the audit and we’ve actually actioned it and done it. So we should have a pat on the back and now let’s get on with everything else. The other side kind of with that is generally looking at those. kind of general performance metrics as you mentioned. So for a start, we’ll look at kind of organic traffic. Then you can kind of move through the website as well. And you can look at, well, I suppose the ranking positions, sorry, I should have said as well, are probably an important one. But then you’re gonna kind of look at, for me, the main one is the bottom line metric of a business. So is it, have you got more leads or have you made more money? ’cause generally you’re kind of working in one of those two kind of areas. For me, it’s kind of saying, if you’ve made more money or got more leads that we can attribute to organic traffic, that’s success. Everything else on the way is a touch point, so the organic traffic, you might have other conversion points. You might have young people to sign up to a newsletter, for example, use a contact form. These all might be touch points on that user journey where it’s essentially going to turn them into a lead or a customer. They’re fine to, to kind of look at, but I look at them sometimes vanity metrics probably isn’t the right word, but for me, they’re not the core metrics where we can look at those and, and that gives us a nice idea of are things working well? And sometimes, especially if it’s more on like a lead generation type business. I tend to kind of stop the, the kind of tracking point at the lead has been created because after that point they’ve done probably got, you know, internal teams that are gonna follow up with those leads, try and convert them into actual customers. Nine times out of 10 you don’t really have any say in that process. So there’s no point actually kind of, you know, marking yourself based on their ability to kind of convert at the end. But everything before that point, as I say, is kind of looking at. You can look at those vanity metrics, but for me, I will always say to a client, what’s the core thing that you want to do? And 99% of the time is make more money, whether that’s getting leads or selling more products. So that’s the success metric that I’m gonna look at from an organic perspective, because I could drive 500% more organic traffic based on year on year traffic. But if none of that converts, I’ve not actually done anything for that client.

Chris Barnard: So it’s not. It might look good at the beginning, but realistically it’s made no difference to them.

Matthew Jones: Yeah, I totally agree. And it’s, it’s a really great point. So I think as marketers, as SEOs, as, as business people, as commercial people, everything really should be tied into the bottom line. ’cause that is really the only thing that’s gonna make the difference in terms of job creation, wealth creation, uh, people getting promoted, things going in the the right way. Seeing that as a KPI, I think sometimes we get too heads up in sort of micro goals, mini goals, uh, things that we create to try and kind of, because the tracking is so difficult and we’re definitely gonna go into that, and the measurement has become so much more difficult in recent years. It can be hard. And so I totally understand why, um, we’ve invented our own sort of metrics. I agree with you. I don’t think they are vanity metrics, and I think things that are term vanity metrics, uh, are very reasonable things to monitor. But you’ve gotta be going for, you can’t have five different goals, right? The goal has to be, uh, whether it’s lead sign up, whether it’s revenue for your e-commerce clients, repeat, uh, repeat customers lifetime value, things like that are the only things really, if you wanna be taken seriously and you don’t want to fall into that trap of being the marketing department or the SEO team who never gets any budget, uh, it’s probably because it can’t be justified. And that is because you’re not tying your objectives into the bottom line, right? Which is the, the absolute be all and end all really. If you can’t, if you can’t move their, their revenue or their lead figures, then you’re probably not gonna get the gig at all, Matt, right?

Matthew Jones: Yeah, exactly. And I think sometimes it can be easy to kind of forget that every, well, every business is a business. That sounds, that’s quite obvious, but the whole point is money makes the world go round whether you like it or not. And that business is paying you for a service to make themselves more money. So if you’re focusing on the wrong areas there, then they’re gonna turn around at the end of that contract and be like, you’ve not done anything. Like we can see that you’ve drove more traffic, et cetera, blah, or whatever it might be, but you haven’t actually made us any more money. In fact, you’ve lost us money because we’re now paying you as well. So I think sometimes it’s that can be missed. And I don’t think it’s a, it’s really a, a bad thing. I think it’s just something that happens because you get so caught up in what you’re doing, but it’s important to kind of take that step back every so often and say, if we make this change, or if we do this bulk of work here, that might take a month to complete. Is that actually going to realistically impact the bottom line of their business, or will it just make things look prettier on a graph?

Chris Barnard: Yeah. And you mentioned measurement metrics makes me shudder a little bit. You also mentioned sort of measuring search traffic, which has become a, a less enjoyable job over the last five years, I think as certain things have come in and, uh, reduce search traffic. And this would be, uh, consent mode, GDPR, um, various changes to privacy. So just want you touch on that in terms of how challenging tracking is and reporting for businesses and marketers in the modern world, because I think sometimes people have missed, unless you’re in sort of the, at the coalface, you kind of understand that things have changed in privacy, but they probably don’t on all understand, uh, the levels of change. Do you wanna just talk through sort of some of these changes, Matt, and how it’s impacted on technical SEO and impacted on organic traffic to a website?

Matthew Jones: Yeah, definitely. So obviously speaking from my 11 ish years of experience, but I think tracking is currently in probably the worst place it’s ever been, and that’s from experience of kind of working with clients as well and seeing the issues that they’ve been having. But as you kind of touched on that, there’s so many different things that have changed. I think one of the big first ones was GA4. In fact, that’s a lie. The big first one, if I’m talking about my experience, was the iOS 15 update, which broke pretty much everything to do with Facebook ads because it was still Facebook back then, and that was kind of, I suppose, the beginning of changes to privacy. That’s kind of why that came about, that that kind of broke the system in a way that’s still not particularly fixed and I’m still doing fixes to these days across multiple clients to kind of get past that. Then GA four came around. Um, I don’t think I’ve really met or spoken to a marketer that prefers GA four to Universal Analytics. But we’re at a point now where we kind of have to just grit our teeth and get on with it because it’s not coming back. So we kind of have to get used to what we’ve got. And from the get go, there was obviously clear issues that change how things actually got tracked in the first place. I’ve also noticed from my personal experience that the disparity between certain figures. Seems a lot larger in GA four and there will always be some disparity, and I will say this to my clients, you’re kind of looking at maybe like a, anything up to 10% depending on kind of the size of the website, the traffic you levels that you’re achieving, and also kind of the channel that we’re looking at having that disparity. But I suppose a lot of it all comes background to the consent mode, and that’s probably at the core of everything. So if I remember correctly, iOS 15 broke everything on Facebook because that’s when they started the allow this app to track or ask the app not to track box that you get on iOS now. And I believe that was on the iOS 15. So as soon as people said no, that’s when it kind of broke the tracking. Which was a bit of an issue, but it was kind of stuck to primarily Facebook at first ’cause it was just iOS and it didn’t really affect many of the platforms due to how much they were used cut to the modern day. We’ve now obviously got full blown consent mode. So years ago, GDPR was brought in, probably not taken as seriously as it. Should have been at first. Um, and definitely not as seriously as it is now. And obviously other countries and other regions have similar variations of GDPR consent mode itself has made tracking one of the harder jobs of marketing, in my opinion. So we i’ve personally seen some clients that have been incredibly lucky and they have cookie acceptance of kind of 80 to 90%. I’ve also seen ones on the flip side where the acceptance rate is about 20 to 30%. So the issue that you’re starting to see there is if you’ve only got a cookie acceptance rate of 30%, 70% of your traffic isn’t allowed to be tracked. You could track it, but you’d be breaking the law and the fine is not worth it. So just let’s go with it. Can’t be tracked, but obviously. As you move up to larger websites, that 70% becomes a huge number of sessions or users that are taking place where we’ll use an an e-commerce site as an example. Here you can slightly track up to the point that click on the website if it’s organic, because we can kind of track that through kind of search console for example. They then land on the website. They click reject cookies or reject all whatever they wanting to click. The next touch point you are going to be able to see is if they go on and buy and purchase a product at the end, that purchase will show up within your kind of internal tracking for that, whether it’s billing to your CMS or or whatever you kind of using there. The issue is you can’t attribute that to anyone because yeah, you might have the customer details, but that’s hidden behind obviously GDPR and you can’t attach that to anything to do with the prior kind of session that took place. And the issue there is. There’s no immediate quick win way to improve that. There are ways that you can look at improving your cookie acceptance rate, and a lot of it sounds really simple, but it’s looking at, do we have it as a popup or a banner? Do we change the colors of the buttons? Do we make it a bit more enticing? Obviously, you can’t force people to accept, but you can use basically CRO to psychologically push them towards accepting it as opposed to rejecting it. There are also websites where. And you’ve probably seen this yourself, Chris, but you can’t even use the website until the cookie is either accepted or rejected. Personally, if anyone’s listening, I would advise against doing that because for me, if a website does that, I’ll just reject it straight away purely for the annoyance of what happened. But you know, we’re kind of in a point now where tracking is never going to be the same as it was. It’s never gonna be as accurate. We are always going to be losing out on. Valuable data, we’ll call it, because people will reject cookies. And I think especially over recent years, people have started to understand cookies a bit more. Like general users are slightly understanding what cookies can be used for, so they’re a bit more aware of whether they actually want to accept or reject it. We’ve then also got the kind of rise, shall we say, of AI and searching with ai, which brings up another problem with tracking where, for example, someone’s, let’s say go on Google and an AI overview shows up. If a query is quite question based, usually those AI overviews are getting a lot better at actually answering that question. And while that might be the case, like your website could be used within the AI overview, and it might even have the link in there. If the question’s being answered, a user’s probably not going to click onto it. So we’re calling that a zero click search. It is similar to example, if someone went directly to the platform, so Chat GPT, or Perplexity and decided, I’m gonna ask this question in here, as opposed to a search engine. Again, you can’t really track that it’s, there’s no way to do that. They might click onto your website and you might see it as a referral only if they accept consent and for the cookies. So you might lose that. It is kind of this big issue at the moment where. There’s so many different aspects going on that all pretty much relate to privacy or ai. But what I have noticed is a lot of companies that I’ve worked with have kind of pushed tracking down the priority list because of these, which is fair enough, I can kind of see if people are struggling a bit more to get that data, why even bother? But there are still ways around certain things, and I’m not talking about doing anything illegal and getting data that we shouldn’t, but there are still ways to fix the data to get things a bit more accurate, as we said, to maybe increase that cookie acceptance as well. So I think for me, that’s probably one of the more important aspects. I class it as technical SEO. Some people might just class it as marketing in general, but for me that’s one of the more important ones. That’s kind of been left by the wayside when it shouldn’t have in recent years.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, for me, with measurement and tracking, I think the, the real pain comes from knowing what you once had. So I’m, I’m not sure I’m over Google taking away the original keyword data in universal analytics. Like that was really, I mean, that really annoyed me at the time. I was quite, uh, incandescent. Um, about that and why it happened. And I’d come out and I still sometimes come and have a shot at Google, but I used to come out then and have a shot and say, you know, this is absolutely wild that they’re putting this under privacy. You know? Uh, and of course since then we’ve lost things on the paid search side in terms of being able to track what people have searched for. I mean, it, it does feel like we’ve done something and maybe as marketers, as SEOs to the big business god And this is why, is why we’re having these things taken away from us. ’cause that is what it is, isn’t it? It is at. That it’s, we have seen how good it can be and, and maybe if you go back 10 years, actually the tracking could be, you know, within a breathe. I mean, it used to be, used to be able to measure to a, a really great extent. Obviously some people were doing it in a more nefarious way that I think has, has probably, um. to where we are now in terms of, I think it is probably too restrictive. Um, but it used to be a great way of having great tracking, great measurement, and, and great technical. SEO used to be a great way if you were a smaller business to compete with bigger businesses in the search engines. Um, obviously take a bit of market share and revenue. Not as easy now for exactly those reasons you mentioned, but are there ways, we’ve got a lot of SMB small business owners who listen if they have sort of a small budget or a small amount of time to focus on their technical SEO, are there any sort of quick wins still in the field that they could implement maybe today, over the next week that’s gonna help them? Should they be focused on the page speed, for example, or, um, the redirects on their site? What, what do you say to those people who are looking to do a little bit of tech, SEO themselves?

Matthew Jones: So I think for me, page speed is a big one. It’s not always the quickest fix and quite often you will need some development help to get around it, but there are still quicker ways to improve that page speed. Nine times out of 10, especially on smaller websites, you generally tend to see that actually the website’s relatively fast. But when we’re looking at kind of the core web vitals, it’s just the main image on the page kind of causes that fail. So you can just compress an image. Obviously it’s not quite as simple. You can’t just click. You can’t just do that. But you know, there are ways that you can use it. Google has page speed, insights free tool. Fantastic to get that information that you need. There’s a lot more advanced data you can pull from it and and things that you can implement, but realistically, especially for smaller businesses, just kind of looking at those images, making sure they’re compressed, but also keeping in mind that you’re not gonna lose the quality if it is quite a large image. So that would probably be the first one. The second would be kind of looking at the crawlability of the website starts looking at redirects or broken links. That’s kind of a a two-pronged one similar to the page speed where it plays an important role in SEO, but it also directly impacts the user experience on the site. So obviously page speed. We know for example. If a page takes ages to load, you’re gonna lose traffic because people are gonna go away. It could be for the sake of 0.5 seconds, which you can’t really compute. But in the world that we live in now, that’s like a a year to some people. So they will just go away, uh, and they’ll go to the next result or find someone else. And similarly with kind of looking at broken links or internal redirects. If you put yourself in the user’s shoes, nine times out of 10, you are trying to then navigate somewhere on that website, but ending up either on a broken page or somewhere you weren’t expecting to be, which isn’t always the worst thing. And sometimes those redirects are in place where an SEO or the business owner has made an informed decision on the best option to send that user to. But until you are the user and until you are doing it, sometimes they might be like, this doesn’t actually help what I’m doing. And they’ll just leave again. So they’re kind of the two main areas I would focus on. If I was to pick a third, ’cause I’m being a bit greedy, it would probably be looking at the URL structure. The main reason for that one is it can be quite quick. You might look at it and think, this is perfect. We don’t need to do anything. In which case, that’s fantastic. If not, it’s kind of looking at realistically, how is the website formed, what’s the architecture like? Do the URLs make sense? Is it including random ID numbers that don’t need to be in there for pages, for example? ’cause that’s not gonna help. And then also kind of looking at. So there’s somewhere, a recent example that I did work on, I should probably say, is a site that was very good and it had a lot of good content on it, but within the services page, they were actually using like an anchor, um, to kind of just keep scrolling down. So the problem was that they were selling kind of one category of service, but probably had like at least 10 different services within that. But they all tried to exist on one page and compete against each other. And while it looked good from like a user experience perspective, and there’s some merit in the past that did work well, at the moment it’s kind of looking and saying, actually, if we create a separate sub-service page for each of those services. They’re not competing against each other. They can have more content. They can focus solely on what we’re trying to then sell, and that’s gonna help you improve in the long run. Not something that’s gonna be, you know, achievable for every website. But that would be the third one is to just check, is that a possibility and does it need, looking at.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, it’s a great point. I, I’m big on URL structure. I’ve always loved, uh, architecting a, a nice, logical, clever URL structure. I think that’s helped, uh, that really does help these sites. Thankfully, we we’re past the time of CMSs. Uh, well, I say we are, I’m sure you’ve got some horror stories past the time usually of cMS is doing the, the P query 1, 2, 3 ID numbers for each page. Although, I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that that was kind of the standard operating measure, right? And to have, um, user-friendly readable URLs, it must only be a last 10 years sort of thing. Um. But I, but I’ve always been a big believer in that and certainly I’ve, I’ve got a, a similar situation with a legal consultancy I’m working with at the moment, um, that are like, well, we’ll just have a services page chris. And I was like, well, we can have a services page, but I want us to build out all these services and there’s good reason to exactly the reason you mentioned so that we can target each of these terms. Because if you are serious about getting search traffic to these pages, then they do need their own page. I think maybe we’re too long in the teeth SEOs, ’cause we just see that as, as. Logical, but I still do get a bit of pushback, a bit of, uh, queries around that sometimes. Oh, Chris, you know, one of our hotels that they’re, they’re bringing an aesthetics person. They said, you know, we’d like to rank for aesthetics queries in our region. Great. Do you think we can do it without doing her a page? I don’t think so. No. No. ’cause we need that page else. How are we going to be able to show that, you know, you’re serious about this and, uh, you have this service. To talk about it enough to, particularly as a hotel, try rank for aesthetics queries. Um, you know, if you are going against proper aesthetics, businesses who are single solely that you’re already coming at a disadvantage. So, so to think that you can just in a couple of lines, um, is, is not gonna work, right? But I mean, it is the great learning for everyone. I mean, SEO is like that, isn’t it? It’s something that we’re all trying to, uh, get better at is constantly evolving, isn’t it? And, and part of the constant evolvement at the moment is certainly around AI. You mentioned it in one of your previous answers, um, generated content. AI overviews, AI search mode gives me the absolute hege, Matt. So how does this change? How is it changing? How you are thinking about SEO and how, uh, some of our businesses should think about SEO, this big AI revolution.

Matthew Jones: So I think obviously the initial part, and I kind of mentioned this earlier, is it’s moving us towards a, a zero click search industry. Uh, industry is probably not the right word, but that’s what people are liking to call it essentially, which is, is, as I said earlier, it’s just someone searching something which is more like a question base. Sometimes it’s not even that. It could be you are literally looking for a local plumber near me. You’re going to get an AI overview, but generally if it’s a question, it is going to answer it. Like the AI is good enough to give a succinct answer to what that query would be, and nine times out 10, someone’s probably not gonna click any of the links there. If it doesn’t have the links, it might then, specifically if you’re looking at kind of the AI overview on Google, you might just have the box next to it where it has got links and, and people are kind of concerned about that. And there’s merit to being concerned because it kind of changes everything that you have to do. But in my mind, it also doesn’t change everything. There’s always been constant changes in SEO. That’s the nature of the beast, and we’ve always had to basically adapt. I can’t remember exactly what it is, but I know it’s bear grills, and I know my partner, if she listens to this, is gonna laugh because she says it all the time. It’s like, adapt, overcome. Something she’ll shout at me for forgetting it, but that’s all you have to do in SEO is something new is going to happen. You’re gonna have to adapt to it, but use it to your advantage and then carry on as normal and then it’ll happen again. Zero click searches is a prime example. It happened exactly the same when featured Snippets came out many years ago as a kind of SERP feature. We started to see some decrease there in terms of clicks naturally. ’cause again, they were using kind of question based queries and they was answering it, but you don’t hear anyone talking about that anymore. It’s not an issue, it’s not a worry for them. AI is slightly different. I think it will have a much larger impact, um, just based on pretty much how much it’s grown this year alone, especially kind of within that marketing sort of element as well. But we’ve also got to think it’s not just. The search engines using AI overviews. There’s now multiple examples from myself where I might go into chat GPT and ask it a question, which primarily I would’ve asked Google or you kind of find with chat GPT, you kind of write the question a little bit longer and a bit more conversational. Whereas on Google, you’re trying to keep it quite short and sweet and, and that’s just the nature of how users are kind of interacting with these different platforms. I think there will be some change. I think personally I, and I could be completely wrong here, but I think the AI companies who own the platforms are probably thinking, if not already working on like analytics platforms for themselves in the background, not really gonna be that useful for general users, but they know a lot of businesses use them. It’s just an extra revenue stream for them essentially. And. If that happens, I I don’t think that’ll be a bad thing. To be fair, I think it’ll be a fantastic way for us to gain more visibility on what actually happens within these platforms, get a bit more kind of information there, and that’s where you’re gonna kind of see that benefit from a business perspective. kind of moving on to another that you mentioned, which was like AI generated content. This is one that I think causes quite a lot of debate, so a lot of people flat out say, don’t use it. It’s not gonna do you any good. I’ve then seen examples of people that have built websites, which literally just use a thousand pages of AI generated content from day one, publish it, and they’re actually seeing results, but they’re not getting penalized. Obviously, that can all change it. We know Google’s constantly working on trying to pick things up, but I think you’ve gotta think when Chat GPT specifically started like dipping its feet in the marketing world and people were using it to create the content you had, you know, companies like Google coming out and saying, don’t use AI generated content. We will be able to flag it for these reasons and more. So they gave you essentially what you needed to avoid in these kind of generated content, but you don’t really see ’em saying that as much anymore. And I think that’s because I think people are getting better at using the AI as an assistant as opposed to just doing everything for them. There is nothing wrong with using these platforms to help kind of create or do some parts of the work. I think the the core important part to remember is, especially in marketing. You need that human touch. And I know it’s cliche and I know everyone says it ’cause they’re all like, I don’t wanna lose my job. Or everyone’s gonna, you know, everything’s gonna happen. But realistically, marketing is such a personal thing to do. You know, we buy from companies because we buy into that company whether we realize it or not. It could be something as simple as, I like their logo. It could be something more down to the brand vision that they’ve got and you’re buying into their values. But essentially, I don’t think AI could ever fully replace that because if you are, we’re always selling stuff. That’s how the world goes round. The human touch needs to be there. If you left it all to ai, if we said like, let’s all take a nice month, government funded, paid holiday, and let AI run marketing for the next month, I think the first few weeks would be fantastic, then you would just see a massive issue where everything’s gonna start looking a bit too similar, nothing’s gonna feel as personal as it could do, and you’re gonna essentially struggle to differentiate which company you’d want to go to. So, you know, nine times out of 10 you’re buying a product that you can get multiple different variations from different brands, but you are drawn to one brand, so you will go to that one. I’ve been drinking Red Bull, why do I want Red Bull? I think it tastes a bit nicer and I think they’re a cooler brand than most of the other energy drinks. The, they’re all pretty much the same. They do the same job. Taste relatively similar, dare I admit it, but they do. But you buy into a brand, but if you take away that human side of things with the ai, you’re going to lose it. So I do think there’s, there’s merit in people being worried about taking the jobs. And I hate to say it because I’m friends with a very, with a large number of talented ones, but I think copywriters are probably gonna be first up there because it’s the more, one of the easier ones that Chat GPT well, that any of the AI platforms are kind of building on and constantly learning. But realistically, I, I don’t think you can ever replace that human side. And I think if you kind of push that across to the clients as well. Your job should be safe for now anyway. Um, but yeah, the way I see it is use it, it, it is a powerful tool. It is good, but use it to help do what you’re doing and enhance it. Not completely do your job for you.

Chris Barnard: It’s a great point on brand as well. It’s often missed out in some of these AI debates is that the human touch is gonna be premium, right? And what is your human touch as a business? Often it’s your brand and what people say about you and how you make them feel, um, how you communicate to them, right? So I’m actually writing a blog article at the moment for, one of the companies we work with, which is around making sure that when you’re getting excited by all these shiny tools, you’re not giving away the essence of your business and, and why you are you and why people love you. Um, I do have a view that, uh, over say the next 10, 15 years, we’re gonna get to the point where departments become, particularly for marketing, I think you’re gonna have a technical expertise person, uh, who implements your agentic ai, for example, sat with the creative strategic person who’s guiding how all these things work together. Um, and I think when once that becomes clear, I think there will be, and some winners with case studies, et cetera, I think there will be, uh, some job losses and there will actually be some kickback from society in terms of, um, not wanting it to get too robotic, um, and inhuman. Um, but again, you gotta be able to if you are creating a brand that is very human, I think it’s gonna be premium in the future. Uh, and what do I expect business-wise to get mopped up by ai? Very much the mid-market, right? So you’re gonna either want to be the premium brand or the, the lowest value brand. Um, I think in that, in that, um, scenario, uh, not getting too doomsday on it. But that is sort of I think it’s gonna go. Uh, but it’s been fascinating to have your views, Matt, really great to, uh, get such good understanding of technical SEO and it was something as, as we started talking that I thought about, um, no one ever really gets to hear from the tech SEOs. Uh, certainly not on a platform like this, where you can talk about the ins and outs of it and how important it’s to a business. But my last question for you then today is the question we ask everyone on Bear business. Um, it’s about what you like to do in your spare time, as short as that must be um, what games do you like to play? Do you like to play a video game, board game? Uh, any sort of game really?

Matthew Jones: So as you probably, and as the listeners have probably figured out by now, I’m quite a geeky person, so obviously I’m gonna give you one of the geekiest games ever, which is called Geo Guesser, which is, it’s basically a browser based game, but it has just launched on steam. So it does look like it’s making its moves now. But essentially you. There’s different modes you can choose, but the, the short answer to it is you are dropped somewhere in the world on Google Maps, on street view. You can move around, but you have to find where you were dropped. So you’re kind of looking for clues on the language that might be used on

billboards or road signs, you could be looking at either driving on the left or right hand side of the road. As you start getting through it, you literally try and find the sun and you’re like, well, if the sun’s there, then I’m technically in the Northern Hemisphere. So, so you kind of go through it and, and there’s different modes, as I say. One is you just find the country, which is a lot easier. Um, but other ones are, you literally have to find the exact point you were dropped, and the closer you get, the more points you get. Is that big now that they do actually have that world championships as well, which I’m not part of though.

Chris Barnard: Yeah. What’s your success rate on Geo Guesser i’m intrigued

Matthew Jones: Um, it’s not too bad. I mean, I’ve, I’m holding top place for some of the local maps around here, around where I live, so I’ll take those. But yeah, in terms of the, uh, if I’m looking at the global leaderboard, probably not that good, but not that bad either. I’ll take it, I’ll go in the mid point.

Chris Barnard: It can always improve. Right? It’s

Matthew Jones: Exactly,

Chris Barnard: SEO point to end on. We can always make it better, right?

Matthew Jones: exactly.

Chris Barnard: thank you ever so much for that. Matt. You’ll not be surprised to hear you are the only person to have mentioned Geo Guesser, but we’ll see if anybody mentions it in the future. But thank you ever so much for sharing your ideas and your thoughts with us today on Bear Business, and I’ll make sure that in the show notes we’ve got links to your social media profiles so our listeners can come and follow you. So thank you very much, Matt.

Matthew Jones: I thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me.