Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #55: SEO Maintenance for Better Site Performance

Chris Raines: Hello, welcome to episode 55 of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast. Your favorite podcast about marketing and dodgeballs.

Michael Utley: That's right. Not about Dodgeballs.

Chris Raines: We're actually number one in iTunes on dodgeball themed marketing podcasts.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Did you know that?

Michael Utley: That's right. That right.

Chris Raines: Thanks everybody, for making us number one in that.

Chris Raines: Today, we're going to talk about SEO maintenance for better site performance. So, a lot of the stuff we talk about, Michael, is really content focused, really user focused. Getting links, articles, things that people can see. But, a lot of that stuff doesn't really matter unless you have these fundamentals in place.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. There are some basic maintenance things that are easy to forget about and take your eye off of.

Chris Raines: We talk about it a lot, but really, it's like this block and tackle stuff, where get the foundation in order so that, when you do your content and you do everything on top of that, it doesn't crumble because you've got bad infrastructure.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So it's infrastructure is what we're talking about.

Chris Raines: Michael, why don't you take the first one here, on SEO maintenance for better site performance?

Michael Utley: Yeah. So, number one, have site backups in place. You might think, "Oh, big companies, they've got stuff like this handled." Or, "Oh, our hosting company handles that."

Michael Utley: Well, here's a question. If you're a chief marketing officer or a marketing manager and the website falls under your management, do you know how your websites are backed up? Is it your hosting company, is it a webmaster, is it somebody internal? This is the kind of thing that you need to have documented. And, when the site goes down you need to have a go-to place for how to troubleshoot and understand what your recovery process is.

Michael Utley: Every company, every organization needs to have their website backed up, in my opinion, at least once a day. We used to run processes where we would run a backup daily, even on WordPress sites where we've used plugins to do backups. We would push those out to either Dropbox or to some other computer approach. We would run those, I don't know, I'm thinking two or three years ago, we'd run those maybe weekly.

Michael Utley: Well, going back a week on most current websites would be a real setback. So, we're recommending every 24 hours, having a backup cycle run and having a recovery process documented that everybody in the company knows exists.

Chris Raines: Yeah. That's the nightmare scenario for people.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: That if your site goes down or gets deleted and you don't have a backup, so that's huge.

Michael Utley: There are a couple of scenarios. This has been in the news lately. A couple of scenarios where this is really relevant. One is you have just a problem with the hosting or a coding problem and a site goes down, you need to know, "This problem happened in the last 24 hours, or maybe the last 48. Oh, we can go back three days."

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: We can restore to there if it's a coding problem.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: But, another problem that's been in the news lately is hacking and ransomware attacks. You need to be able to immediately have a set of steps you can go through to shut anybody out of access, and then restore to a pre-hack situation and codebase.

Michael Utley: Yeah, that's a best practice. It's easy to overlook and assume that it's not going to be a problem because you've never been hacked before. But, more sites are going through that now.

Chris Raines: Yeah. I thought about this. Schedule the automatic backup. Is there an additional step to make sure that's actually happening?

Michael Utley: Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

Chris Raines: I'd imagine it's a plugin and if anything breaks or something ...

Michael Utley: I would say so. I think you need to have somebody to watch the watchers when it comes to backups. You need to have a documented process. And then, if I was a marketing manager or VP, or somebody in charge of a website, I would want somebody, once a year, to review that policy with me and validate that it's working. And then, I would have them, quarterly, go in and check, and make sure stuff's working.

Chris Raines: The reason I ask that is I just remembered, I have an automatic backup on my website and I have not checked it in a long time, to see if it was actually doing ... The plugin maybe broke, or the API from Dropbox ... There's all kinds of stuff that could go wrong. So just make sure it's actually backing up.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Typically, at GoEpps what we're doing these days is using the hosting company's backups process because it's just as stable.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: And, they're so good. But, something needs to check that box for backups, for every website that you care about.

Chris Raines: That's good.

Chris Raines: Okay, number two here is keep your CMS and plugins up to date.

Michael Utley: [crosstalk 00:04:34] CMS.

Chris Raines: CMS obviously is a content management system, so WordPress is a popular one, Squarespace is another one, there's several others. A lot of these, especially WordPress, they'll push updates to their platform almost every week and definitely every month.

Michael Utley: A lot of those updates to WordPress are automated now.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Which can kick off a plugin problem.

Chris Raines: You've got the CMS and you've got plugins that work with the CMS, tons of plugins are available for WordPress for instance.

Chris Raines: This actually happened with a client of mine recently, where we were using an SMTP plugin ... You know this because you were around my desk when I was pulling my hair out.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: But, they get probably 10 to 15 lead notifications that we generate, a day and they stopped getting lead notifications, we couldn't figure out what was going wrong.

Chris Raines: Well, the SMTP plugin, which is a little plugin that uses a mail server to push the lead notifications to the client, it hadn't been updated. We went around, and around and around to see what was going on. Finally, I went into the plugins section and it had not been updated. Well, sure enough, updated the plugin, it kicked it right back up again.

Michael Utley: Yeah, and then it was working again.

Chris Raines: Now, we have a process, Michael, that we've helped the client implement. It probably should be every day, but every week we go in and go through the list. If anything says update available, we just update it.

Michael Utley: Sometimes, those plugins don't have a heads up that they're going to experience problems. There can be a version update of WordPress that gets pushed, and maybe they're lagging behind on getting updated and caught up with what's going on with WordPress. So occasionally, the plugin managers, a lot of plugins are poorly managed.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: A lot of plugins are zombie plugins that are out there in the plugin marketplace.

Chris Raines: And that's a problem.

Michael Utley: They're not managed well. Free plugins, yeah there's a lot of vulnerability with that ecosystem.

Chris Raines: That's the downside of WordPress.

Michael Utley: Yeah. I would say plugins is the single big downside of WordPress because of security and plugins. We love it, we still use it, but you can't set it and forget it the way you can a more closed system.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Cool. I'll take our next topic. Implement Google Search Console.

Michael Utley: We've talked about Search Console a number of times, but we just think this rounds out the maintenance category. Search Console is different than Google Analytics. Google's Search Console is a set of tools that they've really expanded lately.

Michael Utley: On the left sidebar in Search Console, you've got overview, performance, URL inspection, coverage, site maps, removals, page experience, a big one, core web vitals, mobile usability, AMP, breadcrumbs, logos, and site links search box.

Chris Raines: A partridge in a ...

Michael Utley: They've got a bunch of stuff. It's basically helping you understand how Google is using and connecting with your website better. Things that they know it would be helpful for webmasters or website owners to just be able to see, "Okay, what is Google seeing?" They've opened up a window to see that.

Michael Utley: Back in the day, when we built a new website, we would just have to go do a Google search for "Submit URL to Google." Basically, you could drop the URL into a one-field form page on Google and submit it, and they'd say, "Thank you, we'll take that under advisement. We're not going to tell you anything." You would hope that they would go get that website and put it in their index or a refresh.

Chris Raines: But with Search Console, you can actually see, "Yes, we see this page. This is in our index."

Michael Utley: Yeah. With Search Console, they've finally opened up a real toolset for seeing what they see. It's really helpful that way.

Michael Utley: This is something that is totally separate from Google Analytics, but it's got some pieces that carry over. If you're running a website, this is the kind of thing you want to get implemented, and keep an eye on, and understand and use.

Michael Utley: For a lot of websites that are not major, high traffic websites, it can get, well I wouldn't say frustrating, but you can go in and see that there are a lot of areas that are not built out yet for your website because they don't have enough data. That just means you're below that data threshold. If over time, you surpass that threshold, you'll have that data. But I would say, don't go into Search Console and say, "Oh, there's nothing here for me." There are going to be some things that are going to be there for everybody. But for some items, you won't get any value out of it right off the bat.

Michael Utley: Just don't be worried about that, do implement it and keep it as part of your toolset.

Chris Raines: Good, good. Number four here is connect your email to Google Analytics.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Almost every email platform out there, from MailChimp to Constant Contact, to all the other ones, have a link to Google Analytics. This is really cool because, when you start really doing some good measurement in Google Analytics and you have goals set up, and you have all this stuff, you want to really see exactly where your good traffic's coming from, like what kind of traffic resulted in phone calls and form submissions, et cetera.

Chris Raines: Well, if you link it to email, your email system, you link Google Analytics to your email system, you're going to get exactly which campaign that came from. When you name your campaign inside of MailChimp, you're going to get that same campaign showing up inside of Google Analytics. You're going to see, a lot of times, which ... I don't know if this is actually true, but the content, which button they clicked to make it to your website so you're going to get that granular data. Which you don't always get if it's not linked up. It might even get caught up in direct traffic if it's not really sensing it's from email.

Chris Raines: It really gives you a clean look at how your email is performing. You can only really get that if you've got that direct link between your email and your Google Analytics. It's really easy to do, usually just a button that you click, a setting inside of MailChimp, or Constant Contact, or whatever you're using. Just link those up and you can get a good, clean look at your email data.

Michael Utley: Yeah. The alternative to that is that you're using your email metrics in-depth in your email platform. Whether it's MailChimp, Constant Contact, HubSpot, or any of the big email platforms and you're diving into great detail there but you don't have it connected, what that can do is create confusion in Google Analytics. They'll often count that traffic as referral traffic.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: If it's coming in from an email client that's maybe a web-based interface, sometimes Google isn't quite sure what traffic is, if it's coming in from email.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Even silly stuff, like a Yahoo email user, or any of those older email addresses, if you ever go through your email data, it's a time capsule. You're seeing that a user base often has email addresses on platforms that are very old.

Michael Utley: You might feel very up-to-date with your thinking around what email platform you're using, but that doesn't mean your audience is up-to-date. So whatever business you're in, I guarantee you there's some Hotmail address out there. Somebody going in and doing a web-based interaction with your email, they may click, and engage and call in, but if you don't have that connection made, you're just using that very old system that Google either is good at guessing about or not good at guessing about.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: In terms of where did it come from. Email is just such a major category of traffic. Yeah.

Michael Utley: Good. Next up, and we'll wrap up this episode with this topic, keep your sitemap working and updated. This is another one. We mentioned earlier in this episode, Google Search Console. But, one of the relics of websites not being as dynamic and active as they could be are sitemaps that are correct, and live and working, but are not automatically updating when new content is added.

Michael Utley: This is really two things. Number one, make sure you have a sitemap. And number two, make sure it's updated live when content is added to your website or changes are made.

Michael Utley: A sitemap is a code type of link for your site that transmits an XML layout listing of your information to search engines. Usually, it's website.com/sitemap.xml. It's an XML file, extensible markup language. It's a really handy tool.

Michael Utley: A lot of times, when a website shop is setting up your website, they'll have a site map live but maybe they haven't done the additional work, either with using a contemporary CMS or something that does this for you automatically. But sometimes, they haven't done the work of making sure that that sitemap is updating when new content is updated.

Michael Utley: Another mistake I've seen is that the sitemap is updated automatically when a blog section is updated, because the web developers said, "Oh, this blog's going to get regular content on a regular basis, let's make sure that's updated." But then, you have a separate section of the sitemap for services pages homepage, and that somehow, for whatever reason, got left out of the automatic updates. So you're going in and editing new content in your services pages, and pushing new updates, and it's updating to the website and everything you can see is fine, but you don't have anything signaling to the sitemap that that content has been updated. That's weird.

Michael Utley: But yeah, sitemaps are a good little handoff for search engines to know the freshness and the recency of those pages. Auditing that stuff and asking those questions of your web dev shop is a good way to go. It's not a huge problem but it's something where, if you have a little problem like that hanging out on a website that's maybe two or three years old, it can really hamper the traction in search engines. It's just one of those things that's like how are you ever going to find that needle in a haystack of a problem? Well, you just have to ask. Ask your web developer.

Michael Utley: Yeah. That's it. That wraps up our episode. This has been SEO maintenance for better site performance and I hope this has been helpful. Follow us and subscribe, especially on YouTube. We'd love for folks to subscribe and follow us, and stay up-to-date with new episodes and clips. Drop your questions in the comments. That's it, everybody. Have a great day. Thanks.

Chris Raines: Later, later.