BluShark Digital
Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of BluShark taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price
Welcome, everybody. We're thrilled to have Alan
Bleiweiss here, one of my favorite people in the SEO space, an audit professional who's been added for years. Welcome, Alan.
Alan Bleiweiss
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate being here.
Seth Price
You know, you've been in this business for a minute. And I'd love to hear from you just big picture. What are some of the things and trends that you have seen, because you've been looking at websites, as a third party consultant for a long time, and I'm curious to see what you're seeing now compared to what you used to see when people bring you their websites and say, Hey, this is what I got. What do you think?
Alan Bleiweiss
Yeah. So having been doing been involved with SEO for 21 years now? I think the biggest challenge that's different over the years is people still believe that they don't need to take the time to understand what usability really means. That's the biggest consistent issue over all the years that I've been involved.
Seth Price
What does that mean to you? What is usability mean?
Alan Bleiweiss
Its content organization, it's being able to find the information people are looking for, in an intuitive manner. And understanding that usability bridges, humans and the search engines because the search engines are users of the content, right?
Seth Price
That isn't that isn't that looks sort of like if we're doing our jobs, right, as SEO is the question is, can we have something that the bot can read, as well as the human when you do that? That's the home run? Right?
Alan Bleiweiss
Yeah, that's the combination is, is understanding that they're both users, right. And that's the thing that's been most consistent over all these years, is the failure to understand that reality, that you need to meet both of those needs. What's changed, obviously, is the fact that technology has come a long way yet people who build websites, continually try to add more tech function at the code level, or in terms of bells and whistles, field slogans, plus plugins, right. And they overload they overwhelm the website now more than ever. Back in the day used to be, well, a web designer would create a visual design on their really high end system at their office, with their really large monitors, right. And they had direct access to the website. So loaded fast. And so the page speed issues back then were purely from a design issue, visually. That still persists yet. Now, it's code bloat. Now, over the years code has gotten more and more bloated. And and it's just made things even more of a challenge to address from a page speed from a page load perspective. And then the failure to cross browser test, which is also old school issues. Right? What
Seth Price
Well that sort of was my next question, a follow up to bring you down this path, which is, historically we sit with our team around monitors in an office, we have Zooms we're on, we're in front of a computer. But given when we first started meeting, it was less than 50%, mobile, you know, breakthrough. We're down well beyond 50%, to the point where desktops don't matter for certain sectors, meaning the overstating it, but not by a lot. You know, the world the audit of yesterday, where you cared about pure desktop, you know, I encourage our clients and when I speak, you know, there should be an Android and iPhone out. If you really care about usability. It's one thing who cares if it was working on the desktop, it's gonna work across platform, as you just alluded to talk to you a little bit as as an auditor, how you sort of help people figure out that, you know, what may seem great when you're sitting in a board meeting isn't necessarily going to pass mustard to the public.
Alan Bleiweiss
Yes, so the first rule for me is my speed tests are all based on 3g speeds. Okay. And, that's, you know, Right. So 3g, what are you talking about? We're in 5g world. No, we're not everybody. Okay. Well, first of all, we're not in 5g, because here in the U.S., even compared to Europe, the data is out. That 5g in the US is a fraction of the speed of 5g in Europe. Okay. That's the first issue. The next issue is 5g is only deployed to pockets across the country. All right, you got the whole rest of the country, that's still on 4g. And even when 5g is deployed in a pocket, there are very small pockets compared to entire cities, as an example from a city perspective, right? Yet, when 4g is the standard, or 4g LTE is the standard. The truth is that the more remote the person is, or the further away they are from cell towers, the more likely that's only going to be one or two bars and 4g, so it's not full 4g throughput. Right. And quite often, in congested areas, it degrades to 3g even to this day. Okay. Then we look at the fact that cable Oh, my God, cable is the big thing. Well, fiber is the biggest thing right now. But not everybody can afford fiber, and not everybody has fiber. So people who have cable connections, if you're in a building with 100, office offices, well, now that COVID is...
Seth Price
Right, it smoking fast right now.
Alan Bleiweiss
Smoking fast right now. But that's about to change as people come back into offices. And in apartment buildings, it's not smoking fast right now. Because if the opposite. If you're sharing one cable connection with 100 other apartment units, you're not getting fooled.
Seth Price
Saturday night on Netflix is now your workday at 11am. Trying to do a zoom.
Alan Bleiweiss
Right? Absolutely. Right. So testing on 3g is still the standard for that reason, and Google to this day, uses the 3g threshold, right? So I see, I see what developers say, Oh, we tested our sites really fast. And I said, okay, show me the reports. And they're using the right tools, but they're testing them under cable conditions, which is an artificial connection. Right. So that's the first thing, then I cross browser tests certain things main site navigation is often done in JavaScript. And it'll work when you have JavaScript on but it won't when you have JavaScript off. That's okay from an SEO perspective, if the actual navigation code is in the DOM is in the is in the the the referrer source. But quite often, it's a client side serve JavaScript, that happens on the fly when you go to a page. And if that's the case, the search engines can't see that JavaScript navigation, right. So it's testing certain elements under certain conditions, in different environments.
Seth Price
You know, you've looked under the hood, probably at more websites than just about anybody in the space, up there. You talked at the beginning a little bit, but if you could give me the top three to five things, what are some of the things like I, whenever I hire a consultant, use them over the years use a lot of consulting. What I hate is when I go in, and the obvious stuff is there, because you want to earn your money tweaking, there's obvious stuff, they don't need a legend like yourself to do it. It's great that they hire you. But like, you'd like to be able to get to the point where the easy stuff is taken care of and you can fine tune it to the next level. What are some of the easiest fixes that, or biggest mistakes that you see generally across the board that you should be getting before you worry about like, Hey, let me get somebody to audit this to get the fine tooth comb. What are some of the biggest things that somebody should sort of hit before they turn to? To make sure that they're not I don't say wasting your time, but that they're not doing the stuff that's like, super obvious, and then you can get into the nitty gritty.
Alan Bleiweiss
Yeah, so they're super obvious. And it depends on who that's super obvious to. Okay.
Seth Price
Well, no, this was saying it's super obvious to you what you'd like, you know, before somebody comes to me, check these three things, because these are major low hanging fruit, and I'll get the rest of the stuff for you.
Alan Bleiweiss
Yeah. When I go to your main services pages, if I only see one page for a highly competitive service, that's a problem. You've got if, you've got answers, buried 35 pages down on your blog that are evergreen, that's a problem. That's a big ticket item, that to somebody who understands the concepts is really obvious. All right, don't hide your content. Make it much more effortless to discover and tie that in navigationally not where you have 5000 links in your main navigation, but where you have section level navigation. Okay? That's number one most obvious, biggest problem that I see. That shouldn't require hiring an auditor understand, right? The number two is, don't make me scroll 17 times. For me to realize, after the 17th scroll, something that's really important to me is actually available on that one page. So have a table of contents, if it's in a long page. Okay, again, this is navigational access. Right?
Seth Price
I'm noticing a theme here.
Alan Bleiweiss
Yeah. Yeah,nthis is a theme, right?
Seth Price
There's a whole, everything you've talked about. It's a theme, which is, get me the information I want. Quickly, don't make me work for it. Don't make the bot work for it.
Alan Bleiweiss
Right? And it goes back to usability from the human perspective. Am I overwhelming the person coming to this page? Or am I not giving them enough information on this page? And that's going to vary page to page, topic to topic, right? These are all usable usability issues for people. And the SEO. Those are the first thing three things that come to mind after we get past the whole speed thing and code bloat and the rest of that.
Seth Price
Yeah, and look, as somebody who focuses heavily on legal and other very competitive spaces, you know, these ideas that somebody comes up with a site that has one page of content on a topic, that's fine, but you're not going to beat the guy that has a library of content on it. So points well taken. We have some major changes coming up with Google, they've delayed them. I mean, we've been following it as as professionals, but clearly, it's been a clunky rollout. They're nervous about people being able, talk to our audience a little bit about what you perceive, you know, what is, what is Google saying? And what will be the reality over the next few months for this quality rollout?
Alan Bleiweiss
They're just refining the usability perspective, from their ability to evaluate what usability means under a narrow set of circumstances.
Seth Price
Understood. So let's dive deep into this a little bit more from the point again, you're looking at all these different websites, you've been following them. There's always usability issues, you've been talking about that for the length of time we've been talking, what aren't let's then only refine it, given that it's an hour, what are the things that you see the gimme 2 to 3 or 4 areas that you think that you know, again, we need to wait till we can use their their tests and have it show us that things are good, but what you as you're watching people, and they're trying to get, you know, going through the scramble to make sure everything is good. Hopefully, they've been doing these practices for a long time. What are the things finitely, that you say, hey, these are the things you need to hit if you want to be able to comply, as Google actually makes this an official thing?
Alan Bleiweiss
I say that at this moment we don't know the specific impact, right? Yet, that these latest changes, the core web vitals you and the page experience changes are going to have with enough clarity, because they continue to refine...
Seth Price
Understood and not knowing what's gonna be the most important and what's the least important, but you know, what they want, where they're how, they're going to how the algorithm is going to evaluate is different. Talk to our audience a little bit what you see the two or three most important things that people should be allocating their time and attention towards?
Alan Bleiweiss
Yeah, it's it's the same core issues that had been related to page speed. As the primary considerations, going back to when they first started implementing speed as of evaluation, back in 2010-2011. So for example, the overall load time, and you can't just look at your 30 day Google average in Google Analytics for page speeds. Because if especially for smaller sites, a lot, I see this a lot with legal sites, they don't give you the data for every page every day. Right? So you need to go into an individual page, look at your most important pages, and look at the 60 or 90 day cycle for individual day spikes in speed delays. And use tools like web page test.org, again, under three G testing conditions. And the page details report will start pointing out consistent flaws with your speeds. Quite often, you have server delays because law firms are not willing to spend $500 or $1,000 a month in hosting, so they get the cheapest hosting. And what ends up happening is if you have servers delays that are incrementally crisis level, those are directly going to negatively impact the upcoming core with vitals data, more often than not, you'll even have to wait for these new reports to start showing up in their impact, to be able to look at this, and get and be proactive. And the truth is, I don't believe it's proactive at this point anymore, either. I believe the reason that Google delayed, the rollout of the update going live with it, is because they needed to accumulate a full month's worth of data to start assigning outcome understanding. So the data they're collecting now and for the next weeks, is going to impact in June when they roll when they go live.
Seth Price
So basically, you think that it's not there, they've rolled it out, you just don't know it yet. It hasn't been effectuated. But they're using this data to to update when the updates happen.
Alan Bleiweiss
They had a finalized with they think in this first version of what are the numbers? How do we measure them? They only just recently made another, you know, changes to some of the core web vitals, testing methods, and what they look for. Right. So they're still there, we're still refining up until just really recently, but now that they've locked that first version in, it's my belief, as I've seen in previous algorithm examples, they're currently accumulating the data that's going to be implemented in the algorithmic change. That's my belief based on past experience.
Seth Price
And based on that, and based on what you assumed to be there, what would you advise people to if they needed to prioritize right now? What would your priority list be? Because what you're saying is, it's not coming, it's here, you just haven't seen the effect of it, that they that, they're actually getting the data. So what you have right now is what's going to affect when there's when they do one of these sweeping changes, you wake up one morning and say, hey, I'm not in the same position. What are the what are the top few things based on your experience, based on what you assume is going to happen? That if you were to be playing sort of priority man, for in house team or for an agency, where do you put your smart time and money right now?
Alan Bleiweiss
Same place I've been putting it when it comes to page speed, all along. And that's related to your server speeds. And don't just look at the overall look at daily spikes, if I see one day out of a two week period, where there's a really slow page speed number, for different pages that I test, and it's server related, I want to address that now. Right. And the other thing is get your page code sequence in order to don't have 40 processes before rendering starts. Okay, my threshold is no more than 10 processes maximum before rendering starts. And that's only going to be valid, if your server speeds aren't delaying any of those processes. Those are the two big things to focus on. They always have been, they're going to be that much more impactful now. And in the future. Everything else is there's granular things to look at. There's other causes of potential delays, too many processes overall, too many scripts running. Right? You know, images are too bloated. But those if you address your server issues, and use intermittent server issues, as a red flag, that those needs to be eliminated, and get your render sequence, much more refined. Everything else is going to be improved as a result of that.
Seth Price
Your remaining time, I know we this is the headline, right for what you do user experience, we have this, you know, we have this major update on its way. I'm going to take you for a second, put that aside, we read about this every day in the trade, you know, online. What are the things outside of this update that you think people should be focusing on? Beyond this? What you know, you mentioned, you know, usability, you talked about some low hanging fruit, like, what are the other things that you think that people should be focusing on that this particular update may not be hitting, but you think is a potential opportunity, for SEOs to improve or in house people to improve their site's performance?
Alan Bleiweiss
I pretty much covered the core issues outside of this, when I've talked about don't just have one page. And if you have more than one page, don't have 95% of the content, buried deep in your blog, bring it out of that. Right. Those are the biggest issues that get the biggest value long term from an on site perspective. Okay. Going beyond that, it's going to be case by case, site by site, industry by industry, you know, geographic by geographic. There's going to be refinements, where you're going to start after all of that is evaluated properly. And you come up with a plan that everything that we've talked about so far, is typically a 30, 60, 90, or 120 day review, and refinement and improvement cycle, just to fix that stuff, right? So all of a sudden, we're three or four months into it ,gone beyond that, then we can start looking at the more granular things that are directly unique to those competitors, issues that you face compared to somebody else or some other website. That could be a whole host of other issues.
Seth Price
Talk to our audience, how can they best get a hold of you?
Alan Bleiweiss
Ah, let's get a hold of me. @Alan Bleiweiss on Twitter, or my website alanbleiweiss.com.
Seth Price
Well, Alan, I've learned a lot speaking to you, seeing your audits over the years, I'm bummed that we have not had our in persons of late but hoping my fingers are crossed PubCon that the Vegas show schedule will allow for a couple of days for PubCon to pop in.
Alan Bleiweiss
Yeah, I'm looking forward to getting back to the circuit again, to get, and for me, it's primarily for the networking opportunities. Right. And, and just being having that aspect of humanity restored to whatever degree we can. It's been a long time since we've had any time together Seth. I greatly appreciate this opportunity today and I look forward to getting together again face to face.
Seth Price
Absolutely. It's great follow you on social but it's, you know, we need to be able to break bread. So thanks so much and hopefully catch up real soon.
BluShark Digital
Thank you for tuning in to the SEO Insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand's online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital's website.
