SEO QA & Testing (Webinar)

How do you know that your team’s SEO work is of high quality? And how do you test the impact of your SEO changes? That’s what we’re going to be covering in episode 30 of Old Guard vs New Blood.

Joining Dixon Jones is Myriam Jessier from PRAGM, Jess Joyce an SEO Consultant, and Chris Green from Torque Partnership.

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Transcript

Dixon Jones

Hi, and welcome to Old Guard, New Blood episode 29 and this is SEO Quality Assurance and Testing, and I’ve got a fantastic panel in here today to talk about QA and testing. Let’s bring them in. Let’s start with you, Jess. Jess Joyce, where are you and where do you come from? Who are you, and where do you come from?

Jess Joyce

Yeah, there we go. Yes, my name’s Jess Joyce. I’m an SEO consultant and I reside currently, physically, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, or Toronto, if we really want to be cool.

Dixon Jones

So excellent. Thanks very much for coming along today-

Jess Joyce

Thank you for having me.

Dixon Jones

… and you’re half Hungarian, I understand?

Jess Joyce

I am. Yeah.

Dixon Jones

Excellent.

Jess Joyce

I’m Hungarian.

Dixon Jones

So we’re going to bring in a… Hello, Simon. How are you? Simon’s in the audience.

Jess Joyce

Hi, Simon.

Dixon Jones

Thanks for coming along. Well, let’s bring in a Hungarian colleague, Myriam, how are you? Who are you? And where do you come from?

Myriam Jessier

Good. I’m doing good. I’m a complicated one. I’m half French, half Hungarian, grew up in Hawaii and up until recently, I was residing in Montreal, Quebec but I’m currently in Budapest, Hungary.

Dixon Jones

Excellent. Fantastic. I was down in Budapest just last week as I went up a boat on the Danube up to Vienna or Salzburg and now I have COVID so anything that’s going to go wrong today, I blame it entirely on boats on the Danube.

Myriam Jessier

COVID and high cholesterol because of the local cuisine too.

Dixon Jones

Absolutely, absolutely but I’ve got tablets for that so that’s not a problem. Chris, who are you? Where do you come from?

Chris Green

Hello, I’m Chris. I am residing in Essex, which a lot less interesting, frankly. I’m also an SEO consultant and did lots of other stuff, but that’s just outside of London-

Dixon Jones

I mean them all.

Chris Green

… in Essex.

Dixon Jones

I mean all these things. So guys, I think you’ve all underplayed yourself on your QA and on your skillsets, but I’m sure we’ll get into all of that as we go through. The whole event, guys, has been sponsored by Majestic so I’ll say at the top of the show, the advert for Majestic because Majestic has just got, in beta mode, a new menu and a whole new layout and stuff so I know a lot of our customers are… A lot of our listeners are majestic.com users and even if you’re not, you want to have a look at the new stuff.

If you go to majestic.com, if you’re not logged in, there’s a big button on the homepage and you go and have a look at the new menu and it’s got all the… You can see the Wimbledon stats for free at the moment on there. If you are logged in and you’re having trouble getting to the new menu, go to newmenu.majestic.com and then you can use it as a page user in there and go with it.

It’s some great stuff. It brings a lot of the stuff, functionality that Majestic had to the floor so you’ll probably find some new features you didn’t know were in Majestic and with that, I’m going to bring in my producer, David. David, how are you, and what have I missed out?

David Bain

Very good, indeed. Nothing at all but all I want to say is that the majority of people that consume this show do so via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify and I just want to say, if that’s you, if you’re listening away, come and join the hilarity next month. Come and watch us live. Sign up at majestic.com/webinars. Hopefully you can make the next live one. You can be part of the audience you can be interacting with whoever happens to be on next month’s episode and I’ll tell you exactly what the topic for next month’s episode will be and who’s going to be taking part at the end of the show.

Dixon Jones

Seeing joined Simon Cox in the audience, in the live show. It’s brilliant. Good. Okay, guys and if there’s anyone else live on the livestream now, and you want to ask questions of the group, then absolutely feel free to do so. Okay, well, so Simon is chipping in here in the text. Right, let’s get into the heart of the matter. We’re going to be talking about trying to find out whether your SEO work or the team that you use for your SEO, whether their work is of high quality and I think it’s a really tough one to crack.

Dixon Jones

I remember when I was agency side and I was doing SEO consulting, it was sometimes hard for even me to work out whether I’d done a good job, leave alone, have any or anybody else looking on there, but that was a long time ago. I think I want to start with asking people at the top. If people haven’t got 45 minutes to hang around and get all the tidbits of information, if they can’t stay for the whole show, what one tip might you give to people for being able to assess whether SEO efforts of yourself or somebody else are of a good quality? I’ll let Chris jump in with that one first.

Chris Green

Oh, that’s interesting. I got two. I’m cheating. One small one and one larger one. The small one and I don’t see this happen enough is just annotate on like Google analytics or similar when changes go live and just kind of keep that view that you can understand that relationship between significant deployments and improvement or not of rankings. That’s really kind of key then the other one is use forecasting as an SEO to work out if we did nothing different, where there’s the forecast say we should go and test yourself against that. That’s a quick thing to say and a hard thing to do properly, but more people need to just be using some of those libraries and test themselves.

Dixon Jones

I might come back to that because the tools to do that are not always straightforward.

Chris Green

Not always.

Dixon Jones

Okay. All right. Interesting. Jess, what do you got as an idea for us?

Jess Joyce

I would say setting expectations is the one that I would suggest and just making sure everybody understands the amount or the small or the big or whatever you’re doing, how big it is and the variables that can go into it so I know it takes a lot of education internally, depending on whatever changes you’re doing and if you’re just changing a title, it might be something small, but your click-through could change and communicating and over communicating with people because once you go through QA, I feel like it’s a pressure point and a lot of pressure gets put on that feeling. Just making sure everybody understands if and when things go wrong that you can handle it properly.

Dixon Jones

Excellent. Okay, setting expectations and making sure people know where they’re trying to go to in the first place. Sounds interesting and again, something that’s easy to say and probably really hard to put in practice.

Jess Joyce

Great.

Dixon Jones

Myriam, what’s your tip for the group?

Myriam Jessier

I have two and I’m not as rational or as empathic as the two other people on the panel. Having survived dev centers, the first piece of advice I would give is save everything. You can save crawls because I’ve seen situations in QA where doing this new thing you want to do, somehow, by some miracle, it breaks everything else you have done in the past six months and you will bring this to the attention of the powers that be and what happens. You get told, “Oh no, no. It was always like this.” No, have a crawl, save it and the other one is on your end. Have a checklist, please. Have a checklist because we will always forget things, and it’s not the same checklist for each situation.

We judge ourselves way too harshly going, “This should have been done and this should have been done and this should have been done.” Otherwise, it’s all going to fail and then you cry at 200 AM in your cubicle, in the agency. No, don’t do that. Just have a proper checklist that says, “Hey, here’s the baseline of what we’re trying to achieve. If we have this, we can actually measure if something has changed. We’re safe at that baseline.

Dixon Jones

Actually, you know what? That’s a damn good bit of tip, really because as soon as you’ve got a checklist, at least you’ve got some kind of quality assessment. You can sit there and say, “Right, have all the things on the checklist been done?” But is that easy? Okay, if you’re going to say, “Right, well, I want to update the content on the title of this page,” you haven’t really got a checklist in there or maybe your checklist is got to be between this many and this many words I suppose, and it’s got to mention the keywords on the page, or you could maybe come up with a small checklist for a title but it’s not always easy to-

Myriam Jessier

I have one for content tuning. I basically try to make people as independent as they can be doing this and go, “Hey, you should be checking this in Google Search Console. If you have this, you should be doing this. If you don’t have this, here’s how to handle it” and move forward, but I think, ultimately, the checklist is a tool to communicate to other people. Here’s the standard we are holding ourselves up to and here’s why it matters so you can actually take this and feel confident to flag things because SEO is not just one person in their cubicle at 200 AM. It’s actually the entire team that’s trying to accomplish something.

Dixon Jones

Would you say then that a great way to approach QA testing is to have a series of checklists that people know that they’ve got to be judged by before they get into any project? One for content, one for technical, one for the state of your server, whatever it may be.

Myriam Jessier

I’m going to say yes and let my other peers answer.

Dixon Jones

What do you reckon, Chris and Jess? Good of idea? Jess.

Chris Green

Yeah, broadly. A lot of the testing or the QA for you and for everyone else use a lot of other tools and software to run those tests for me, whether they’re of your own recipes or someone else’s. There’s a list of compliance steps that you always need to maintain. That’s not necessarily absolutely everything exhaustive, but if you’re not meeting these certain standards, server response codes, robots, all of those kind of key ones, you know it’s going to go drastically wrong. They always need to be constantly checked. I think the worst thing that can happen in that scenario is when you’re like, “No, we already know all that. That’s taken care of.” But if everybody that’s involved takes that same approach, you’ll catch a cold because someone won’t do the test or something will get deployed and it’ll go wrong and it will break and no one will have checked it so you can never have too much due diligence on those key points.

Jess Joyce

Well, haven’t we all been in those situations where somebody’s like, “Everything’s fine. It works fine. It’s great. Awesome. We’re just going to push it,” but at least if I like to make a list of critical things and maybe lower ones and then-

Dixon Jones

Traffic lights.

Jess Joyce

Yeah. Traffic lights. Something of those matters, at least so at least if you’re going to do push something, then at least we have time to check these things because you’re going to have to let stuff go in any level of SEO. In a dream world, you would have everything but time being what it is and resources being what they are and developers always pushing back on every level, you have to work on what you.

Dixon Jones

Simon Cox jumps in. Checklists are like a car MOT. Doesn’t stop you crashing though.

Myriam Jessier

I have an answer to this. I have an answer to this. Today, before we all met to discuss this, a friend of mine comes on Twitter and is like, “Myriam, we have to talk. I have a problem. Google Search Console, all the data is gone. It’s gone” and I’m like, “Okay, well, I have to run but first things first, breathe, second step, let’s start it with a checklist” and I was like, “Maybe your old code was just validating one version of the website, and maybe, since the relaunch, you decided to go the other version so VVV, no VVV. And maybe that’s why your Search Console goes [pppffff] and I was like, “This is step one of the checklist. That’s the type of thing I would look at.” After that, we can get worried and they got back to me and they were like, “This was it.”

And I was like, “Okay, we don’t need to do step two of the checklist” and I know this sounds really funny, but imagine the panic that you have, if you enter and you don’t have the data and you’re supposed to be the person who knows it all like the expert and you’re like, “I expert. There is no data. What do I do?” There’s that panic. That’s why I like checklist. Yes, Simon, we are still going to crash, clearly, but we’re trying our best and putting a seatbelt on, okay? Because not everything depends on us, but the seatbelt we can do.

Dixon Jones

Okay. Guys, I wanted to dive into the different elements of SEO a little bit and what we might want to have in said checklist or in QA and testing but before I do that, I want to think a little bit about the stakeholders that we’ve got in the SEO world, because they might consider very different things as important so the business itself might consider value for money, whatever that is as the thing that they’re trying to get out of there. They know that they could spend more to get an extra half mile, but do they want to go there? Whereas the in-house SEO might consider conversions at attributable to organic traffic and think about the UX, whereas the agency might stop and say, “Well, once we’ve got the organic visitor, that’s all that’s important to us.”

And the in-house developer might just want to give say, well, as long as I don’t have to mess around with anything on the site that’s going to take away from my core tasks, then I’m happy. People have got different views as to what they want out of SEO so how deep are these differences and how can they be molded into a Quality Assurance or testing protocol that everyone might be able to agree with? It’s a hard question. I don’t know if anybody wants to have a crack at it.

Myriam Jessier

I would like to nominate Chris.

Chris Green

Oh, that’s good. I was going to jump in anyway. The thing I usually find is you, certainly, from the SEO point of view, I try and learn what are everyone else’s KPIs and what are they trying to achieve?

Dixon Jones

How often do they know?

Chris Green

Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I think if we really struggle, the question I usually ask someone is what metric will stop you getting a bonus or a pay rise? And that can sometimes be a bit blunt force, but you actually find that a lot of the metrics are overlapping or you can find a way and actually it’s just presentation of what that looks like so page speeds that can help performance, that can reduce carbon costs, that can increase conversion rates, that can increase rankings and it’s like what’s the story we’re going to package all of this initiative under that makes us all look great when we do it? And obviously, I work a lot with product teams and product teams have to deliver products that then work and get the engagement and buy in from the other teams.

It’s almost just showing that there is some kind of harmonized view that you’ve all agreed on this KPI set and you have a way to track it. I quite often track or report on metrics that aren’t mine, but I know that I can measure it better than other people can and actually, very often, just helping show that and bringing light to it because most of the problems around all of this is that people just do not have the measurement in place like they don’t know what they need to measure, or if they’re measuring it, they don’t know how to interpret that. If you can nail that bit and then make people see that you are the one that’s owning that bit, that’s really advantageous because they’ll want to come in with you.

The other one is then with that is if you’ve got different stakeholders that have different interests or different metrics, if you see something that doesn’t look great, go have a quiet conversation with them first. Talk about it and then present it back to the group. If everyone’s on an equal footing, that’s fine. The minute you say, “No, there’s a curve ball. Your metrics are doing badly and you’ve got to explain that in front of everyone else.” Then it turns into infighting and a battle. Pretty quickly.

Dixon Jones

I’m sure it does. That’s not why I’m no SEO consultant anymore because horrible, horrible. Yeah, absolutely. Try and talk one on one, I suppose at that point, but also you can’t hide those issues. When something’s going south, it’s got to be addressed. You just got to get away from that-

Chris Green

You don’t ambush someone with it.

Dixon Jones

And you got to make it very clear that we can’t take this personally. Things go wrong. Things happen.

Chris Green

Oh, absolutely.

Dixon Jones

It’s tackling the problem not the person behind the problem so yeah, absolutely. This idea of benchmarking then really becomes an important factor for QA testing. You started with forecasting as something important, Chris. Jess, you said set expectations and Myriam, you said checklists, so having these benchmarks is really important, but what should go into a benchmark? When I was doing SEO as a consultant, what? 20 years ago, it was literally taking some keywords and where they rank now and then hopefully in six months time, they’re going to be all ranked better. That doesn’t seem to be as effective as it was before because we’re not really always thinking in terms of keywords but what things do you set down as a benchmark to test against? And I can’t see anybody because I’m the only one on my screen at the moment. I want to pick on Myriam because her microphone’s off.

Myriam Jessier

Oh, it is?

Dixon Jones

No. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, yeah. That’s fine.

Myriam Jessier

Okay. Well, so on my end, when it comes to benchmarking, well, there’s multiple things so if you are in an agency setting, you have to make sure that whatever you are setting up will be able to be reused for that client but also, internally, makes sense. There’s nothing worse than you going on vacation and somebody tries to get into your stuff and they can’t and they call you. Avoid that. That’s the first part for me. The second part is if you are going to set up something, so let’s say an auditing process. I don’t think I’m the only one who has had to deal with the situation of being called in to actually check some other agencies work or some other consultants work. Yes, I specialize in this sadly so it’s the situation of explaining, “Hey, we all have different ways of doing this same thing.”

Huh? We all talk about search intent and how it’s different and it’s changing. Yeah, we’re human. We do the same thing in our jobs so for me, when it comes to benchmarking, it’s a question of developing what works and adapting to your environment. For example, if you’re in a dev center, I try to make sure that we all agree on certain definitions like how are we testing this period and what is considered a passing grade? For example, very basic one for me but I complain about technical QA a lot. When it comes to JavaScript. If, for example, Google shows up on your page and, rendering wise, it can’t tell this is a transactional page, because there’s no price, there’s no reviews, there’s no product name showing, you have to wait a little bit, hey, that’s the baseline for me.

That’s something I’m going to check. That’s something we all agree on. We have to discuss that as a team, this doesn’t fly because another issue that I want to bring on the technical end, developers are kind of like wizards and which is if they want, but they can fix stuff and go, “There. I fixed it” and you go in the back and it’s like Homer Simpson all pulled back. For SEO, you can’t do that. It shows the bot will find this so there’s some people that you work with that are not used to your level, your benchmark of this is what should go out. They’re not used to that so that will create clashes and that’s why I think what Chris said is go talk to the person first and foremost like you can’t have your benchmark. Doesn’t matter if the person is not onboarded. I’m sorry. I don’t hear you. No, you’re just beautiful but no sound.

Chris Green

Oh, you’re on mute, Dixon.

Dixon Jones

I absolutely agree and I suspect the other two will agree as well, but doesn’t that cause a little bit of a problem internally because there is this balance at a business level between cost, OCD, and risk so SEOs, well, I’m not, but other SEOs are OCD and they want to get it exactly and they’re never perfectly happy and they have to go to a point at which they say, “Oh right. I live with that.”

Myriam Jessier

You will get fired if you make your company spend 50 K on improving speed and there’s nothing left and you have nothing to show for it.

Dixon Jones

Well, this is it. At some point, you have to say whether it’s a money constraint or a time constraint, there is a point at which you have to ship the product and it shouldn’t really be the SEO that holds it up that often. Unless and this is what happens, I know, is that the developers say, “Right, we’re ready to go. We’re going live now and you can fix it afterwards.” And the SEOs have to come in off the effect. At that point, I think the SEOs have every right to say, “Give me my money back” or rather just pay because you’ve screwed it up out the box but, still, there is this problem here. This dilemma with QA.

I remember, like you Myriam, a long time ago, I was asked to do an audit on somebody else’s audit for a major national newspaper and I was thinking, “Well, okay, it’s great if you’ve got that budget to spend on doing it for me again and I’ll do it all again.” And what they’d done, what the original guys had done, it was not bad at all. I found a few points, but now I was starting to pick holes in somebody else’s, which I suppose you have to do all the time, Myriam, if that’s what you do, pick holes in somebody else’s work but that’s not really as good as being able to tell them what they did right I would guess.

Jess Joyce

Yeah, and you’re always going to find something. If you’re doing that, you’re going to find something wrong. I feel like you’re just, the audits are… From that perspective of that consultant or that agency or whatever it is, so you can always find something if you’re looking for it.

Dixon Jones

Yeah, absolutely and another thing is nothing’s ever perfect as well so if you do one thing right, there’s probably going to have an impact performance-wise or content-wise on another factor. If you rank better for this word, you’re going to rank worse for that word. Myriam, you want to jump in?

Myriam Jessier

Yes. There’s a few things that are jumbled up in my head. Let’s get them out one at a time. I had a situation where I was actually brought in to do an audit and the person took my audit. It was a paper audit because I don’t know why we had to print them, and it shows I’m old, took it, thanked me for it, opened drawer, and dropped it with the rest of the audits. I’m not joking. This was a reality so, for me, when we’re talking about audits, if I’m onboarded to redo an audit, I ask them why, and I try to provide actionable stuff that they can do, which goes back to QA because when it comes to QA, if you’re going to QA something and say, “This does not pass,” explain why? Try to explain. If we don’t do this, we may end up with this and document it.

So least, if you are headed for a crash, mention to Simon, “Well, you can go back and have a postmortem to say, “Hey, as a team, how can we avoid this horror show again? I can’t do it on my own. What do you propose?” And for me, QA is also about automation. What can you automate as the QA team or the dev team’s flow? What do they normally check? And can you piggyback on this? Can you say, “Hey, add this other check for me. You know what it means, and we consider this passed.”

Dixon Jones

I like that. So, because the coders will have, often, a pretty rigorous QA to check before they ship the code but they won’t include the SEO’s stuff in there so that’s a good tip I think.

Myriam Jessier

And it’s one of the wonderful things because you can genuinely integrate with everyone so there’s no, whose responsibility is this? Because let’s be honest, all four of us, we all get Google Search Console emails. Even if you don’t work in that field actively, Dixon, I know you get them. We all get them, but that’s the thing. Your client gets them. Your design team gets them too. Everybody’s added on Google Search Console lately and nobody does anything with it. Nobody. So if it’s no one’s responsibility, it sucks. If you have those emails coming in, they end up in Slack in that specific channel, you can assign responsibility, getting to the flow.

Dixon Jones

Okay, cool. Montse says hi and Chris is waving his hand in the chat as well so thanks for coming in Montse and Simon says, “Get paid up front,” which I think is fair but at the same time, I think when we’re really looking at the quality before we ship, I think we need to maybe dive into some of the areas of SEO because it’s not easy to do. Let’s take content for example. How do you do QA on content? What things would you put into your checklist, Myriam, or what would you put into your… For me, I probably just go through my Yoast plugin and sit there and make sure it’s got, or use my other business to check my content and make sure I’ve got some stuff in there, but how does an average person say that content’s good or that content’s bad? It’s going to be very different for every business, surely.

Myriam Jessier

I have a very haute couture, vintage curated process that most people are not going to like, so I’m going to let my colleagues answer first and then I’ll bring out the old school type of thing.

Chris Green

Oh, now I see. That made it sound more interesting than anything I have.

Jess Joyce

Yeah, gosh.

Chris Green

For me, a content QA process, there’s a couple of things. I think firstly, if a content’s live, let’s look at the data, who’s using it? Who’s visiting it? Are they completing their goals? Is it ranking? If that’s the point of the content. I think that’s the boring take. I think more and more my content QAs, what is the intent of what is being targeted? Obviously, I’m taking a very straight on SEO approach for this, but is this content just fit for what it needs to do? Is it exceeding expectations or even meeting the search’s expectations? Not just ranking for it because it makes sense. Actually, in my experience, that’s where the vast majority of content fails because it’s a good keyword on an okay page. It’s-

Myriam Jessier

Yes.

Chris Green

… less good content to actually do it for so it’s like, “Well, yeah, it’s legible and the grammar’s fine and it’s been written by a human that vaguely knows what they’re talking about,” but it’s just deployed wrong and it’s not going to last a year’s worth of algorithm reshuffles and E-A-T or whatever you want to chuck at it basically. And I like that one because it’s simple in its purity as well because when you go to the stakeholders and say, “What’s wrong with this content?” You don’t go, “The keyword density is too low, and your word counts too low and there aren’t enough internal links.” You just say, “This is not fit for the people who will use it and Google will rank you down for that” and maybe over simplistic, but that’s the easiest to communicate.

Jess Joyce

I’m literally doing that process right now with a client and it’s not even essentially a QA, it’s like a refresh so we’re just using an Airtable and then going through and understanding what the content is doing, how it’s performing, and which content should be merged, or if the user’s actually reaching the intent, or if they’re signing up for trials, how close they are to the buying cycle and all of those things that go along with it so it’s less of a QA, but it is a QA at the same time.

Dixon Jones

I guess this is something that is close to my active area at the moment and I think, for me, if I’m looking at a piece of content, then I can go and talk to, if I had clients, I’d be able to talk to the clients and say, “The problem with this content is that if you want to rank for this concept, you are not talking about this idea or this idea or this idea, and your competitors are four, five and six times over here, here and here” and so you can see a gap analysis of the concepts and ideas which, to me, is the approach that I’d go on content.

Then on top of that, I’d still put whether you use Rank Math, Yoast, or any other whatever thing, I’d still use all of those as well, because I think that’s useful and make sure that they’ve got checklists like site or an authoritative source or whatever the other bits and pieces, or use your keyword in the title and some of the more boring bits but I think that can improve things, but what if we move on to technical etiquette?

Oh, sorry. Myriam, please, go on.

Myriam Jessier

I do have one thing that you haven’t spoken about. So in my haute couture approach, well-

Dixon Jones

Of course.

Myriam Jessier

… when we’re QA, the content.

Dixon Jones

I’ve got COVID, Myriam.

Myriam Jessier

COVID brain. Okay, so Simon was saying, “Hey, can an SEO QA content? Should this not be the subject matter? The person who’s going to do this? The person writing it. Well, not always. The way I QA content is very old school. I will tell people, “Oh, your content is not working. You optimize this product page and it’s not showing up.” You’re just not getting visibility, you’re not getting traction, not getting clicks, nothing. Let’s go figure out why, and very often, you will find, in the search result pages, hey, Google’s positioning aggregators and homepages. That product page, it’s not going to fly so you’re literally cannibalizing yourself so please just optimize the homepage, or you’re going to have situations where two people, or more than two people don’t talk and I had a client like this recently where they had 150 posts about Instagram styles for whatever clothing at any time.

Their winter content was off the roof. I’m like, “Can we not do this? Can we please just focus on writing one thing, not pushing out content that nobody cares about that’s…” You pushed out fashion content for winter, as soon as winter started in the middle at the end, and when there was that last blizzard, can we talk about some other stuff? This is also SEO QA for me, and we don’t need a subject matter expert on winter fashion to say, “Hey, too much Instagram stuff, please stop” so these things matter to me.

Dixon Jones

But I also think that an SEO or SEO with tools has the ability to jump in and see what… They might be very, very minor concepts that have been missed out in the body text that you can then refer back to the subject expert and the subject expert can say, “Yeah, all right. I didn’t realize that our competitors have brought in that particular angle to this particular conversation. I’ll add that in.” It’s only a sentence, but it makes a huge difference to whether this is the more authoritative piece than this, than the other one so as well.

Myriam Jessier

Absolutely.

Dixon Jones

Okay, Myriam, and so Monty was jumping in with some stuff there. I won’t bring up on the podcast, but she was talking about her audits, and how do you do quality assessment for off-page SEO, things like links or Google my business listings or social media profiles or things that are part of the SEO process in a slightly less obvious format. Is that something that you would actively do QA testing for? Backlinks, let’s say backlinks, for example.

Chris Green

See, this is a tricky one because what makes a good link? In my opinion, the same that makes an effective link and there’s this differentiation of actually some stuff that works it shouldn’t do, but it won’t forever, and some stuff that is inferior, great link, takes too long and doesn’t always move. The best kind of process around links is actually just, if you’re not trying to fly too close to sun or buy too many links or do anything that the Google says you shouldn’t be, and actually you are using the QA to work out well, what’s another agency bringing in, or what am I getting picked up naturally? I would rather be on that side of the equation, but that’s as much because actually building the links is so much of my forte, but the key test that I run at the moment, and this is maybe because I’ve done link clean up on far too many sites back in the days. It’s actually just, can I see that this is a website that Google will want to penalize eventually? Is this of any value?

Does it drive traffic? Is there a network footprint I can see? What are the linking tendencies? I have some basic flags and again, the checklist against that, and then once you get this stuff, that’s what I’d call high risk in the future out of the way. It’s just variations of, it’ll probably do nothing to this is a really good link, do more of that and that’s the kind of dimensions that I try and do, but I don’t subscribe necessary to the whole, these links are toxic. Delete them now, otherwise you’re going to regress it later. I think I’m not really convinced that’s that necessary these days.

Myriam Jessier

I think Jess and I have a nugget when it comes to backlinks being in a bilingual country. Well, very often, the main domain, like the main URL, like your domain.com will get all the links. However, depending on where you are in Canada, you may want to figure out very quickly, which version, which linguistic version is getting those links, because if you’re getting a lot of English backlinks and your homepage is in French, that’s also something you should be. QAing for. That’s a decision that’s really hard to make for us in Canada.

Dixon Jones

Jess, anything you want to add on there?

Jess Joyce

I know, I agree with both of them actually, and have had both situations. The dimensions that you got kind of go on. I always go on the one piece I would add is traffic and how many people are… Because I work with a lot of SaaS companies. I always like trials. How many people have come from there so I tie everything as close to money as I possibly can, which is always the hardest thing to do and really, that’s honestly my biggest takeaway from all of this QA is I tie as much as I possibly can to money.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. One of the challenges there is that if you’re going to try to tie a link back through to the money, then you’ve probably got something in the URL, which then makes it a non-unique not a unique link, which makes, makes the whole, how do you get 301 message to it? Or I don’t know? There’s a whole load of problems if you’re going to put voucher codes in links, for example.

Jess Joyce

Exactly, and then to Myriam’s point of it’s most of the websites that I also work on are bilingual so targeting per where you’re targeting because Quebec is its own region in itself so a beautiful part of our country. When you go and you go into Quebec, the signs literally change from English to French so they don’t define that English is part of what they’re speaking at the moment there so they think of that on the internet as well.

Myriam Jessier

I don’t know if you can feel the tension. We’re going to leave one one alone.

Jess Joyce

Everywhere else in the country, it has to be bilingual, but in Quebec it has to be just French.

Dixon Jones

Just French because that’s-

Jess Joyce

That’s how they roll.

Dixon Jones

Well, fair enough. I’m not going to go into your politics. There’s enough-

Jess Joyce

No, no.

Dixon Jones

… conflict in the world, all right. So I think going back a little bit to Chris’s observation, for me, I think that I only emotionally counter link. If I see it as a value. If I’m going to use Majestic tools, for example, these other tools are available, but I would sit there and really probably only count links that have got some kind of citation flow and citation of trust flow in their source as well. Otherwise they’re not really of value so that cuts out probably 80% of most links that are coming in. I then will pair it down to a few other things that are important to me and really, probably for any business, a better way of looking at things might be, let’s have a look at the top 50 links of your business and everything else after that doesn’t matter.

So whether you are IBM or whether you’re a small business, it’s a top 50, and can you make those better than they were before? Because Google is saying, “I haven’t seen you for a long time,” whether everyone believes him or not, but the rubbish links are just rubbish. It’s just ignored and I think that that’s not just the rubbish links, but it’s most links are ignored. It’s just trying to get the ones that have a signal either to Google or to a human. They’re the ones that are important, and so maybe just, just concentrate on the top 50 or top 10 or top 20 and see if you can improve them. Because in the end they’ll still be there afterwards.

Okay. We’re running out of time already. I just quickly ask about things like GMB listings and social media profiles and stuff like that. Is that something that you think SEOs should be checking on and looking up? Google my business, I assume, oh, they’re getting rid of that, aren’t they, but those kind of things. I Google my business, it’s just a big directory, isn’t it? But should we checking on those kind of things as well? Or is that so SEO 101 that you’re just hoping that it’s been done?

Myriam Jessier

I got frustrated because Google took forever during the pandemic to actually release some reviews that were made. So if you are just checking in on these, you will get very frustrated. That’s all I wanted to say on that.

Dixon Jones

Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.

Chris Green

Yeah, I think a lot of this stuff is foundational. I think if you are a business that relies on people coming to, or you have bricks and mortar supremacists, you need to rank in map packs and bits. I think that has to be part of the checks. The QA one is just simple like name, dress, phone number, just do we have consistency? Does it relate to the website? I have stopped going into like the networks of citation listings to try and clear it up any… I’ve spent far too long doing it at a real low level. I think now you just, I can’t remember the top six or the top 10 or whatever it is aggregators.

Let’s see the lot of that data. If they’re accurate in there, you verified your listings and you are getting notifications when stuff changes. For me, that’s what I do, but I think if the more businesses you have within that network, the more it pays back to keep a really super close eye on that. The last thing you want to do is effectively lose control of a premises for six months. Don’t know, then you come in to find a slew of bad reviews. Someone’s changed your opening hours, hijacked the URL, I’ve seen all of that. That can’t happen. You

Myriam Jessier

For folks who don’t see us, we’re all shaking our heads in agreement.

Dixon Jones

That’s true. Yeah. Don’t lose control of your property. Absolutely. Okay guys, we’re already up time. So I’m going to bring David in and ask David what do we got next week and next month, rather on the next show, whenever the next one is.

David Bain

Sure next month, indeed. Yeah, next month. It’s going to be on the 3rd of August and that’s going to be episode 30. Oh, up to episode 30 already. We’re going to be talking about how can SEO and UX work together? We’ve already got Ulrika Viberg from unicorn.se booked for that one. We’ll have another couple of SEOs probably for that one as well but August the 3rd is the date of the next show and if you want to watch that one live, just go to majestic.com/webinars and sign up there.

Dixon Jones

Fantastic guys. So just before we all go, why don’t you guys let us know how people can get hold of you if they wanted to get an audit of an audit. Myriam, where do they go and find you?

Myriam Jessier

So if you are French or French Canadian, I’m LinkedIn at Myriam Jessier if you want to just chat and have fun or complain about something on Twitter at my name Myriam Jessier once again. And I just wanted to say one last thing. I’m old enough to remember when Majestic was Majestic SEO. I just want to know if I’m alone in this, leave a comment, please.

Dixon Jones

So you know, it used to be called Majestic-12 before that, but anyway, Myriam Jessier is spelled M-Y-R-I-A-M-J-E-S-S-I-E-R for everybody that hasn’t got a screen, which is most of us. Jess, where do people get hold of you and why won’t they get ahold of you?

Jess Joyce

Sure, you can contact me at Myriam Jessier or I hang out on Twitter a lot. It’s my friend at Jess Joyce, J-E-S-S-J-O-Y-C-E or jessjoyce.com. I keep a track of hurdles, currently. Heardle is like the Wordle for music so check it out. I’m keeping a historical version of it on my website. It’s fun.

Dixon Jones

Very good. Very good. We’re getting some nice thank yous from Montse and people out there. So thank you very much, guys. Chris, what about you? Why do they want to get hold of you and where do they go?

Chris Green

Why would they want to get hold of me? I don’t know. A good question. I kind of helping people solve more technical kind of search things, using kind of newer technologies, testing, edge bits, and pieces like that, but you can find me on Twitter or on LinkedIn at chrisgreenseo. DMs open or find me on my website, drop me a message.

Dixon Jones

And if you can’t spell Chris Green, you’re in the wrong business guys. So thanks very much for coming along. Thanks very much for coming along and we’ll see you next time and do check out our new manu at majestic.com if you’re a Majestic user or even if you’re a different link building, link technology user, and you want to see the new layout, then go to newmenu.majestic.com. Bye guys.

Jess Joyce

Thanks for having me.

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